the.com/wingsuit
A nylon squirrel suit that turns falling into flying, briefly, if you're lucky.
means A webbed jumpsuit worn by skydivers and BASE jumpers that adds surface area to the body, letting the wearer glide forward on a cushion of air instead of just dropping straight down.
from The word itself is a plain 20th-century compound — 'wing' plus 'suit' — describing exactly what it is, but the idea has a much older, stranger history. Would-be aviators had been strapping fabric or wooden wings to their arms and legs since at least the Middle Ages, almost all of them with fatal or near-fatal results; these early tinkerers were sometimes nicknamed 'birdmen.' The modern wingsuit as a refined, flyable piece of gear really took shape in the 1990s and 2000s, when jumpers added the fabric webbing between the legs and under the arms that gives today's suits their batlike silhouette and actual lift.
- glide ratio
- forward speed can exceed vertical fall speed
- origin
- evolved from bat-like suits in the 1930s
- risk factor
- proximity flying kills more than base jumping alone
- top speed
- horizontal speeds can exceed 150 mph