OT: do you really want to fly?

[weisan]

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GASFa7rkLtM

Talk about zero margin of error and having absolute confidence in your equipment.

[oldpotatoe]

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GASFa7rkLtM

Talk about zero margin of error and having absolute confidence in your equipment.

No guts, no glory..do it in the fog.

Besides they are not really flying, more like falling, a little forward but falling nonetheless.

[wallymann]

"so safe and smooth"

uh, yeah.

there was a piece on 60 minutes about guys doing this, serious pucker-factor for folks like myself with a strong self-preservation instinct. i still enjoy watching the vids immensely!

the thing is, the way these guys fly down the mountains so close to the earth...there's no margin for error. if a ridge or treeline doesnt agree with your glide-slope, it's not like you can throttle-up to clear it! one of the guys on the 60 minutes piece actually had that happen (not during the segment, though -- it happened later). bad day at the office.

[MattTuck]

Not that much different from descending on a bike. Huge amounts of kinetic and potential energy, limited ways to dissipate it.

That's about as close to 'flying' as I need to get.

[redir]

Call me a chicken if you want but that's something I would never do! It's stupid is what it is but still none the less pretty freakin' amazing.

It amazes me to think of the first person to ever have done something like this. They must have really trusted their design and at the same time been completely accepting death. Or do these kind of people just lack the reality of the situation, it won't happen to me... sort of thing.

[benb]

There is a good documentary about these guys on Youtube, I wish I could recall the title.

It is a pretty darn small community, and they don't have a great life expectancy.. there are not that many people who have done the proximity flying for a long time without "buying the farm".

But for all out "extreme" these guys take the cake. I don't see how you can possibly compare descending on a bike to this.. nothing in cycling is even in the same universe in terms of risk. Not even championship level downhill MTB, and that seems completely insane to me too.

They can't go any slower than about 100mph on these wingsuits... they have a glide ratio of 2:1. (2 feet forward for every 1 foot down) They can dive and turn but they have to calculate every instance of the flight perfectly a head of time. They also can only fly for about 3 minutes before they hit the limits of endurance. Pretty much any change in weather or wind can ruin there day very quickly.

It is also not new.. the first wingsuits were created nearly 80 years ago.. there was a famous wingsuit flyer in the 1920s, the sport went into hibernation after he died at an airshow.

[DY123]

Birdmen on Netflix