the McPhee Blog

I’ve been wanting to take up skydiving for a while now. More specifically, I wanted to try sky surfing. I’ve recently changed my aspirations to learn to wingsuit dive. What childhood boy didn’t want to fly. Now we actually get that chance. The video at the bottom is what put me over the edge.

Now, you do have to have some 200 logged jumps before you can even think about jumping out of a plane in one of these suits, but it would totally be worth the time and expense of getting there.

The man in the video is barely above the tree line. In my opinion that’s more of a BASE jump. However gliding across the country, well above stationary objects, sounds exhilarating.

I am aware Yves Rossy’s jetpack invention. Admittedly, his jet suit is really cool, however, it is not as practical for a number of reasons. A major one being that he has already put £ 123,000 ($ 239,000 US) into his jetpack. This puts the jet suit out of the range of most consumer hobbyist. You can pick up a wing suit from birdman for around € 500 to 1000 ($ 767 – 1535 US) depending on the type of suit you want to buy.

Even if the cost were equal I would prefer the wing suit to the jet pack any day. The former is far closer to actually being given the gift of flight. Rossy admits that he has to concentrate so hard on the operation of his flight suit that he cannot really enjoy the scenery. I’d rather strap on some fabric wings and fly. His main advantage is that he can climb in altitude. With a wing suit this is not possible. Neither he nor anyone else to date can land without a parachute, but there are a lot of extreme people out there working on this right now. I think in the next decade there will be a way to slow your suit enough to land without the aide of a parachute. Then we will have truly mastered flying.

For awhile now I’ve been trying in vain to get the blogroll feature of this template to add some links to my sidebar. They work now, but I had to add them into the code manually. Not exactly ideal for speed of updates, but it works.

I’ve been preoccupied with other projects for the past year now, but I hope to start posting somewhat regularly.