Flyboy

Man was meant to fly
Icarus was just an idiot.

After seeing this video, I now want a wing suit.

I've always been fascinated with flying. I'm one of those few people who were given the chance to take their first flying experience alone, and I enjoyed it - and each subsequent experience - immensely. You won't catch me looking over the edge of some precipice, since I still have that annoying case of acrophobia, but I'm more than willing to try something that's liable to make me shit in my pants but will give me more than enough of that adrenaline rush that you just can't find in daily living.

I wonder what material they use for the wing suits. It'd have to be something really sturdy to survive something close to re-entry - at least I'm assuming it'd be somthing like re-entry, since I can pretty much see the curve of the Earth in some of the shots. Is kevlar sturdy enough to survive re-entry? Urban legend says that the older - and less reliable - wing suits were made of varying materials like canvas, wood, silk (are you bloody serious??), and whale bone.

It'd be easy to understand why they'd fail.

But if you watch the video carefully, the flocks of wingmen here are wearing suits that don't fall apart even with the massive resistance falling from an absurdly high altitude entails.

There's even this video that shows this wingman tracing the length of a ski slope. Its been said that wing suits slow down the fall of the human body to 50mph, but allows people to move forward at 70mph - so horizontal displacement isn't static, or accidental. It's a pre-meditated action.

That is seriously so cool.