600 Feet!

I played navigator to a friend, while driving today. I had to be most alert during the short stretches that led to turns. I noticed that the GPS reported distances a bit after they had been reduced. At one point the GPS system (we used a Tomtom system, which we like very much) chimed '900 feet,' after we had passed the point where the display had said '900 feet.' Just to throw in some numbers, I guestimated (i.e., I estimated the distance, though it was more of a guess) that we had passed a little under one-third of the distance in question by the time that the GPS system chimed in. So, just for simplicity, I guessed that by the time I heard the chime we had about 600 feet before the next turn.

Well, guess what? We weren't going fast (certainly not fast, by free fall -- skydiving -- standards), but we crossed those 600 feet incredibly fast! At that point I wondered how Mr. Jevto Dedijger might have felt, looking down at the ground from the Kockertalbrucke Bridge (pardon my spelling -- I do not have his book, "BASE 66," here with me), near Heidelberg, Germany, right before his 'S' jump in BASE.

Okay, okay, the whole point of my exercise was to get a feel for how he might have felt, but I got more than I had bargained for; for when we whizzed through that distance I was left with a knot in my stomach as I tried to fathom how much discipline Mr. Dedijer must have had to pull his rip cord during the jump. It was quite scary, and I cannot truly imagine that morbid feeling of watching the ground rushing up faster and faster, to meet you, eventhough I have watched the ground rush up when I jumped off an 8 feet high wall, and when I put my parachute into a tight spiral during my first (and so far, my only) skydive.

Should Flying Men Look Back To the Flying Darts?

Flying man minus Wingsuit: Maybe the first wingsuit landings should be done on skis, right off of a Nordic style ski jump. Perhaps the real challenge will be adapting the ski bindings so that the parachute (during testing, and for emergencies) does not get entangled in them. After that, maybe wingsuiters will start jumping out of airplanes with adapted (perhaps shorter) skis.



But, of course, I have never seen telemark ski bindings, my entire life, nor have I BASE jumped, nor wingsuited.

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I got this idea from watching Jeb Corlis' appearance on The Colbert Report, and the wonderful cinematography in the above video, starting at the 6:41 mark.

The above clip is taken from Werner Herzog's documentary "The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner," perhaps more properly translated as The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcutter Steiner.

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A few days after putting up this piece I found this clip on YouTube:



So I take it that I'm not the first to come up with the idea of learning to land a wingsuit using a telemark ski jump setup. In my defense, though, I did come up with the idea independently.