I don’t know how many people are involved in wing suit flying but I doubt anywhere near the number who parachute. Looks like a dangerous sport
Travis Pastrana, way back in 2008, jumped from a single-engine Cessna from 12,500 feet over Arecibo, Puerto Rico. He was only wearing sunglasses, socks and surf trunks while holding a can of Red Bull. He was not wearing a parachute.
Gary Connery landed successfully with just a wingsuit. He had to use a giant crash pad made of cardboard boxes, but any landing you walk away from is A-OK.
I think wingsuit flying in and of itself probably isn’t a whole lot more dangerous than simple skydiving - it’s the way people tend to use them (wingsuits). Riding a motorcycle on a featureless flat plain isn’t nearly as fun as a twisty mountain road, and wingsuits are no different: rocketing along over nearby terrain - buzzing down steep hillsides, along avalanche chutes, that sort of thing - is a lot more fun than just twirling around in a big empty blue sky. And when you leave thin margins for error, you get more catastrophes: fliers miscalculate and slam into things instead of just barely clearing them, or they need to decrease their descent rate and find that they end up just stalling and settling into the treetops at 60 MPH.
I went through a period of watching wingsuit videos. I think like a quarter of them inevitably ended with “Joe later attempted this path between the two standing rocks and was fatally unsuccessful.”
I went skydiving once (it was awesomely fun) and sat watching the experienced skydivers come down waiting for my turn. I can’t remember how many times I thought “OMG! OMG! OMG! he’s diving right into the ground! I shouldn’t look!” a second before they leveled out and zoomed along the ground, or pond, before coming to a safe, serene landing.
Apparently jumping out of a plane from 5,000 feet isn’t exciting enough for them.
Sure. But what else are you going to do with wingsuit besides something a lot more dangerous than skydiving? Keep in mind wingsuits are the only intermediate step between skydiving and falling like a brick.
People are willing to tolerate a certain amount of (perceived) risk for a certain amount of (perceived) benefit. If you lower the risk, they tend to change their behavior to get the level of risk back up to their comfort level so that they can enjoy greater benefit than before. This shows up in a lot of activities, and skydiving is no exception:
‘Booth’s rule #2’, often attributed to skydiving pioneer Bill Booth, states, “the safer skydiving gear becomes, the more chances skydivers will take, in order to keep the fatality rate constant”.[1][55] Even though skydiving equipment has made huge leaps forward in terms of reliability, including the introduction of safety devices such as AADs, the fatality rate has stayed roughly constant when adjusted for the increasing number of participants.[56][57] This can largely be attributed to an increase in the popularity of high performance canopies, which fly much faster than traditional parachutes.[n 16] A greater number of landing fatalities in recent years has been attributed to high speed maneuvers close to the ground.[n 17]
Let’s imagine that there’s a giant umbrella also falling at the same time as you. Just as you pass it at ~200mph, it swings onto its side in the air just perfectly so that you can reach out and grab the end of the handle. Your continued fall will cause the umbrella to rotate in the air, pulling your over and then up on the opposite side, like a swing. I believe that we can all trust that there’s some size of umbrella that’s large enough to act, effectively, immobile under these circumstances. It would just rotate in the sky and toss you like a catapult.
That said, the forces acting on your body in this maneuver might do you in, regardless of the lack of impact with any solid surfaces.
But, this would seem to say that there’s some scale on which you can translate downward movement to upward that would be sufficient to give lift, given the right equipment? Survivability, more questionable.
On the contrary. See these folks:
They zero out their vertical velocity and even gain a bit of altitude (check out their shadows). If they’d done the same on a frozen lake and skimmed a tad closer to the surface, they could have “safely” slid to a stop.
Your scenario is not clear, but a parachute of certain shape and size when deployed at sufficient velocity will create lift briefly until the descent slows down. Designs like this were tested during the early space program and possibly at other times. These were not para-wings but I don’t recall exactly how they worked but I think one type was something close to cylindrical in shape. Ordinary parachutes and umbrellas would slow your descent but not reverse it.
These folks in wingsuits seem to be moving up in a big way:
Sure, but that looks like a tandem jump (i.e. two people, one parachute), where Pastrana connected with the other person before they deployed the chute.
It’s not like he just sailed down and splashed in the water without a chute and was none the worse for wear.
It was a response to Maserschmidt’s post about people doing crazy things. Sure he grabbed onto someone mid-air, but what if he missed? I can think of quite a few other things that might have gone wrong as well.