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A quote I heard somewhere that really applies: "The average person thinks skydiving is crazy, the average skydiver thinks base-jumping is crazy, the average base-jumper thinks wingsuits are crazy."
Oh right, a body length of clearance from certain death while moving at 120 mph isn't close at all. I don't know how I would have missed that, he had tons of room for error.
if he dipped at all, he would go face first through the powder, and at that speed, he would of hit had pack breaking his neck/back/face/everything. the snow wasnt even waist deep bruh
people crash in snow going 60+ mph all the time. People get injured a lot but rarely, if ever, any deaths that aren't related with something else going wrong (hitting a rock/tree, buried in snow, etc).
I think if the pow was deep and fluffy enough and the slope was just right it could be done without injury. Obviously with a good helmet and neck brace like that guy landing into the boxes.
So many deaths of professional wing suit flyers. Guy may have lived because of the pow, but he'd be looking at a serious head injury/badly broken bones maybe neck as well.
yeah i guess, it'd pry be like when water skiing, but going 5 times faster, he was going right over the snow, not bombing down, I think it would fucking hurt
well clearly a safe landing would assume there are no rocks or anything else hard that could be hit and there's an adequate amount of snow.
Did everyone miss the video of the guy landing into boxes?? This could absolutely totally be done with snow.
Ok, after some very quick searching I found that the average speed of a wingsuit is ~160 kph forward with a drop rate of about 50-60 kph. Drop rates lower the 40 kph are possible.
You can, however, swoop with the wingsuit and get an effective drop rate of 0. Also your groundspeed will be your airspeed minus headwind.
So.
Let's assume a perfectly flat landing. Coming in straight you could be going 120 kph forward and 40 kph vertically. This could be enough to kill, but could also be survived. It would not be fun though. Now factor in that someone on approach could swoop up before the ground making their drop speed very low (it would be a parabola, so they will still be a bit off the ground with a drop speed of zero but would not reach anywhere close to the original speed again by the time they hit the ground). It's probably feasible to assume someone could hit with a 20 kph or less drop rate. If there's a decent headwind, say 40 kph, the groundspeed could be dropped to 80.
Now, someone coming in to fat ground with effective rates of 80 kph forward and 20 kph down could easily survive this fall into a good amount of soft snow.
Sad news for the BASE community yesterday. Both men in this video have died in Switzerland in a terrible accident. Both Ludo and Dan were amazing people, and top wingsuit proximity pilots. Its a reminder, that in all that we do, whether it be skiing or jumping, always leave room for the unknown.