Closer to Human Flight 290
negativeblue writes "Dropzone.com has (had) a story about the preparation of a man (Jeb Corliss) who prepares to land a wingsuit without a parachute. If you don't know the current abilities of parachutes, now-a-day, you should do your research. Basically airfoils, they can perform close to an airplane wing (high performance turns and lift)."
May I be the first to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh well, I guess something's got to thin the herd...
Is it really flight? (Score:3, Insightful)
Human flight? (Score:3, Insightful)
There are a few people that have fallen out of commercial airliners and survived. They didn't have wing suits and fell thousands and thousands of feet.
surviving falls (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know whether people have survived "attempts", but you can certainly survive falls from airplanes without a parachute: hitting brushes, trees, water, or snow can break your fall sufficiently so that you don't die. Theoretically, even hitting a solid, hard surface is survivable if you break the fall correctly (but I don't know of any actual cases).
Why is it so hard to beleive? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:May I be the first to say... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:There is a reason (Score:3, Insightful)
In 2003 there were 42,643 traffic deaths in the US. Using the estimated population numbers from the CIA website that came to roughly
Using the latest sky diving death numbers of 25(the last time they reported) and dividing by the only number I could find as to how many jumped (members of the USPA). It came to a
A better stat would be deaths/divided by number of attempts/trips. I wonder if anyone keeps accurate counts of all sky dives and if someone has any figures around number of car trips taken per year.
Another thing I wonder about is do the sky dive deaths include base jumping? IMHO, I would agree with you about base jumping being very stupid to do on a regular basis. An acquaintance of mine died doing a base jump when a gust of wind pushed her back into the mountain. She was a pro sky diver(doing competitions and stuff) so it was more bad luck than anything that got her. Knowing what happened to her, I still think people should try a tandem jump at least once in their life. It is truly an amazing experience.
Re:surviving falls (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably not. The "best" way I can imagine landing would be to land in a standing position, with your knees locked. You are hoping that the impact energy will be absorbed in your lower body instead of your internal organs, spine, and brain.
Upon landing, the bones in your legs would shatter, the flesh of your legs would be pulverized, and your lower body would basically explode like a blood-filled water balloon. Even if this all happened correctly, there is still the matter of decelerating your upper body.
The equation we need here is v^2=2ax. We are solving for a. Suppose v is 120 mph, and x is three feet (the typical length of a person's legs). The acceleration would be about 1600 m/s^2: 163 G's. This would turn your brain to mush.
Now, some people theorize that instead of just impacting into the ground, you could land at an angle and "roll" in order to transfer the kinetic energy into a harmless direction. Except that if you think about this physically, it's even worse than just impacting directly into the ground. Now, instead of removing your momentum of fall, you have to redirect it to a perpendicular direction. This takes 40% more force than simply stopping the motion, and would probably result in your entire body exploding like a water balloon, not just your legs.
Without something to substantially cushion the fall, I do not believe it is possible for a human to survive an impact on a hard surface at terminal velocity.