lurch

Amazon: the opinion expressed by both yourself and Turtle is far scarier than any enemy this country will ever face. I do not expect you to understand why. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Twardo, we calculated the dispensing rate based on supply limitations. With 3 rollers we could have emptied 6 rolls in three seconds and Matt would have needed an entire garageful to keep us operating for just a few minutes. Same problem you get with a GE Minigun... at 6000 rounds a minute, you need a truckful of ammo to sustain that firing rate for any length of time... And believe me, this is Lurch you're talking to... if we'd wanted a flamethrower effect I'da produced one. A little gasoline added just after the paper comes off the roll and it would have looked like the ass end of an SR-71. We're talking 5-alarm, here, bigtime. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Thats damn good, Trix... Heres a tip: Slightly narrowing your legwing and jamming your elbows up toward your ears allows you to pull the outboard wing area down the sides of the suit taut. Instead of feeling the load on your arms it winds up being mostly between shoulders and legs. Instead of feeling it in the usual places you'll feel the load in the backs of your upper arms and your forearms might even feel almost unloaded. Thats how I get mine into the sub-20's range for as long as my upper arms and legs can stand the loading. When you do this you'll know its working cause the whole suit will give this lofty lifty feeling. The sensation is rather like trying to lift a heavy load on your shoulders. Second, don't try to float... drop head and shoulders and go for a bit more speed. Its both easier on the arms and more productive. Flying like that is combining float technique with speed technique and if you get the balance just right you'll get more airtime easier than just trying to fly for one style or the other. Thats how I got that flight this weekend and unlike a hard cupping float-only flight, my arms were tired but not burned out or shaking, even after that flight. When I hit the air I immediately made myself try to relax, conserve energy for the long haul, put my head and shoulders down and went for a medium-effort that'd last the duration and it worked. Flew far longer than many flights where I burned out my arms by trying too hard. Its all about technical combos and energy management. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Doc, I wouldn't beat on yourself too much, man. I'm quite a bit taller, wider wingspan, younger, leaner and prone to brutal gymnastic parkour-like behavior, plus I've got several hundred solos done specifically dedicated to long-flight discipline. 3:20 for a middle aged career academic is outstanding. You'd beat the snot out of most average pilots with that performance, and take it from me, you're already within a few seconds of the absolute limits for a guy of your size and weight in that suit.

...and boy, are his arms tired.... -B I went back and did the math. My neptune has repeatedly shown sustained 36 FPS, (24.54 mph 2 minute cruise) and 28 FPS (19.09 MPH 60 second sustained cruise, I.E. not a flare, but burning my arms out in one minute) but I know damn well I can't fly like that the whole way down... However 3:57, 13350-2100=11250 ft freefall, 47.46 FPS, 32.36 MPH average for the entire 4 minute flight. Not too shabby for a slow carving flight done with a cramped leg. And yeah, my arms were tired. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Jarno, one thing I learned from this one is, you can injure yourself flying that hard. My leg fell asleep in the plane due to being squished behind a tandem. I was worried I wasn't going to get full circulation back in the time I had before exit. Sure enough, seconds after exit my left calf cramped up badly. I ignored it and kept flying hard the whole way down, but by the time I deployed I thought I'd already blown the time attempt and put in a substandard performance. I figured I'd probably got between 3 and 3:15ish, much of my attention during the flight was dominated by that damn cramp so I had no real idea how long I'd been flying. I was surprised as all hell when I played back the video and found instead that I'd smashed my own record by quite a margin. But now, two days later, that leg is still sore as hell. Most of the reason I haven't shown up on the competition site or tried to make any public claim to the title of "Longest/slowest flyer alive" or whatever, if there is such a thing is because I just don't want to come off as a skygod. I don't show up on this site much anymore because of how much ego and chest-beating goes on here, and whenever I show up here it feels like I'm just doing more of the same myself. Still, I couldn't help putting up this result because ego or no ego I'm damn proud of it. I've been trying for years to see if someday I could pull 4 minutes flight under normal jumping conditions so although its just another relatively trivial achievement, for me anyway its kind of a big deal because of how much work and for how long it took to finally be able to do it at last. Tell you what though, I'll throw my old Garmin back into my gearbag just for the hell of it and see if I can get a good track to put up on wingsuitcompetition.com anyway, next time I try to see how far past 4 minutes I can make it, if I can. But so help me god, if I start running around claiming to be the greatest -anything-, somebody, please smack the shit out of me ok? -B Edit: I'd never really looked at that site before, I figure if I'm gonna compete might as well see who I'm taking on and what they can do... got some kickass flyers up there, but I think I can give em a run for their money, we'll see... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

New personal record from standard altitude: Saturday October 2, 2010, Jumptown, Orange, Massachusetts Suit: Tony Suits S-Bird Flightpath: one and a half overlapping circles Exit 13,350 Deploy 2,100 Neptune result: No data Time on video: 3:57 Took me most of a season of flying it to prove it, but I was right. The S-Bird IS a 4-minute suit. Hell of a design, guys. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Your first line, you're starting to sound like Yuri, man. Not a good role model. You come off negative, you think those of us who love this aren't going to at least point out that we disagree? If you've got everything you wanted, good. So have I. If you're ever in the Boston area, come fly with me. I fly with ALL crowds... west coast, east coast, z-flock, the Euro guys... all suits, anyone who loves to fly. But you're gonna have to work on your trash talking skills and up your game a little if you wanna keep up with the likes of US. Chuck Blue showed me how it was done back in the day right before he ruined my suit, but you know, it looked a little less shabby without the decals anyway. Chuck's got wisdom like that, sort of like Master Yoda on a bender. I've been drunk-dialing him on occasion ever since. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Play the clown much VB? Your shit is weak. I'll play straight man so you can work on it.

This is kind of sad... end of an era. My first suit was a GTI. Excellent suit. Delivered quickly. I flew it for years. By the time I wore it out the S-6 was out. Jari made me a dealer... I sold only one suit... to myself. Delivered 6 freakin' months late only after repeated emails to Jari. I ordered it around the beginning of the season. By the time I got it it was too late for all the boogies that year I'd hoped to fly it at. When it arrived the mylar in the shoulders crunched, broke and went to pieces the first time I flew it. Mylar wing liners soon followed. The bright beautiful decals began to peel right off almost at once. Easily the most incompetently designed consumer product I've ever owned. Jari told me to send it back and they'd redo it but by then I was so pissed off and frustrated I declined and kept it. I figured if I sent it back I wouldn't have a suit till halfway through the next season given how long it took the first time around. Jari told me they'd solved the peeling decals problem but this was not true... I saw others made later than mine that also peeled immediately. Total disgrace. I ripped the broken mylar out of the shoulders, ignored the shattered crap inside the wings and Chuck snuck up and peeled the rest of the decals off at the next Flock n Dock. The underlying suit design was awesome, I flew the thing for years and loved it anyway despite its glaring flaws but that experience put me off buying Birdman's stuff again, and cost Jari any hope of capturing the northeast wingsuit market. Everyone around here knew I was expecting it to arrive any day now... any week now... any month now... and the crap I received when I finally got it. After that I couldn't have given the damn things away and I could not in good conscience try to sell crap like that to anyone. Thus ended my relationship with Birdman Inc. Then I get an S-Bird. Tony's suits were a good deal cruder than Birdman's for most of the time I watched them grow and spread but by the time I got mine they were far more refined and the suit I received was flawless in every way... perfect. Even though mine was won in a raffle and thus I could reasonably expect it to be at the bottom of the priority stack below all the paying customers he still delivered it within weeks of Justin sending in my measurements and color choice. Now THATS customer service. As a freebie one might expect it to be thrown together in haste, shabbier than the average suit. Instead I get perfection. I've put a season on mine now and its still perfect. Not so much as a frayed stitch. Slightly rough zipper action on lower right leg but I think thats my fault for zipping it harshly at a bad angle once. And its the most state of the art suit I could ask for. It'll be years before I break the personal records I've set with it, if ever. The level of perfection still surprises me... I'm a picky critter and I would have thought by now I'd find SOMETHING I didn't like about it. But after maybe 200 jumps I'm still 100% satisfied and happy with it and to reward that outstanding effort I have directed as much sales Tony's way as I can. He's earned it with interest. I'd hoped to do this for Jari, but after what I got from Birdman, forget it. If Jari is ever going to rise from the ashes he has a lot of catching up to do. A pity. I was such a fan of his suits for so long... I was not a fan of Tony's designs for quite awhile, but when he finally whipped one out that satisfied me, he did it so overwhelmingly that it'll be very hard to sell me another suit made by anyone else. Brand wars don't interest me at all... but quality, well, quality wins me over every time. If I ever encounter a suit design that beats his, I'll fly that... but I don't expect that to happen for quite some time. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Lurch here. SNE peeps have probably seen me show up once or twice a year, stagger drunk but politely around their village for awhile visiting various friends, make a few wingsuit flights and vanish. I've always been made welcome. Every time I show up the place impresses me with the sheer LIFE on display by the people there. This however, blew me away. That was FUCKING AWESOME. The single most inspiring and heartwarming thing I've ever seen skydivers do. BRAVO!!!! (Applauds with great enthusiasm) If THAT is how SNE people take care of their own, you people are a testament to all that is best in humanity. Thank you for posting this. It reminds me to appreciate the honor and privilege of being a part of a community of people of such quality. First class. Absolutely first class. Take my hat off, I do. I have GOT to get up there more often. You people are just... awesome. Best wishes to Barbara. With people like THAT on your side rooting for you, you ought to make it through just fine. Get well soon so you can return to them. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Say what? Whaddya mean, its been only two weeks! And there were two of him in one flock, at that, what with me flying his Phantom in the vertical challenge. It was wild, like Mike in stereo! Seriously though, I'm still not really seeing your angle. You kind of made my point for me actually... number or lack of numbers... and there are more of us this year than ever. I just don't see anything like any indicators of a decline here. Aside from Mike going more than one week without his pic posted in major media somewhere, that is... and come on, even Mike gets to take a break from camera-geeking at least ONCE in awhile... right? Ok, maybe he doesn't. You're right. Wingsuiting is on its way out. Fuck it. I'm hangin' it up and taking up minigolf. Its so exciting when I can get the little ball to go around the little windmill and over the little hump into the hole... -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Interesting debate here. Is the market tiny? By the standards of most consumer products, yes. No matter how popular wingsuits get, we who fly them are still just a small subset of the total number of jumpers. It is still dangerous enough and challenging enough that out of all skydivers, -relatively- few of that culture are either inclined or qualified to get into it. Even if, in time, wingsuiters became half of all skydivers the wingsuit market would still be "tiny" by general-public standards. The general public can and will buy several million of any given product... DVD players, cars, ipods, flashlights, whatever. But even if half of all jumpers were birdpeople the market would still only be supporting 5-10,000 at best. However... stagnant? In stasis? You've got to be kidding me. Short story for you VB. Here at Pepperell I've watched it grow and disperse and grow again. When I started here it was just me. Plus a couple guys who owned suits but didn't fly em much like Murphy and Godin. Nobody to fly with. The discipline was in its infancy. Between the three of us we could barely manage a simple dock, let alone all the technical flying most of us can do these days. Those guys became my old-school brothers, been flying with em since before it was cool. They're still flying. I trained Justin and the Flock U thing was born. Justin got into organizing promoting and selling suits in a big way. For a time, we had a very solid crowd here as a result... occasionally taking up the whole Otter, more and more often. Justin took his show on the road and our local crowd dispersed somewhat as various flock members either tended to hit the road with him or stayed here with me depending on inclination and ability to travel freely. Some did both, and are either on the road or here with me on alternating weekends, plus our local stay-at-home crowd still frequently gather at Jumptown, CPI and sometimes Lebanon. But guess what... the crowd regenerated after it split up. I get new birds here all the time. And they're good! They're talented and dedicated. Roman, Vicente and Sati just in the past few weeks. And this is at a dropzone with nobody in particular promoting it or putting up logos everywhere or actively trying to make a big deal out of it. I'm not much of an organizer, "front man" or promoter but it doesn't matter. Its known that if you go to Pepperell and the surrounding dropzones theres always a diverse handful of birds to fly with. And the new birds just keep on coming. I'd hardly call that stagnant. Stagnant was my first 2-3 years when I could fly for a season and only meet one or two new birds... except then it still wasn't stagnant, it was just too small to have critical mass. It can't be stagnant when there was never a big scene to GET stagnant in the first place. Now there is, but I'm not seeing stagnant. I'm seeing onging steady healthy growth and growing popularity. Right now the scene itself is sort of "in-between" major trends. Last couple of years have been all about the bigways and it was good. But by now we're sort of "over it" and have moved on to focus more on the variety of other ways to fly besides simply making big groups flying static formations. We still do that, but now we've broken up into lighter smaller flocks with much more variety in the types of flying we do. I can join one group for cloud surfing, another for a basic 9-way diamond and help train the newer birds still enthusiastic about basic formation work, fly in the Vertical Challenge the next week, then grab a bunch of the old brothers for some anything-but-flat wingsuit freeflying the week after that, where we're carving spinning and diving doing high speed stuff the newer birds won't be ready for for another year or two. But theres a well-established hardcore of veteran wingsuiters waiting for them when they are. Stagnant might describe the freeflying scene around here actually... theres always some freeflyers, but its usually the same basic crowd, not large, I don't think I've seen bigger than a 4-6 way all season. Wingsuits are a different story, we can put up anything from a 4-10+ way on any randomly selected weekend out of whoever happens to be here, and whoever that is, is usually only maybe 1/3 of the total number of wingsuiters available. If we all showed up at once, we'd need another aircraft to keep us all flying. If we assembled an all-newbie-way it'd still be bigger than the biggest hardcore-veteran-way we could have done 4 years ago. Where does the negative perception come from VB? Seriously. From my own experience, (take with grain of salt because naturally any event I attend will be wingsuit-heavy, so theres always lots of birds wherever I go) dropzones without any wingsuits look like they've become a minority. Instead of talking it down and pushing the negative attitude you seem to be taking, my suggestion would be grab your suit and a couple of newbs and go fly with some enthusiasm! It feels stagnant to you because there aren't many bigways at the moment? Thats just cause you've been in it for awhile so anything less feels anticlimactic. Ask the newbs... it sure doesn't feel stagnant to THEM. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

So I finally got to fly with Vicente. And you know, he didn't disappoint. Armed with just a T-Bird he pulled a solid 3 minutes, incidentally setting himself a new personal best record. And that was including time lost to a barrel roll, a dive and carving turns. I got a whopping 3:03 cause after that flight I was just too wiped out to do my usual planeout at the bottom. The whole flight was one giant planeout. I'd say we covered a solid 5-6 miles in a wide loop around the DZ. DAMN! It was the most all-out flight I've done this year that wasn't a solo. We went to max as soon as we cleared the plane. My Neptune did not even record the exit till I dived at around 11,100 and recorded deployment at 7800. Vicente's Altitrack recorded a peak low of 16 mph which is about right for the way we were flying, probably recorded when he followed my dive and the planeout immediately after. When he gets ahold of an S-Bird I WILL be outfloated. Every time I backed off my wings in the slightest he'd start to float on me. I could float on him, but just barely. He already has most of the major ninja tricks figured out. My first impression was "Holy crap. I have nothing to teach this guy about slowflight." At one point I was already flying at about 90%, and employed a combo that got me some climb relative to him that also put me at closer to 95% of my limits, fallrate in the high-mid 20's. He looked up briefly, then put his head down, gave it all he had and actually climbed up to meet me. Nobody has ever done that before. Not while I was flying that hard. The only time I have ever been outfloated was by a veteran pilot in an X-Bird while I was flying a stock S-6 which gave the other pilot enough overwhelming advantage to catch me. In a radically modified S-6 I could just barely outfloat the X-Birds depending on who was more tired, and in an S-Bird nobody has been able to stay with me at all no matter what they were flying. And Vicente did it in a lesser suit. Impressive. Figuring since I was flying an S-Bird I left the airlocks open so it'd be a bit more of a fair fight. I save closed airlocks for when I need every last bit of flight I can get. In any case it wasn't a true contest since we were both flying dynamically with carves and dives and such, and having way too much fun. Next time I'm closing it all up so I have 100% capability on tap and we'll fly purely for time and see if Vicente can stay with me into 3:30+ territory. Even in a T-Bird he might just be able to do it. Fuckin' A that was some epic flying. Both of us were so wiped out our arms were shaking for 45 minutes after.

Oh, and second the opinion of leaving the GPS on the ground and learning to fly instead. During the recent Vertical Challenge event I was mildly amused to think that YB would totally lose it if he were there, and that it is exactly the sort of event he will never be invited to because of his attitude. (or complete lack of actual flying ability. Pick one) Normally I do prefer to fly all-out, but in a flock or trying to do something specific, you fly the way you need to in order to accomplish your purpose... and not only (gasp) was I flying half-shutdown and with my legs bent, but I had to borrow Purple Mike's suit to downshift my wings for a more appropriate and steeper flight range since my daily-driver S-Bird flies too flat for high fallrate vertical formation work and cannot be shut down far enough to be workable for that sort of formation. Oh, the horror. I guess we weren't really flying, or we were "f-ten-cking", whatever the fuck THATS supposed to mean, since our l/d or d/l or whatever the fuck he blathers on about probably wasn't up to his elite standards. Still, we had a godawful amount of fun at that event, just ask Scott Bland, who still can't view certain pics of the event without laughing his ass off... something to do with me making an idiot of myself by flying my slot to perfection, except it was somebody else's slot... -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Yep. And although Yuri_base certainly earns the bashing he gets, I don't wanna see him die with a tiny crane wrapped around his face, either. I wasn't quite sure who I was addressing there in my last post though since nobody has fessed up to being the one who actually made that crane thing yet. I figured the maker would read it and figure out it was meant for him, whoever he is. I should have been more specific but cut me some slack... I work third shift and my brains are well scrambled about this time of day. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Well, look. From one WS prototypist to another... if you're gonna fly something that radical, BE SURE. That leather wingsuit I made awhile back looked so outlandish because I knew damn well I had zero sewing skill so I compensated by making it 5 times stronger than it needed to be by way of incredibly crude but completely indestructible construction, which is why that monstrosity was laced together out of mostly Spectra. It was ugly, but it worked and I survived it without incident. Test that gooseneck by holding it out a car window on the highway first. If the maker is European, get somebody to drive at 100+mph on the Autobahn and SEE. Don't just throw it together and bet your life on it... few people know the kind of testing I did before flying any of my more radical prototypes... I made wings and then tried my damndest to destroy them on the ground. I'd stand on part of my homemade suits, grab fistfuls of fabric and then try as hard as I could to destroy them. When it was strong enough that I could NOT make it fail, THEN and ONLY then did I fly the finished product. Just be careful ok? A friend once warned me that one day someone was gonna die by trying to follow in my footsteps. Don't be that someone, ok? Because he was right. I once mastered the art of high speed exits from an Otter. It was insane but glorious. I was very methodical about it, and lived. A good friend of mine was careless with a big wingsuit and killed himself against the tail of an Otter much later. And he didn't even need enhanced exit speeds to do it. Just using a bigger suit than I was using when I did that was enough to cause him to unexpectedly exit this world. The moral to this story is, Think it through. Please. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Hmmm, good point. I should cut him some slack. After the stuff I've made and flown I really got no business sniping at it. Besides, whoever made this is at least trying. I'd second the suggestion of a mudflap mount though. If I'm gonna fly something radical it needs to be justified by the potential for radical results that can't be achieved any other way, and the info this headcrane thingy can provide can be just as easily obtained by a chest or bellymount with far less risk and it makes more sense from an ideal-glide perspective anyway, head needs to be down in close to mudflap-viewing posture... I just get this visual of the pilot with that gooseneck wrapped around his face or hung up under his chin after looking down and having the relative wind bend it. Anyway good luck with it, and if it works out, cool! -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I know who did that. Nobody but Yuri could possibly think this is a good idea. This may be the most epic fail I've seen yet. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

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

Sabre 1 135 loaded about 1.2-ish. I find Sabre 1 deals with being deployed at a wide range of fallrates much better than any other canopy I've tried and is far more forgiving of dropped shoulders and such than Sabre2's or Pilots or semielliptical whatevers. Sabre 1 is so perfect for wingsuit that if I could buy one brand new I would. The design may be dated but it is VERY reliable for this use. I've put maybe 1100 jumps on mine and chopped it only once due to bad packjob within the first hundred jumps. Packed properly a Sabre 1 is so resistant to twists and so forgiving of bad body position on opening that the worst twists I've had in 3 years have been a simple 180 degree- only half a twist... even when I'd badly dropped a shoulder and was expecting a wild ride, I got nothing...it opened straight and true anyway. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Its also good for skateboarding actually, I sometimes indulge in wingsuit skatecross near the loading area at Jumptown. When the plane pulls up I can tack across the loading area on the propblast like a sailboat. I do not recommend wingsuit rollerblading though. Its a lot harder than it looks. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Hey just figured I'd pop in here to say 1: Thanks to Mike for loaning me his suit... much to my surprise I finally found a circumstance in which I simply cannot fly an S-bird effectively. The required fallrates for this type of flock were higher than I expected. Way too much suit. I could get to my slot but only with the wings completely crushed down to nothing and Justin described watching me try to hold that slot as looking like I was wrestling with an alligator. So I was unexpectedly unprepared for the vertical challenge since I didn't bring any of my older smaller suits and Mike's Phantom loaner saved the event for me. 2: Props to Phoenix-fly on the suit design. I hadn't flown any of their gear in years and never a Phantom. The P2 turned out to be easy enough to fly and dial in that I had no problem flying it in a demanding invitation-level event right out the door, and it had a surprising amount of power and range for what I would consider a rather small suit. There was a lot more subtlety and refinement in the design than it looks at first glance. Scott Bland gave me a couple pointers for taking advantage of the upper body wing design and when used, those ninja tricks will squirt a P2 across the sky in a surprising turn of speed. Although it doesn't have the nuclear sledgehammer glide and power of a megasuit at breakoff, it had more than enough for my needs in this event. Needless to say I had a blast. Fun event. We gotta do that again sometime. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Unfortunately Perry's been out of the wingsuit circuit for the last few years, guess he had to go home and take care of his Dad for awhile. I use guys like Jeff as performance yardsticks- I'm not out to "beat" or outfly anybody, and for us floaty guys the real challenge is flying fast enough to keep up. I have to get all ninja with minimizing my drag to hit the same forward speeds a heavier bird can do with ease, and although I might stay aloft 10-20 seconds longer the heavier birds with ninja skills will always go a bit further... speed over time equals distance, simple math. Flying with the heavier birds helped teach me how to freefly a wingsuit- because often I had to get very creative with the headdown techniques to build up the necessary speed to catch or stay with them. I haven't had a chance to fly with Loic yet. Looking forward to it sometime though... I need to get out to Europe one of these days. I've flown with almost all the major players in the U.S. wingsuit community and anyone from Europe who has come here that I ran into at an event, but theres still a big pool of pilots over there I haven't even met yet because they mostly do mountains and I just do aircraft, so the only way I'm gonna get to fly with em is if either they show up at a skydiving event or I take up WS base, and theres a real shortage of jumpable cliffs around here. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.