Flying Contraptions:
The Wingsuit
In the 1930s, professional air-circus parachutist Clem Sohn became fascinated with the idea of flying through the air horizontally rather than just vertically. During his jumps, he practiced “swimming” in the air before jerking his ripcord, and found that he could move as many as 300 feet in any direction. When a friend told him that “you ought to sprout wings,” Sohn decided that he would. After studying the anatomy of flying squirrels and bats, he created a pair of wings from airplane fabric and metal tubing, which he fastened to the arms and sides of his jump suit. Between the legs, he sewed a web-like tail fin. In 1935, he jumped from a plane at an altitude of 12,000 feet and, after a 2,000-foot drop, spread his arms and legs, until the air caught his wings. After performing an inside loop and other aerobatic maneuvers for more than a minute, Sohn pulled his parachute ripcord and landed, about three miles from his starting point. He spent the next two years performing similar stunts at fairs and air meets, until at an exhibition in France in 1937, both his regular and emergency parachutes failed to open, and he fell to his death. Other daredevils who experimented with wingsuits — such as Frenchman Patrick de Gayardon in the 1980s and 1990s — met a similarly grisly fate. In 1999, Croatian base jumper Robert Pecnik and his Finnish compatriot Jari Kuosma developed an improved wingsuit design capable of slowing a flyer to 12-13 meters per second in downward vertical speed, compared to the 50 meters per second that a parachutist will drop.
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