lurch

Specifications for a 1976 Lurch: Verified distance: Birdman S-6 hypermodified: 6.5 miles Approximate max distance, Tony S-Bird, unverified: 7.5-8 miles At-will ff time: 3:30-3:45 Maximum recorded FF time, 13,200-3000 ft: 3:52 Estimated theoretical maximum endurance, 13,500-2000: 4:20 Lowest on-demand repeatable continuous sustained cruise, 2 minutes duration: 36 FPS, 24.54 mph Lowest sustainable burst cruise, limited by muscle endurance: 60 seconds: 28 FPS, 19.09 mph. Typical forward speed: 60 mph Pursuit/distance speed: roughly 85 mph Maximum recorded speed after prolonged dive: 208.8 mph Height: 5'10". Weight: 134 lbs Build: broad shoulders, lean everywhere else, heavy bones. Body is dense enough that I sink in water unless I am actively swimming. I cannot float unless my lungs are full. My bone density is unusually high, so much so that the moment I breathe out I sink like a stone. Strength for a given weight is important. I am not an endurance athlete but my personal workout involves a lot of climbing and hanging. Although I probably couldn't run a 5k I can casually pick up and throw an object 2/3 my own weight, and carry more than my own weight with some difficulty. I can also hang from a bar by one hand using any two fingers or hang by my toes. I can't quite do a one-armed pullup but I can do about half of one. I could benefit from adding 15-20 lbs of muscle, but my current weight/strength balance is as close to ideal as I could get. If I weighed 15-20 lbs more, the added strength would mostly be wasted supporting its own weight against the added wingload. So if I was any heavier it really wouldn't do me much good. And if I was any lighter, I wouldn't be strong enough to get the performance. I was sick for awhile about a year and a half ago and was down to 120 lbs for a few months. My performance fell off dramatically. Maximum performance still has a scale. Jeff Nebelkopf is slightly taller, about as lean as I am proportionally, and about 30 lbs heavier. So although his fallrate limits will be a few mph higher, he is also exactly that much faster forward and would most likely outrun me by a quarter mile or so in a long range head to head run. Lighter flyers fit further up the spectrum. Scary Perry is probably the highest performance "superlight" I've seen, estimate he weighs no more than 120, 125 lbs but his strength/weight ratio is about like mine and last I knew he could pull 3:42 in a stock V-1 back when I was barely breaking 3:15, but that weight means he really has to dive hard to hit high horizontal speeds. Like me, he is light enough that the Mach suit series was useless for him because he couldn't load the suits effectively. I'd love to see what he could do with the new "-Bird" suits, he'd be in the 6-7 mile range and pulling 4:15 at will in an R-Bird. In an S- or X-bird he'd do a solid 4:30. Given what I knew of his capabilities last time I flew with him 4-5 years back I'd estimate he could do a sustained cruise in the high teens with a modern suit. I swear the man has hollow bones and lives on birdseed. So there you go. How you define "ideal" depends on how you want to fly. You wanna be a bit faster? Be built like Jeff. You want to balance ideal speed with time? Be built like me and you'll be slightly slower but get a bit more hangtime. You want pure hangtime? Be built like Perry and as muscular as possible for that weight and you'll be on the slower end of max performance but your hangtime will be insane. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

"Yes, he will meet your needs" Bullshit. Amputees really, really NEED the limbs they've lost. Neither your god nor any of the others ever dreamed up will ever restore those lost limbs. Pray, beg, go into sobbing hysterics... your god's answer to the prayer "Please I want my leg back!" will always be "No." No god will do SHIT for your needs. Provide for them yourself... or do without. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

(applauds) Bravo!!! Welcome to wingsuiting J. Take it easy up there, and nag Spot about his Ipod for me willya? -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Bonehead Havok user review here: I've got roughly 2200 jumps on one with the lens removed. These things are weird. Theres actually room for 4 audibles- 2 outer mounts 2 inner slots. Comfort and fit are perfect. I have never noticed the slightest vision restriction with or without the lens on it. I use it with no lens and goggles under it just because I like some wind on face- with whole face behind glass skydive feels too much like watching television. Helmet is quiet and good for noise reduction even with no lens. Major reason for continuing to jump this helmet is, I've had braces on teeth for last 5 years. A kick to face would make hamburger out of my mouth. The motocross-looking lower half of this helmet provides awesome level of protection. I got BADLY kicked in the face by a newbie wingsuiter on exit once. A full blooded sole-of-the-shoe dead center in the mouth. Hit so hard my camera whited out and took several seconds to reboot and refocus itself. I didn't feel a thing and took absolutely no damage from the hit. Helmet paid for itself in a split second. So if actual injury prevention to face is a concern, this helmet kicks ass. Havok also makes a pretty good rough-and-tumble camera helmet with a little creativity. I only have 1 audible slot left because 2 are taken by remote battery mount and one taken by camera mount. Latch mechanism is somewhat overelaborate and gives the helmet a certain "Darth Iguana" look, but seems failureproof- I've never had the slightest reliability problems with anything on this helmet. After 9 years of use and many impacts everything on the helmet still works as well as the day it was made. No weird creeping wear issues, nothing comes apart. And last, the way this thing clamps onto your head, the chinstrap is redundant. You won't lose this thing because it'll stay on your head just fine with or without a strap. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Did anyone notice the awesome irony in the second pic of a disintegrating aircraft with nobody in it striking the ground right behind a sign marked "Entering Vehicle Control Zone"? -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

We just had a day of 10,000 foot tall puffies come sailing through at Pepperell. They went from the door at 13.5 down to about 3300. Best surf I've had in years. Bagged 5 clouds in 3 flights, two of them hopping from cloud to cloud. Huge flattop cliffs, canyons and stuff to fly through. Happy.

That rainbow ring is one of my favorite natural special effects. Since the puffy sunlit cloud surfaces that produce them attract wingsuits like kids to candy, we get them often. I video em every chance I get. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Oh, well ok, then. The way you described this guy just made him sound like a newbie wingsuiter. If he's got megajumps then he isn't going to have overload problems such as described by Notsane when dealing with weird handle locations. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Agreed. Problem is with pilot, not with gear. Fix technique, not PC location. Fucking with critical muscle memory sequences very bad idea. To the OP: Tell your buddy this: Ideal technique: The Wingsuit Reacharound Touch fingertips together behind pilot. Touch both sets of fingertips to PC pouch. Separate fingers dragging fingers lightly across pouch surface. Fingertips will scrape wing away and put handle directly into hand. No fumbling, just one circular movement. Works with the biggest suits. Master the movement and you will never miss. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

At the wingsuit world record in Elsinore last november we got that. The wind there regularly switches 180 degrees. At the time I thought oh shit...68-way downwinder, here goes, this is gonna be wild! In a sky that crowded you do NOT break discipline. Besides, if you're in a world record you're supposed to be skilled enough to handle that and land it standing. Everyone I saw, did. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Interesting debate here. I agree with both sides. Its something I'm grappling with myself these days since said bean counters decided to offshore most manufacturing, wiping out my economic niche in the process. So far I've been an adventurer, high school dropout and self-trained mechanic and industrial automation tech. I made myself a niche solving tech problems the engineers had given up on. Time after time I see "engineer-correct" solutions that are expensive, elaborate, completely ineffective and just plain wrong... where when they turned the problem over to a general tech/mechanical tradesman, (me) I came up with simple, durable and permanent machinery. I briefly dealt with some guys with this rigid mindset they got from their education: They told me "All troubleshooting starts with the PLC." (programmable logic controller). I laughed in their faces. The machinery they were taking an attitude about had some incredibly subtle mechanical effects... when I let them try to fix the gear they were hopelessly lost... It took them all day to fail to fix a simple alignment issue I fixed in 5 minutes... Because I knew the gear well and could spot a simple loose bolt/misaligned air cylinder with one quick look and a couple test cycles. Their one-size-fits-all attitude and approach to troubleshooting equipment was like trying to diagnose a sticky doorhandle or a flat tire on your car by asking the engine computer. It had absolutely nothing to do with the problem. When I walked away from that factory, they were still insisting they could fix worn/misaligned parts by reprogramming the damn thing. I left them to their fate. Last I knew the gear still wasn't running. Their incompetence will cost the company millions in time. The bosses of those guys I was training on the gear they were inheriting from my closing factory refused to hire me for the position even though I could fix it and their guys couldn't, because I didn't have a degree and since I didn't buy into their "all troubleshooting starts with the PLC" schtick, they considered me untrainable. Funny. I thought the same thing about them. The company's solution to this will be to hire even more of the same kind of guys who will expensively fail to keep production running, the company will lament how it can no longer manufacture cost-effectively, and send the factory overseas to be badly run somewhere else, putting entire towns out of work rather than acknowledge the flaws in their faces. It is no longer my problem. I've found another factory to work for now. But as much as I have invested in the freehand tech-hacker mentality, I lack the patience and rigor to do the kind of engineering mentioned earlier in this thread... the spiral weld example. The way I'd do it, I'd cut a few test pieces, look up the best known way to do it, do trials till I had a weld quality and material output that met spec, make a first piece, record the required amount of weld filler, THEN just do the damn job. And that approach to uneducated "engineering" has major limitations. You don't want me "whipping up" a nuclear reactor. So I can relate to both pro and anti- college positions... I get annoyed with job requirements that blindly require an 80,000$ investment in an education to do a job any seriously skilled and enthusiastic industrial tech could do... I made a very good living waiting until the engineers were so frustrated they'd turn the machine over to me, whereupon I'd promptly design a simple mechanical solution out of spare parts and junk, often carving it freehand with a Dremel and a drill. It worked every time, because I didn't just design it on paper, make it, and then wonder why it doesn't work since all the math says it oughta, I kept redesigning it till it actually DID work. But there is less and less room for the self-made types in industries, and without a degree, they simply will not pay you what the gear you make is worth no matter HOW much money you make or save the people running the factory. "Tough shit, you're not an engineer". So I'm seriously considering a mech.eng. degree myself, 15 years after I walked out of high school and did just fine on my own. I simply do not have the in-depth ed needed to BE an engineer and I know it. There is only one way to GET that level of education: School. Point I'm making here Bolas is, you wanna play in the big leagues, college would appear to be the only way... and I'm a guy who disdained the idea for half his career. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

None of the above! Fuck performance! Theres a puffy guys, LETS GO GET IT!!!! -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I love the cop-bait drivers. I gotta Grand Cherokee I drive fast but conservative and I'm nice to others, share the highway, anticipate the needs of the other drivers and all that. Couple months ago I'm doing 80 on the NY thruway, taking it easy driving polite, passing dense traffic in right lane maybe 5 faster than them. Early 80's primer black "rough-racer looking" Monte Carlo covered in decals screams up behind me and starts dancing all over trying to find a way to get around me. Right lane still packed solid so no go. I push it up to 85, he's still on my bumper. Then 90. Still aggressive. I'm like WTF guy, we're doing 25 over, this is stupid, back off settle down and wait till I can get outta your way already... I ain't gonna drive this fast, piss off the staties... I get a gap on the right and before I can begin to move over, racerboy swerves around punches it to 100+ and blows me away on the right. I immediately drop back to high 70's and move over cause the next car that had been behind HIM is coming up fast behind me. It was an unmarked NY statie who'd been watching the whole thing, soon as I was out of his way he lit out after the other guy... I've learned that with cops it ain't necessarily about how fast you're going, its how much of an asshole you are while you're doing it... -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Sup... I finally stopped in to this thread and checked out the suit. Tail's a big sucker! My estimate based on pics would be this thing's gonna be FAST. I'm not gonna order a demo just cause I'm not in the market for a suit right now but if I come across one in my size I'll test fly it. Be interesting to see if it can meet or beat the S-Bird I'm flying now. That suit's a hard act to follow, but the S2 might do it. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Yo. Just watched the vid. Found myself going WHOOOOA! That was one...fast...spin. Maybe the fastest I've ever seen. Props to the guy for getting out of it. (Pun intended

Alright, I'll even step in here myself. If you want an experienced prototype test pilot, I will volunteer to fly the thing. Gib, no worries about the risk. If you look up the video Spot put up a few years back you'll see I've built and flown some of the riskiest gear imaginable. I'll happily sign a waiver absolving you of responsibility and a legally binding NDA promising not to give away your intellectual property. I reserve the right to inspect the suit and judge its flyability and structural strength myself before donning it, (especially as a test pilot, I MUST inspect the gear I fly) but I have absolute 100% certainty that if the suit you have bears any resemblance to the pictures you've put up on the net, I can fly it easily with no control issues whatsoever. I have experience with unstable rigidwing prototypes that make your suit look small. If it even vaguely resembles a wingsuit, I can fly it to its limits and give you an experienced, objective assessment of its capabilities. If your design has the hidden physical advantages you have told us it does, I will know it within seconds of exit. Such characteristics would be instantly obvious to me. Such was my experience with Tony's new designs, for example. I would fly the thing and test it for you for free, just for the fun of it and to see if your suit can do what you have said it can. If that suit of yours can be flown to a 3.7 GR, I can do it. I don't need to put it up against another suit if I'm flying it myself, either. With, or without instrumentation I know the performance I am getting. Although putting it up against another suit would allow me to prove it by visual demonstration. If that suit can do 3.7 or anywhere near it, then small wings or not I will be able to utterly smoke Justin in his X-bird. Justin is one of the higher-performing pilots out there flying the biggest production suit... but if your suit can do 3.7, or even 3.0 for that matter, I will be able to both outfloat and outrun Justin in it regardless of what he flies. Whaddya say? If it was fated to collect dust in your basement you have nothing to lose anyway, and with all of us volunteers willing to help you and sign agreements protecting your work, you're at no risk of having your ideas stolen and turned into someone else's profits. The people who have volunteered to help you in this thread all have reputations of high integrity, and with legally binding documents for us to sign you can be sure none of us would steal your ideas and turn them into production suits, earning ourselves reputations as cheats and crooks just to make a few bucks off your work. If you want your work to contribute to the advancement of wingsuits, DO it. You've asked for help. We're offering it. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

No, shit! That thing is a true preproduction prototype! As rare as wingsuits get...there can be only one suit #1. And get this: I have a Classic 1 that is 90% identical to that thing! From the white fabric, purple wings, blue bootie material. Differences are the collar on mine is black, both front and back of wings are purple, the label is in a different place and it has the namebrand arm patch. However mine is a first-generation production model, with the patch on it that says Birdman S.U.I.T. I still use it every once in a great while for students. It was the first suit I bought specifically for teaching with. In fact, its the suit Justin flew for his first 20, maybe 30 flights before he got his own first suit, an early Phantom. I'm gonna have to check the label on mine to see its serial number. I'm pretty sure its a '99 but what number? I'll go look next chance I get. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

E-cigs can be a lot of fun in the right places... like airports. Security people are programmed to go bugshit when they see defiance or rules broken, and they do...till they get close enough to realize you have not, in fact, just lit up a cigarette in the terminal, at which point they go away, looking disappointed. I put the use of e-cigs in no-smoking locations down under "obnoxious behavior, creative forms of" -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Exactly. Since the usual Tony reps haven't stopped by here to answer you, I will. Those things are informally known as "foamies" and Fraser is right...their purpose is to provide a sculpted and clean leading edge. They've been used off and on in various Tony designs. My own new model S-Bird has them. Some of the heavier birds I fly with swear by them... Personally I don't notice the difference but I'm light and seldom truly use the maximum capabilities of the suit. Some of the bigger guys flying them have grown used to them and reported that switching to an otherwise identical Mach suit without foamies cost them a noticeable loss in float and speed performance. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Gib... just a suggestion... Maybe you're going about this the wrong way. For most engineering disciplines it IS all about the test data, specifications and so on... With wingsuiting the environment and conditions are so subjective and so fluid that trying to do comparison testing by collecting data when the conditions will never be the same twice strikes me as kind of like trying to build a sculpture out of water. When I was doing my own suit development I didn't bother trying to collect data or establish protocol or attach many numbers to it. The only numbers I was really concerned with was freefall time. When it came to distance and speed, I'd mapped my performance...literally, on a map... and then bought a GPS to verify it. It did. My rough estimates turned out to be a lot more accurate than I thought they would be, actually. The GPS did nothing except tell me what I already knew: Range, 6.5 miles. And when I wanted to assess the performance of my work I did it in a simple nonsubjective manner. I flew it against the best pilots, including Jeff Nebelkopf himself. I didn't smoke him... but the stuff I made did enable me to keep up. My situation is different than yours. I wasn't trying to design a suit to sell... I got better results out of modifying existing suits than anything I made from scratch. So I knew my work had no commercial value from the start and I made no effort to commercialize it. But I certainly did get results, and anyone who saw my stuff in flight knew it. Up until Tony put out the "bird" series of wings, there was nothing in the sky that could stay with my stuff except Jeff in one of his own megasuits. What I'm saying is, instead of trying to sell a suit design based on numbers, protocol and test data, you might be better served and meet with more success with a much simpler approach: Fly the thing, publicly, with the best wingsuit pilots out there. Build a reputation on it. If you can fly the thing against the best of the best and consistently smoke them by a wide margin, THERE is your test data. THERE is your comparison test. Nobody's going to deny you've put a hell of a lot of work into it. Personally I thought the thing looked cool as hell. I wouldn't have thought the plastic and rubber designs (if thats what the materials were) would be very comfortable, but if you say they are I'll believe it, you've worn em, I haven't. All I'm saying is that in the art of wingsuit design, nothing beats demonstrated superior performance. When The new Tony "-bird" designs came out, I KNEW they were vastly superior without having flown them myself. I SAW the results. I didn't need test data and protocol to convince me. Pilots who I had previously been able to smoke without effort suddenly became able to keep up with me. Pilots who had been able to at least compete with me suddenly became able to beat me. One of our local pilots used to fly an S-3. In my S-6 I could outfloat and outrun him by thousands of feet. Then he got an R-Bird and quickly learned to use it. On breakoff one day I punched out, up and away from the flock. Within seconds they were all hundreds of feet below and behind me. Then I looked to the right, and there was Dave. My jaw dropped. He was still with me. I'm both taller and lighter than he is. I was absolutely astonished. That result was repeated by other pilots. I'd been able to dust Justin no matter what he was flying. Even his megasupermach1XS didn't allow him to smoke me. I'm quite a bit lighter and knew my suit too well. But when he and Phil got X-Birds I got smoked by both of them. No contest. Not even close. The only way I could match them was with my own biggest mods, and even then only just barely. That, is what is selling Tony suits. Not protocol or test data... but a demonstrated performance envelope that beats everything else in the sky. Now I fly an S-Bird myself, and am enjoying the same advantages the design granted the others flying it. My homemade stuff is obsolete and I don't see myself trying to build anything better. What they've built is so good I have no urge to improve on it. But if I had a design like yours that I wanted to commercialize, THAT is how I would do it. I'd generate the test data you've been making, but I'd be PROVING my world-class numbers by demonstrating that nobody and nothing can compete with me while I'm flying it. The performance numbers you've claimed for your suit design say your design is so good and so fast it nearly defies physics and would beat any suit ever built or flown. I don't think it unreasonable for the wingsuit community and manufacturers to expect you to prove those claims and those numbers by simple demonstration. You don't need tests and protocol and all this complex comparative stuff. All you need to do is smoke everyone. Then the suit will sell. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Which way would this convince you then? I've talked to the guy. He is quite real. As is his suit. And so is mine. I'm taking his concept to the next level. I just finished building the frontend. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Try the Philippines. I lived there for a couple years awhile back. Had a couple little jigglers in Manila that made the pool dance. Spent most of my time there in Baguio city up in the mountains. Got small ones quite regularly, a couple that knocked stuff over and after getting annoyed with them, caused me to bungee my speakers to the wall. We had a swarm of them once, little ones. Slowly increasing frequency, more and more often. Felt like it was building up to something big. When it finally happened it was weird... no prolonged shaking, just a single big SNAP. Everything in the universe suddenly moved 5 feet to the left and that was all. It would have been almost disappointing, except the entire time I was there, all I had to do was look across the valley to see evidence of how strong they could get, there... there was the ruin of a major hotel, huge building, slowly crumbling, abandoned before it was finished cause it got totalled in the 1990 quake that wrecked half the city. 2 years later there were still jagged concrete ruins everywhere downtown and buildings with twisted rebar sticking out the sides into vacant lots where the other half of the building fell down. You could tell a lot of these buildings had once been twice the size if you looked at the side, you'd see concrete and paint outlines from the missing floors, interior walls that had become exterior walls complete with the original paintjobs from the individual rooms. They'd just chisel off most of the missing floors but occasionally miss a spot so you'd see random ledges sticking out of otherwise plain walls, and doors opening to nowhere. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Ok THAT was cool... At first I thought the bird had some serious skills when it managed a clean footdock on the tail. Then I was REALLY impressed when the bird managed double mouthdocks on the tail! Now, THATS skills... In 7 years of wingsuiting I've managed a facedock once against the sole of someone's shoe but Never have I seen anyone with airskills enough to do mouthdocks on a powered aircraft of ANY kind. Way to go bird! -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Ok, you're right. It needs more diamond plate. Maybe some carbonfuckingfiber. Or some construction stripes. Everything is cooler with construction stripes. Maybe I'll add some. That way when I buzz you under canopy y'all be seeing plaid like a hornet in a blender. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Matt, come ON, when have you ever seen Mr. Blue NOT blicking it? Even IF the suit turns out to be distinctly NOT blickable, somehow I am quite certain, that Chuck will blick the living daylights out of it anyway. I understand the necessity of this. Its a philosophical thing, a form of zen. Although I am not an authority on the blickage arts, I express my ability to relate to it any way I can... for example, I divide by zero whenever I damn well feel like it. Usually whenever I do this, everything in my field of view turns blue! Coincidence? I think not! -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.