Beyond the skyflier wingsuit

[guest]

When I first started skydiving, we used a spring loaded pilot chute and a ripcord mounted on the upper right hand chest webbing, near the cutaway handle. Would it be possible to extend the arms
on the skyflier all the way to the feet and use a ripcord? Obviously you need to modify the base
gear but it seems the things you could do with that type of suit would be far superior.

[Yuri]

Yo !

I can see 2 problems here. First, a spring-loaded PC hesitation would be very scary - but this can be addressed in many ways. Second, such a big wing may not increase your glide ratio significantly but will be rather hard to handle. I believe this has been tried before with mixed success, and there may be more work in progress going on now.

A smaller wing going down to knees and a conventional throw-out PC appear to be the next step so far. Beyond that, i would love to see a suit that takes less altitude to start - opening up a whole new range of objects to fly from. Starting altitude is pretty much proportional to the wing loading, thus bigger surface area will help a lot!

bsbd!

Yuri.

[guest]

I have built and tested a suit where the wings run from the fingers to the toes. The design was basically a copy of the sugar glider (Petaurus breviceps). I did several aircraft jumps and a jump off a cliff (Kjerag, Norway) with this suit. The deployment (BOC) was difficult. There is so much opportunity for missing your BOC (material in the way) or having hesis!!!

I would hate to take that suit low and have to rely on a spring loaded pilot chute. They are a bit unpredictable.

However, the performance out of an aircraft was incredible.

p.s. picture of a sugar glider [tomarent.tripod.com/sugarglider.jpg]

[guest]

see

tomarent.tripod.com/sugarglider.jpg

[guest]

http://tomarent.tripod.com/sugarglider.jpg