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| Like Icarus, but smarter, and French |
The Lounge Feature |
Words By Chris Mitchell
The early history of wingsuit testing must have been similar to the early history of cobra charming: glamorous in a mystical way, yet ultimately suicidal. I imagine early conversations about the discovery process went something like this:
Man: Hey honey, can I borrow your sewing machine?
Wife: Sure dear. It’s in the den, next to – Hank, what are you doing with the night vision goggles? Christ, if we have to relocate one more time, so help me …
Man: Would you let it go already! I’m watching bats! Garden variety bats out in the yard. I think I finally figured out how they fly!
Wife: I told you. They have hollow bones and thousands of years of evolution.
Man: Pffff. Shows what you know. They have wings, Martha. Wings!
Wife: You’re 37 years old, and this is just now occurring to you?
Man: And as soon as I can stitch those ugly curtains your mother gave us into a wingsuit, I will have wings too! By this time tomorrow, I will be shouting your name from the top of that giant oak tree in the neighbor’s yard!
Wife: That sounds reasonable. Oh, Hank, before you embark on your first flight, be sure to leave the keys to the Beemer and the safe deposit box on the dresser.
Man: Good thinking, hon! Those clunky things could weigh me down!
Of the 75 people credited with building wingsuits since the 1930s, 72 of them died in their suits. This includes the father of the modern wingsuit, Patrick de Gayardon, who began crafting flying suits in the mid-90s and then died while jumping in Hawaii in 1998.
As such, wingsuit flying is a very young sport. There are only a handful of people around the world who do it professionally, and only a couple of companies which are successfully manufacturing the suits for public use. One of those companies is the French-based Fly Your Body, which started in 2000 as the brainchild of Loic Jean Albert.
As the son of two skydiving instructors, Loic Jean Albert would have been hard-pressed not to be a daredevil. He started skydiving when he was 16 and did his first BASE jump at 19. He describes paraponte – a sport where the participant runs off a cliff with a parachute – as, and here I’ll use his word, ‘relaxing’.
Loic is not a stereotypical Frenchman. He doesn’t seem condescending or nihilistic. Although he doesn’t specifically say so, I get the impression he doesn’t smoke little cigarettes. While all my research points to the fact that he is, in fact, the man behind this wingsuit phenomenon, he is humble and self-effacing, pointing out that a Finnish skydiver just accomplished 30 seconds of horizontal flight with jet-fuel-powered boosters attached to his feet. The thing is though, Loic helped launch the phenomenon, and he is still carrying the torch.
Loic Jean Albert worked closely with Patrick de Gayardon from 1996 until his death in 98, manipulating the details of the wingsuit to make it even better. ‘We had a friendly relationship,’ says Loic. ‘We would hang out together and talk about the designs. I had a sewing machine so, sometimes, I would make little modifications on the suit.’
When news of Gayardon’s tragedy hit France, Loic was understandably upset, but he didn’t let that stop him from making progression with the wingsuit.
‘Since then, I have been improving a lot of things to make it more efficient, but also have more manoeuverable so you can fly close to objects with a very precise trajectory.’
In the years following, Loic started his own company Fly Your Body, which produces the S-Fly, a version of the wingsuit that comes in beginner and advanced models. What makes the S-Fly so popular is its superior manoeuverability. The wingsuit, essentially, is constructed like a parachute canopy. Wings running between the arms and body and between the legs inflate to form a kind of airfoil. This slows the skydiver’s vertical momentum, but allows him/her to move horizontally.
‘The way it is designed is very simple. It makes it interesting to BASE jump with the S-Fly, and to play around rocks and clouds and things like that because it is very sharp to fly. You can be very precise about where you fly and how fast.’
Now that they have hit upon a safe formula for the wingsuit, the activity has started to grow into a respectable movement. The first competition was held in Russia in 2006 with disciplines in ‘distance,’ ‘time’ and ‘freestyle’. With ‘distance’, skydivers start from the same altitude and compete for horizontal distance from the drop. With ‘time’, the goal is to stay airborne for as long as possible. And in the ‘freestyle’ event, a cameraman follows two aerialists, who perform manoeuvers in the air. Teams are judged on camerawork as much as aerial ability. Almost 50 people showed up to compete in this inaugural event.
Loic’s most recent jump happened in South Africa at Table Mountain. What makes this peak so difficult to work with is the topography. There is a vertical drop of no more than 160 metres, followed by a graveyard of impossibly sharp rocks. In order to survive the jump, Loic had to fly horizontally at a much greater rate than gravity was pulling him vertically. And he had to do it quickly.
He sprinted along the top of the mountain, and then threw himself off the edge. Spreading his wingsuit taut, he caught the updrafts, and used them to fly along the ridge of the mountain until it was safe to pull his chute. By the time he touched down, he had traveled about 800 meters vertically, and close to two kilometres horizontally.
‘What I like best,’ says Loic ‘is the feeling that you are flying. You are not maneuvering a machine, steering a canopy or steering a plane. When you fly a wingsuit, you fly with all your body. If you want to turn, you use your shoulders, your hips, legs, arms, everything. Same thing with speed. So the sensation you get is really the closest you can get to a bird’.
Give me one minute. I just have to drop off my keys.
For more incredible imagery of Loic in flight, check out our gallery here.
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Tags: The Lounge, Sport
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