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Four seconds with no wing
The modern suit is a ram-air wing built around the human body. It has an upper layer for the back and an under layer for the belly, with ribbed fabric between them like a parachute canopy, and inlets on the front. Leave a plane already moving at 80 to 120 miles an hour and the inlets fill at once, the suit pressurizes, and the jumper can fly right away, even climbing above the aircraft.
Off a cliff, nothing fills. For about the first four seconds the suit feels sloppy and soft, and nothing can be done until it powers up. The jumper grabs the tail wing and makes a little teepee with it, gets toes to the edge, checks every piece of gear, and looks out into the abyss. Then comes a rock forward past the point where changing your mind no longer works.
Those four seconds demand the best performance a body can give. Go off head low and scorpioning, or head high and pitch through it, with terrain below, and that is how a lot of people die. Done right, the suit powers up and the jumper pulls away, with a heart rate so high that the jumper wonders whether the buddy next to them can hear it.
How does fabric create lift in a wingsuit?
A wingsuit works like a small ram-air wing. Air enters the front inlets, pressurizes the cells between the upper and lower layers, and gives the fabric an airfoil shape. Lift grows with the square of airspeed, so doubling speed roughly quadruples the lift. That is why the first seconds, with almost no airflow, produce so little.
Who invented the modern wingsuit?
French skydiver Patrick de Gayardon developed the design that shaped modern wingsuits in the 1990s, adding fabric between the legs and under the arms. Finnish skydiver Jari Kuosma and Croatian-born Robert Pecnik, working at Birdman Enterprises, refined the concept into a commercial product around 1999. Earlier attempts, including cloth wings in the early 1900s, had mostly ended in failure. Skydivers today use suits that can glide far more than they fall.
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