A friend just showed me this, it has to be one of the coolest things I have seen in a long time!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5417019303200331106&q=man+skydives

I still cant beleve that he is the first and noone else has done something like that(I think thats what he was saying anyway)


Wow, Im pretty sure some of you will appreciate it;)

Jon

That's awesome!! Http://users.adelphia.net/~javamoose/Smilies/rock.gif

They need to come up with better fuel "tanks" though.

Balls...

You are right about the "fuel tanks". The current design is a disaster looking for a place to happen.

Wow, and when I saw the title I thought it was going to be another one of those storied about baked beans and a match.

I still prefer to have lots of metal around me when I fly, but this guy has balls.

Steven

I would love to do that.
Maybe he was the first to strap jet engines to his legs I dunno, but people have strapped rockets to them selves since the mid 60s

Maybe he was the first to strap jet engines to his legs I dunno

Maybe he is just the first to live to tell the tale.

That's crazy, but very cool. I'm trying to talk the grad students into doing it right now.

I'm trying to talk the grad students into doing it right now.
They do all that work to be grad students so they can die after a 5 minute joy flight.
Id prefere to not have done the study if I new I was going to die young.

This is truely a cool idea, not maybe the safest in the sense of all that fuel strapped to his body the way he did but cool none the less. I used to fly skydivers for a living and can tell you that they [ skydivers ]are a unique bunch. This fellow is also using some addition hardware [ actually its soft ware (cloth) but.. who's counting] called a bird suit. The bird suite fill's w/ ram air pressure and creats a type of wing between his legs and under his arms. This gives him more surface area to enable him to create enough lift.. to remain level. At the end he talks about staying level at 2000m while his engines are running so.. he's succeeded in being the first actual flying superman type fella that I know of. Most bird men [bird suit] jumpers can get to almost level flight, I've heard of some getting enough forward speed to actually climb a bit but they soon run out of steam.. this helps in this issue. There was also a fella who flew across the English channel w/ a type of fiberglass wing strapped to his back [ w/in the last year or two]. But again.. this has to be the first 'engined' human I've heard of.

Lurk mode back on.. :)

Jerry

I'm trying to talk the grad students into doing it right now.

That makes me glad I spent my gradschool days in the physics department with the sane people :)

Jon
Thanks for posting!....I loved it very much!
Konrad

Very nice! I'm definitely passing this link along to some people :)

That was pretty cool, I wouldn't want to be in his shoes though.

They do all that work to be grad students so they can die after a 5 minute joy flight.
Id prefere to not have done the study if I new I was going to die young.
One of them agreed to do it after he finished his Ph.D. I told him that if you're going to do something where you think you might die, do it before going through the pain of writing your thesis and defending it. They aren't going to put your degrees on your headstone.