At a late and insomniac hour, when you can’t find a Law and Order rerun that you haven’t already seen and resuming your reading of the family’s Encyclopaedia Britannica at GUNN to HYDROX seems too arduous to contemplate, it is well to resort to YouTube, that portable and compendious ocean of funny cats, sadistic pratfalls, awful vocalists, miraculous gymnasts, instructions for dismantling your computer and fake airplanes presented as though they were real.
I wrote five years ago about one of the remarkable things that I found on YouTube: the use of wingsuits in sky diving and base jumping. A wingsuit consists basically of some fabric membranes stretched between arms and legs and between the legs. It increases the area and improves the shape of the jumper’s planform, making him or her look a bit like a flying squirrel. Some of the most startling daredevil stunts on YouTube — and there are many — involve guys in wingsuits barreling down mountainsides, seemingly inches away from some very abrasive-looking rocks. A good wingsuit can attain a glide ratio of 2:1 or so; in 2010 an Army jumper glided 11.5 miles after jumping out of a C-17 at FL 320.
