Birdmen The Original Dream of Flight

We join wingsuit pilots Mike Steen, Matt Gerdes, and Ellen Brennan in France. They meet up with Loic Jean-Albert who is a pilot at a skydiving station in Gap. The three attempt to fly with Loic’s plane after jumping out of it to show how similar a wingsuit flight is to a planes. Afterwards these three friends travel from mountain peak to mountain peak across Europe while explaining the sport of wingsuiting and their own personal motivations. They also make a flight with Jeb Corliss in Switzerland, a legend in the sport. Each exit point and flight path gives the wingsguit pilots new challenges they must overcome to stay alive. Lester Keller, the head sports psychologist for the US Ski and Snowboard Team, explains the motivations, desires, and needs of these type of thrill-seekers. All the wingsuit pilots comment on having close friends dying and why they choose to continue to fly, while another pilot explains why he quit the sport while he was still the best in the world. In addition, they discuss the decision-making skillset needed and the broad knowledge of BASE jumping, weather forcasting, and mountaineering, required to achieve safe flight. The advancement of wingsuit technology is also explained along with the process of working your way up to the most challenging aspect of wingsuiting: proximity flights. These types of flights result in the most deaths in the wingsuit community.

After a detailed and thorough explanation of the state of the sport today, next up is the future of the sport. Yvess Rossy of Switzerland is shown experimenting with rigid wings and jet engines strapped to them. While his research and flights are very promising, for now it is not within grasp of the everyday wingsuit pilot. A more realistic future for birdmen is combining technology with a traditional nylon wingsuit. At EHT Zurich, significant progress has been made in this field in the last couple years. Raffaello D’Andrea and Geoff Robson of EHT discuss using electric engines with a nylon wingsuit and adding a fly-by-wire autonomous cruise control system to keep a pilot perfectly balanced during flight. With this system the pilot could chose whichever flight path he desired as the cruise control system stabilizes the flight.

Thousands of years after humans first leapt into the unknown, a select few of us have achieved the very kind of flight that our ancestors have been envisioning for eons. Perhaps the transformation to true birdmen is not yet complete, but as technological innovations lead to newer designs, the boundaries of human flight remain wide open for the adventurous and courageous spirits who long to fly like birds.

-Written by Matt Sheridan. Copyright 2012. WGA Registration Number: 1526472