World Records Broken_ What's Next For Wingsuit Flying?

This video is brought to you by Brilliant. This is Alexei Galda. He has these extensions on his wingsuit that increase the time and distance he can fly by about 10% over a typical wingsuit. They aided him in becoming a world champion wingsuit performance flyer and world record holder in 2022. Fun fact, he is also a quantum physicist and this is his hobby. He reached out to me just before US Nationals last year and asked if I'd be willing to help design a winglet or extension that could be added to his wingsuit to increase its performance. These modifications are not entirely without risk as I will describe later. This is a significant jump in performance over current wingsuit design and I could not have hoped for a better outcome. So how did we get here? Alexei reached out to me a little more than a month before US Nationals of 2022. That did not give us a lot of time to design or test these extensions. A quick google search on the history of wingsuit extensions didn't turn up much. There was mention of the Icarus Project CFD studies on winglets and apparently a suit manufacturer did try 3D printed winglets but noticed no benefit. An extension of span rather than an upturned winglet appeared to be the path with the most significant potential returns. Safety was the primary concern and I didn't have much information to work with. So a few design choices were made to minimize risk until some experience could be gained. One way to easily minimize risk was to keep the extensions small so as not to create a large change that the pilot could not easily deal with. Another safety measure was moving the extensions towards the rear so as not to create a tail heavy situation. Nose heavy flies poorly, tail heavy flies once. And lastly I wanted to reduce torque on Alexei's forearm so an airfoil with a zero pitching moment was chosen. Alexei would be 3D printing this. Weight really wasn't an issue though and when I 3D printed my own according to his design and print settings I found there was virtually no chance of an in-flight failure. I tried to break one over a broom handle and the broom handle folded instead. Alexei handled the internal extension structure design and wingsuit integration. Due to an unrelated injury in an already short time frame he was able to practice very little with the extensions yet took two of the three events at U.S. Nationals and moved the world record on time out a little bit over his previous record. So what is wingsuit performance flying? First off it's not base jumping. Base is an acronym for buildings, antenna, spans, and earth. Up until this video I always associated wingsuits with base jumping for mountains or other structures. Wingsuit performance flying is different in that you jump out of an airplane rather than off of a fixed structure and you compete in three tasks, speed, time, and distance in an invisible 1,000 meter window from 2,500 meters above ground level to 1,500 meters above ground level. Having seen them both now I think of it a bit like Formula One racing versus rally racing. Both take the same level of precision and skill but one injects a touch more chaos and they attract quite different personalities. With U.S. Nationals over Alexei finally had enough time with the extensions to start providing feedback. In his particular case it appeared that the sweep on the extension was not necessary and actually made it a bit harder to handle the wingsuit in certain aspects of flight. This allowed us to remove the sweep and gain more efficiency. Also the extension itself was not as easy to handle at higher angles of attack which told me that the airfoil I had chosen was slightly too thin. I thickened up the extension a little bit and Alexei was more confident with how they handled in flight. If you've been enjoying today's video so far you're probably into math, science, extreme sports, or all three. That's why I'm pretty sure you're going to love this video's sponsor Brilliant. Brilliant.org is a website and app where you can learn math, science, and computer science interactively. Viewers of this video may particularly enjoy the lesson on drag forces as they relate to a skydiver jumping from a balloon. Instead of learning a principle abstractly this lesson helps you visualize these physical laws interactively in a specific scenario. The same is true for this other course I'm going through on the physics of Formula One racing as it relates to an upcoming project. I'm personally enjoying going through the logic courses to improve my critical thinking skills. Brilliant is great if you are a student or already out in the workforce and want to refresh what you already know or you are preparing to go a new direction in life. Brilliant may be the perfect tool to teach you what you need to get to where you want to go. To try everything Brilliant has to offer free for a full 30 days visit brilliant.org slash thinkflight or click on the link in the description. The first 200 of you will get 20% off Brilliant's annual premium subscription. Alexei's performance set off a small arms race before Worlds the following month where three more competitors showed up using the extensions. You might think given his performance at Nationals all of the competitors would have shown up with this clear performance enhancement but this is where safety must be addressed. Indeed a few competitors who had access to the extensions refused use of them because they didn't have enough practice time to feel comfortable flying them. Alexei made it clear to me that it was tricky the first few times to pull the pilot chute as he normally would and was only willing to experiment with extensions as he was confident he could get to the reserve chute or if everything went terribly wrong. This one here is the automatic activate activation device it will open your parachute even if you don't at a certain altitude let's say you've lost consciousness or dislocate your shoulder or something else when you get to a low enough altitude when you should be opening your parachute if you haven't the system registers that you're still falling really fast at low altitude and it will it will basically pop the reserve parachute for you okay save your life even if you're unconscious. What altitude does it go? You can change it slightly but it's around seven or eight hundred feet I believe. Okay. Having flown many jumps with the extensions at this point Alexei is comfortable enough with their safety profile to share this performance increase with those who could benefit. After the FAI World Championships which I will circle back to, Alexei came out to spend a few days jumping at Skydive Elsinore in Southern California to start collecting hard data. Up until this point we had been operating very conservatively due to a lack of data. To make effective changes safely we had to get accurate information. The most straightforward way for me to start getting data was to use some of the drone autopilots I often use in my projects. These autopilots can be very small these days down to about five grams without additional sensors and one of them would be small enough to put in one of Alexei's extensions. Also I wanted to put an autopilot with GPS on Alexei himself. The GPS would not be able to fit flush with an extension it was a bit too tall. So here we've cleaned out the space for the autopilot setup that we'll be using to gather data. And here is the extension ready to fly once the autopilot was installed. After completing the autopilot installs we headed down to Lake Elsinore for two days of filming and data collection. On our way to skydiving. This is where I was introduced to Zeeshan, a BASE jumper, PhD, and wingsuit instructor. He provided a lot of the great shots I was able to get for this video. Zeeshan and Alexei went up on a number of jumps the next two days. By the way, did you see the pipes on that Cessna caravan? These jump planes were incredible. I was able to purchase a ride in the co-pilot's position and these turbine converted Cessnas really put you back in your seat even with a full load of skydivers on board. In one circuit they are up to 14,000 feet and after releasing the skydivers they push the nose down hard and are often back on the ground to pick up the next group before the group they just dropped even lands on the field. Unreal. I couldn't even tell if flaps were used for landing. It almost looked like they just drilled the landing with a clean wing. Nobody has time for flaps. Zeeshan and Alexei had a lot of coordinating to do to get any useful filming done. Mostly because these performance wingsuits are quite a bit faster than BASE jumping suits due to design differences like these stiff inserts that hold the wingsuit airfoil shape along the arm. Their task was to deliver video and mine was to deliver data but I was having issues getting the autopilots to cooperate due to the limited logging ability on this particular hardware. This particular hardware was new to me so I had tested them in the shop beforehand but not long enough to trigger the problems I was running into. So I'm heading to Lowe's to switch autopilots because I can't get the autopilot working that we need to be working which is the entire reason that Alexei came out here so we got to fix this in the next stat. My local home improvement store had the material I needed to mount the autopilot from the puck in the wing extension and the day was saved. We could now get the data we needed. Alexei went up solo for a maximum performance run. Here's how that run looked. Everything had come together and now we had some data to start making improvements for Alexei's next competitions. The world's competition had come and gone without the new data that we were collecting that day yet Alexei had been able to extend his current world record time from 102.9 seconds to 109.1 seconds. This was a relatively massive six percent improvement over his record set just a month earlier at US Nationals. With this new data now collected I am excited to see what improvements can be achieved. At the time of this video's release the FAI has passed new rules regulating what does and does not constitute a competition legal wingsuit but we do not yet know what the ruling is as the decision has not been made public. Perhaps the new rules will be designed to allow continued innovation down this path or perhaps span extensions will not be allowed and competitors will have to find new ways of pushing wingsuit performance limits. Let us know in the comments what you think of these innovations. If you enjoyed this video check out one of these videos on the left. You may enjoy those as well.