Here is a thought: How about getting in your wingsuit without the parachute. Get a decent water ski boat and find a large body of water. Have the boat pull you fast enough to get up on belly plane. Increase speed incrementaly until you were flying like a kite. The hard part would be that you can't hold the ski rope with your hands, the rope would have to be attached to your torso at about the chest. You need your hands free for flying. You would have to have someone you really trusted to be on the quick release. I think you could really learn to fly close to ground and see how much the "groud effect" plays into slowing a wingsuit. I think landing a wingsuit is very doable but the magic key is timing. I also like the idea of having a profession long jump snow skier were a wingsuit. This would also teach you the necessary timing and would verify the "ground effect" of flying low. I just know somone is going to do this very soon. P.S. I think that wingsuits could increase in size without adding additional stress to the body by using inflatable sections. You could add "tubes" around the perimeter of the suit that were "shaped" so that the suit was rigidly open because of the air pressure inside the tubes. You could add inflated "ribs" that held the wing shape perfectly with little effort on your part (think inflatable spar). These tubes could be around an inch in diameter and would just be part of the suit. The pressure would have to be low enough that you could still move your arms and legs enough to manuever by deforming the wing shape slightly. You could have several of the inflatable tubes in the area between your legs all the way down to the end of the wingsuit that would keep your legs apart with no effort. The ribs on the upper part of the suit would keep your arms apart for you and would greatly reduce fatigue. You could make the suit larger overall without increasing the stresses on the body, should even reduce the stresses on the body. To jump, you could have the wingsuit be completely "loose" at launch and then just hit the C02 charge to inflate the tubes for flight. This would allow you to jump from aircraft or BASE equally well. When you are ready to pull the chute, just deflate the suit with a quick release valve and then pull your chute. Just a thought... P.P.S. Did anybody see the episode of Myth Busters where they dropped an inflated life raft (from a jet airliner) from a helicopter with "buster" inside it? They were testing the myth that you could escape an airplane in danger by using the inflated life raft as a parachute. Anyway, the raft floated down in a very slow flat spin and landed gentle as could be, around 10MPH, with buster inside it (about 180lbs). An inflated light-weight structure seems to fly slowly.
