by Christopher Gryniewicz

Created on: December 20, 2009

Okay, so you won't fly exactly like superman with a wingsuit but, you will fly or to be more accurately, you'll glide. The vision or soaring up to the Sun like Icarus, without the whole melting wings bit of course, has been around for ages. The oldest historic record, or pseudo-historic record as the case may be, of man-made winged flight attempts dates back to 850 BC, when King Bladud designed, built and flew wings he constructed after communicating with the dead through necromancy. Sadly, either the King didn't get it right or it was a sick trick for the dead to add to their numbers as the attempt failed. In the 11th century Eilmer of Malmesbury, also known as the “flying monk” leapt from the abbey tower with wings and had a moderately successful flight. If two broken legs and fifteen seconds of flight time could be considered successful. The list of short run winged flights continues throughout history with various degrees of success and peaks in the 1930's with Leo Valentin and Clem Sohn both of whom were able to make a few successful runs before dying at the hands of their own inventions.

The modern wingsuit came in to being in the mid-1990's and was the invention of Patrick de Gayardon. What de Gayardon was able to achieve was a truly successful suit designed on the principle of placing air-foils under the arms and between the legs using a design similar to a flying squirrel rather than a bird. This created not only greater control and distance than its predecessors but was able to be replicated and commercialized.

This is not to say that wingsuit flying is a safe means of transportation at this time or a sensible one. Patrick de Gayardon himself lost his life in 1998 due to a botched modification to his parachute during a wingsuit jump. The equipment is expensive and those interested in taking flight must jump from a great altitude and glide down at a two to one ration. In other words, for every two feet you go forward you travel one foot closer to the ground. For the actual landing part of wingsuit flying, jumpers still need to deploy a parachute. Before an instructor will even consider teaching someone how to use a wingsuit it is recommended that they have at least 200 jumps from a plane under thier belt and to fly solo requires an additional 500 jumps with the wingsuit.

There are many in the world today trying pushing the limits of wingsuit flying to the next level and attempting to find a way to land without the aid of a parachute. At this point no one has successful achieved an unaided landing. The biggest reason we humans can't precisely replicate a flying squirrel is because we don't have tails. The squirrels tail acts as a rudder providing greater speed and directional control. Despite the great advances in technology of single man flight no one has yet replicated this tail control. If we consider, however, that it took over 2800 years from the first attempted wing flight just to prefect the glide we must be patient as we let technology take its course.

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