Why no suits like this?

[RCflight 0]

Hey,

I’m Jakub and new here. I have always been fascinated with flight ever since I was born. This human flight thing is very fascinating to me. I have watched all the youtube vids of it and all. I plan on trying it out myself in the near future.

One question I have for you guys is; Why don’t I see wing suits with more surface area? Here I did a quick pic on MS paint of a suit I think would provide a much better glide ratio with an additional 50% more surface area. Adding this surface area shouldn’t change the COG much and looks very possible to me.

So why have I yet to see a suit like this? Or is there some already that I have not seen?

Thanks,
Jakub

[monkycndo 0]

Because we Americans haven't gotten so fat that we need quite that much wing.

I bet the Euro birds would disagree.

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[Bill_K 0]

There was/is a company that is coming close, at least per their website with a suit close to that size.

[Bones 0]

Bigger isn't necessarily better with wingsuit wings. In the picture you provided I wouldn't be surprised if the suit would be fairly slow vertically (but perhaps hard to control--think balancing on a beach ball) but its forward speed might take a big hit due to the excess drag.

[kallend 1,619]

I would **guess** that the following would be issues:

1. Excessive loads on the arms.

2. Limited ability to use legs for control without disturbing the tensioning/pressurization of the entire wing.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[Costyn 0]

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I would **guess** that the following would be issues:

1. Excessive loads on the arms.

2. Limited ability to use legs for control without disturbing the tensioning/pressurization of the entire wing.

Yea, Jarno and I find that suits where the attachment point of the wing is below the knee are kind of twitchy and harder to control than those with attachment points above the knee. Like you said, when you give input with your legs, you do something with your arm wings and vice versa.

Costyn van Dongen - http://www.flylikebrick.com/ - World Wide Wingsuit News

[Zeemax 0]

It's already been done

Phoenix Fly - High performance wingsuits for skydiving and BASE
Performance Designs - Simply brilliant canopies

[unclecharlie95 3]

The XS and WoM suit are not that far away from this..

BASEstore.it

[airdog07 0]

more area = more drag unless you put rocket up your you know where (on the wing ) like the rocket man

"A peaceful heart leads to a healthy body; jealousy is like cancer in the bones ..."

[dqpacker 7]

More than once.

[lurch 0]

You don't see them because they're incredibly difficult to fly. I know... I built one. A zip-on mod to a Birdman S-6 that took the wing to the ankles with a connection to the toe allowing me to use the suit like a suspension bridge or a sail. If you dig around in the threads for pics from FnD 3.5 October-ish '07 I flew it once at the event. So far as I know that convertible suit is still the only one of its kind and I still fly a slightly cut-down version of it minus the toe cables from time to time, I keep the zipon panels stashed in the suit for whenever I feel like doing a solo specifically for freefall time/cloud surfing because thats all the thing is good for. The only wingsuit pilot who ever managed to stay with it for any length of time was Jeff Nebelkopf in one of his own supersized suit designs. It delivered fallrates consistently into the low 30's to high-mid 20's for as long as my arms could take it, resulting in at-will flights of 3:10 to 3:40 or so. When my arms toughened up a bit and I learned how to really use the thing to take advantage of all that wing the fallrates became sustainably so low that eventually my Neptune was no longer detecting freefall at all and would only log the part of the jump it considered to be freefall- the part from folding the wings to deployment.
But guess what: such a suit is effectively useless for flocking and general purpose wingsuit flight, all that extra wing only becomes useful if you're trying to sustain sub-35 fallrates, and actually DOING that is excruciatingly hard on the arms. You can fly it in a flock just fine, but all that wing just folds back and flutters and does nothing useful. It also complicates deployment considerably, deploying a canopy designed for 120 mph at 30-40 mph down/60-90 forward past a suit with a burble the size of Nebraska severely interferes with the opening depending on your technique and tends to pitch you over head down when you go for the handle because a wing that big can't be entirely shut down or contained. If most of your wingsuit flights are done flying with others, you'll never need anything even close to that big.
I did a series of test jumps on several versions that were much bigger than even THAT... actual exoskeleton pieces made of lexan, ZP and snowboard bindings donated by a friend extending the tail 12 to 18 inches past the end of my toes, plus those zipon wings making the arms as big as your picture there. The thing was almost unflyable, keeping it open was so difficult I gave up on the design within a dozen jumps. The Tony suits megamach designs are about as big as a practical wingsuit can be made. Anything bigger goes way past the point of diminishing returns, vastly increased risk and difficulty for an extra 5-10 mph of fallrate you'll never need and seldom use anyway unless you like flying alone. Didn't do much for the glide ratio either, since the extra drag from all that crap mostly offset the gains in performance. It got fallrate, but not much more distance.
-B

Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

[kallend 1,619]

Quote

It's already been done

And what happened to him?

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[Zeemax 0]

He lived happily ever after with a series of mail order Thai brides?

Phoenix Fly - High performance wingsuits for skydiving and BASE
Performance Designs - Simply brilliant canopies

[mccordia 73]

And two ponies!

this book is definately recomendable reading for any wingsuit flyer interested in that stuff....funny seeing pictures from the 1950s with 'new innovative ideas from 2007/2008' already present in black and white (and a lot of canvas and wooden dowels)

JC
FlyLikeBrick
I'm an Athlete?

[KrisFlyZ 0]

Quote

Bigger isn't necessarily better with wingsuit wings. In the picture you provided I wouldn't be surprised if the suit would be fairly slow vertically (but perhaps hard to control--think balancing on a beach ball) but its forward speed might take a big hit due to the excess drag.

My guess is that this suit would be a good glider.

The Center of gravity of a human is roughly somewhere near the belly button. Higher up for people with a muscular V shaped body and lower down for women and skinny guys.

The angle at which any suit naturally balances on the 'beach ball' depends on moments of the lift and drag about the CG.

With so much wing area below the CG, my guess is that this suit would balance head low and thus be easy to glide in.

I guess that may be why suits like the SM1(lot of arm wing above the CG) work for solidly built American guys but don't work that well for the more slender Europeans(will need a suit with more wing distributed lower down).

[RCflight 0]

Thanks for all the replies guys! Very interesting.

I have a somewhat better understanding now. I will definitely do some of my own experimenting with this once I get started in the sport.

Its very interesting to me reading all these replies. Keep them coming

[bodypilot1 0]

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oldwingsuit2.gif (164 KB)

I forgot about that......that F'n funny!

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[KrisFlyZ 0]

Was this Zip-on wing inflatable?

[Butters 0]

Quote

I have a somewhat better understanding now. I will definitely do some of my own experimenting with this once I get started in the sport.

If you're going to experiment then make sure you read Birdmen, Batmen, and Skyflyers: Wingsuits and the Pioneers Who Flew in Them, Fell in Them, and Perfected Them so that you don't make some of the same (fatal) mistakes most of them made ...

"That looks dangerous." Leopold Stotch

[lurch 0]

Nope. Didn't need to be since the 6's basic wingshape still was, and leaving it single layered making a half pressurized/half not wing had the advantage of creating an unusually wide range of usable fallrates. The idea was to have it act like a monowing suit only when it was pulled tight between wrists and toes. That element worked very well... if I did decide to flock in it, I could, without having to fight to keep the wing shut down. As soon as I eased off a bit to a normal S-6 flocking body position with my arms back a ways, the zipons just sort of rolled back, undeployed themselves and got out of the way, and the normal S-6 characteristics dominated except for a little flutter at the sides. But when I maxed it out it got performance nothing but an M1XS could hope to catch. The result was a megasuit that could fly docked, and still get sub-30's after breakoff in the same jump, something I couldn't get out of its equivalent giant Tony suit which is one of the reasons I built my own instead of just buying it.

I test flew a Mach something or other and loved it, the pressurizing down to the bottom made the superslow flight a lot smoother... but if I tried to do docked precision flocking with it I'd be straining to keep my arms behind my back and the wing forcibly shut down just to get the fallrate to even reach the flock. The mach suits float too well...I'm pulling high-mid 30's in a stock 6, call it a "medium wing..." a suit almost twice the size of THAT would be a poor choice for me, for most flights most of the time. The zipons were a workable compromise because you could turn them off completely. As it is I didn't flock that hackjob all that much, (Jeff dubbed it the "Godzilla mod") maybe 100 flocks or so total, plus another 100 or so nonflock flights. The joy it delivered at breakoff mostly didn't offset the disadvantages of flying a wing that huge, but it did make an ok daily driver suit for awhile till I got tired of dealing with the oversize wings. The only reason I never bought a Mach myself is simply that I couldn't justify spending that kind of money for a suit I didn't need, and the only advantage to me flying one and the only one I'd be interested in buying would be the biggest I could get as a dedicated "dragster" for my fleet... something meeting or beating the specs of the Godzilla mod but smoother and built better. I gotta give em credit... the Machs don't look as slick as the Birdman and PF offerings but if all you care about is raw power, technical function and how well the suit really works, Mach is the way to go.
-B

Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

[kelter 0]

Why do I have an image of my crappy two euro umbrella during the windiest September day in Ireland???

:S

[elias123 0]

I read that book about a week ago. I, peronally, found it to be very interesting. It's definitely a very wel researched and well written book, for an outsider of the sport. The writer, Michael Abrams, has made 2 tandem jumps though.

"In a mad world, only the mad are sane"