Suit material wear and performance

[Machine-710 0]

Hi, noob here with all of my 11 ws jumps  Im jumping a used Phantom 3, I'm 86kg (12kg too fat) clean, with all ws gear 100kg total. I just got curious how much flight time woud you expect to get out of used Phantom 3 in that conf. My best so far is from 4km to 1,4km 77 seconds. Suit is maybe tiny bit too long, i cant get as much tension into leg wing as i see others do. Otherwise it fits well, ofc its my lack of skill, but i've heard comments about when flying a fresh Intrudair Piranha 3 to be like "dude it like a whole another level"

Do wingsuits degrade in performance the same way as canopies do?

[Machine-710 0]

this place is dead, once a cool place, now dead...

[giacomo 0]

For a good comparison, you can check HERE the flying time is for me not the most interesting thing, I focus mostly on glide and speed.

Yes, wingsuits degrade in performances too and you notice it more if they are in light fabric.

Edited August 28, 2021 by giacomo

[piisfish 135]

On 8/28/2021 at 11:06 PM, Machine-710 said:

this place is dead, once a cool place, now dead...

How many replies did you expect in 6 hours? And during the weekend?

[skydave89 19]

How used is the Phantom? I have around 500 on my OG Havok and then 450 on my OG Strix and at this point I can tell there’s a noticeable decrease from when it was new. I’m really rough on my suits and also live in a hot humid place and sweat a lot in my suits which doesn’t help the material. 
 

I think you need to hit at least 400 jumps or so to finally get to a point where it’s actually affecting your overall times compared to when the suit was brand new. And once you learn the suit more you’ll probably make up for the lack of performance with how you’ve learned to fly it to the limit of its ability. At a certain point I can see a suit not worth flying anymore, but I would guess that number is nearing like 800 jumps based on my own experience. With people having hundreds of tunnel hours I think we’ll start to get a good idea on the upper limits, but then I think the skydiving environment is a lot worse for longevity than the tunnel. 

Edited August 31, 2021 by skydave89

[mccordia 73]

I have (had) a Hunter which had around 800 Skydives, a good 100 WS Basejumps and 400+ hours in the wingsuit tunnel, and thats still flying around, currently owned by someone else...

There is some degradation in terms of fabric porosity, which might affect full flight performance by a single digit percentage, but in general flying, no real issues should arise.

Some older (old, old) suits do tend to get in trouble with inlets collapsing, and fabric not holding air well, and as a result, legwing or armwing flapping. But all of that is usually when talking about 500+ jumps on a suit minimum..