Landing A Wingsuit Without A Parachute _ Theory Of Awesome

Two. One. What? And a big welcome to The Theory of Awesome, the show that asks, wait, they did what? I am your co-host and aspiring bird, Sophie Schrand. I am the other co-host and a good faller downer, Trace Dominguez. Not only will we see what all of these awesome people did, but we're going to find out also how. With science. Today we're looking at a one-of-a-kind stunt, one that was never done before it was done, and has never been done again since. Yeah. Back in 2012, Gary Connery donned his wingsuit and prepared for one of his many hundreds of flights, but this flight was different. Hey, Gary. Welcome to The Theory of Awesome. I'm Sophie. I'm Trace. Thank you, and thank you for having me on The Theory of Awesome. It's great to be here. So how did you get from putting on a wingsuit for the first time to jumping without using a parachute? I was always searching for the next best thing. All of a sudden, the holy grail then became landing without a parachute. And I just thought straight away, if I've got a good enough box rig and I can fly accurately enough, I can land one of these. So that's really interesting. Did that choice then affect your speed? All of my training was really about trying to find a soft speed, because the faster I would go, the greater the impact. The maximum speed I hit was 80 miles an hour, but that was as I jumped from the helicopter and then transitioned into flight. So I found a position that I could fly all day long, 60 miles an hour forwards and 23 miles an hour down, and that gave me a three-dimensional speed of 65 or so miles an hour. So how did he pull it off? With a lot of intense training and physics. So the four aerodynamic forces that act on any aircraft are lift, thrust, drag, and gravity. Now since wingsuits aren't powered, they don't create any thrust. But all other three forces are in play here, and they make wingsuit flying possible. It's just like a skydiver, but with more cross-sectional area, right? The skydiver jumps out and they reach a terminal velocity. It's when they're no longer accelerating. This happens in a little under 15 seconds. And it happens because the drag force created by wind resistance on the body is equal to the force of gravity acting on the skydiver. When there's no net force, there's no increase in acceleration. Now wingsuits change that equation. They present more cross-sectional area perpendicular to the air resistance, increasing drag, and they get extra upward force from lift, which is created by the motion of the wing through the air. So instead of falling at a terminal velocity of around 120 miles per hour, or 190 kilometers per hour, a wingsuit pilot can slow the fall rate to as low as 25 miles per hour, or 40K. Actually, I want to go back to Gary's video again because there's another thing I want to point out. All right, let's do it. Enhance. All right. It happens so fast that you might miss it. But what happens there is he actually pulls up right at the end to slow himself down, I think, and then that changes his angle of attack dramatically, and then from there, I mean, he talks and rolls. Yeah, absolutely right. Now we talked about the wingsuit creating the most drag when all of its cross-sectional area is perpendicular to the force of air resistance. And since he's traveling forward as well as down, the air resistance is coming to him at an angle, like this. So when he pulls up like that, he's adjusting his angle of attack so that he's using the extra drag force to slow himself down. It's pretty cool. I mean, he's obviously really good at this. Yeah. So maybe we can try and mimic that effect right here in our studio. Let's do it. Let's go. We've put a wing inside of this amazing homemade wind tunnel. And this is also going to illustrate Bernoulli's principle, but in a slightly more, I don't know, wingy way. So when you think of, like, Gary Connery and his wingsuit, he's essentially a human wing. In this case, you can see the front leading edge of the wing is cutting through the air. And what will happen is the air going over the top is a different pressure than the air underneath. The air underneath is a higher pressure, and thus it's moving the plane up into the air. Okay, so that looks amazing. You can really see, as the smoke goes over the wing, you can really see that bump. That bump is the wing changing the shape of that column of air as it passes over it. Doing that changes the pressure, creates that pressure differential, and that's what makes us fly. So you want to, like, change the angle of this maybe? Like, if we change the angle of attack of the wing, we're going to get a different amount of lift. Love that for us. Let's do it. So you can see, it seems like there's a lot less air on the bottom. Which makes sense, because he was talking about actually creating more drag for himself when he lifts himself up. So he's slowing his speed. And that tracks with what we're seeing as far as how the air is moving around. This one looks really good. That's really cool. We do have this, like, one kind of burning question. What's up with the boxes, man? Like, how did you decide that the boxes would help you land safely? There's no other way of doing it. Water is so hard and doesn't displace. Airbags, you can only really hit airbags flat. You can't come in and skid along an airbag, as I did with the boxes. So the boxes we use are what we call single skin. So you've got essentially a piece of paper, another piece of paper, and then a wiggly piece of paper in between. And that's a single skin. So that had to be thousands and thousands of boxes out there, right? I mean, do you know exactly how many there were? So the structure of the boxes itself, I'd ordered 18,600 boxes of various sizes. Three different sizes. And the runway was 100 meters long. So that's 330 feet long and 42 feet wide and 12 feet high. And every 8 feet of boxes I had, I put in a 2-foot gap. And that gave the whole thing flexibility. And that also allowed me to be able to walk out. Do you know how fast you were going when you hit the boxes? Because you just kind of strolled right out. I hit the boxes at 69.8 miles an hour. I know all of this because I was wearing GPS and we had satellite link data and such like. We were just talking about the maneuver that you did right before impact. You kind of like pulled up and slowed yourself down. Can you tell us about that? Energy goes somewhere, and I just wanted to bleed off as much speed as possible before impact. So I pulled my wings hard forward. What that does is it goes from sort of this position to lifting up slightly in this position. I would imagine it probably bled off a good 8 to 10 miles an hour. We've learned so much. Thank you so much, Gary. Thanks for taking the time. Absolutely. It's been super fun having you here. And thank you so much for talking to us. The box thing, though, that was new for me. I realized that I didn't even think of boxes as a way to do this stunt, right? Do you want to see it in practice? We can just do that? I mean, obviously then, yes. Okay, well, hold that thought. Because I want to take a closer look at what's happening with these boxes before we go any further. So the boxes are doing quite a lot of work here, so to speak. First, they're providing enough stability to withstand the impact of a wingsuit collision at 70 miles per hour. The corrugation, the adhesive, and the skins, the outside of the cardboard box, as well as all the air inside the cardboard box, all provide a structure that is durable and rigid, but is also capable of crumpling. And that really is the key. Oh, crumpling. Like, I think of a car, right? Like, it's got crumple zones built in so that we know where things are going to kind of collapse. That's great. And, you know, I know a material can be crumpled when its thickness is significantly less than its length or width. It's actually a technical term. The term is geometric frustration. So now on to the boxes. Now, I won't be doing this part myself. And Trace is also not going to do that thing himself. Right. We're all set up. We've got our Kevin. Are you ready? I'm ready. Kevin, are you ready? Kevin! Kevin! Okay. Well, that is our show, and there is so much more to come in the weeks ahead. We cannot wait to share all of this stuff with you. We've got so many episodes. Thank you for coming with us on this first episode out. But until next time, I am a professional nerd who will remain a great nerd. And I'm a professional nerd who's going to learn how to fly and become a bird. Yay! See you next time. Thanks for watching. You're welcome. See ya.