The video is meant for entertainment, so here are some technical details for those who have been asking me why we struggled so hard.
Canopy is an HK2 64 from Fluid Wings: it is fast and really glidy, which makes it a really hard canopy to do XRW with. Morgan was recording GPS data with his flysight and we couldn’t get the canopy under 2.35 glide ratio, which was really easy for me on the belly, but really painful on the back since I was maxed out. I could maintain flight with him, but it was physically tough, and I had no range to come for the dock.Those are the different things we had to figure out during our jumps:
1) Exit timing: on the first jump I was exiting too early from the plane which placed me in a bad position to join him. We found out that the later I exited the aircraft, the faster I was connecting with Morgan. We also found out that too far wasn’t good when I lost visual on him and we did our double solo.
2) Flying pattern: we realized through the jumps that certain patterns were making us gain time by allowing a better approach and avoid altitude consuming turns.
3) Wingloading: we couldn’t figure out the right wingloading. We started at 3.5, increased at 3.6 then 3.8. We figured out that more wasn’t necessarily better so we got down to 3.4 then realized the sweet spot was at 3.6. We burned a lot of jumps trying to understand it.
4) Trim: because the canopy was flying quite flat we tried to change the trim by putting longer soft links on the rear risers but the landing was unpleasant for Morgan so we gave up after one jump.
5) Canopy pilot’s position: I was amazed by how much the position of the pilot affects the flight. We were lucky that Julian Barthel was around to tell us what were the do’s and don’ts of the canopy pilot, which made us gain time, but it was of course not always perfect because as soon as we were nearly getting the dock Morgan was looking down at me and was losing the position.
6) Winds: we did 5 jumps in high winds which turned out to affect a lot the jump wether we chose headwind or downwind. Flysight data showed us 60km/h of difference on our groundspeed with the same glide ratio depending on which direction we were flying. The jumps that day were absolutely useless.
7) Wingsuit pilot’s performance: braking is not allowed and I did that mistake many times. I was arriving too fast on him on the back with my max glide position, which forced me to brake and resulted in a loss of energy that I couldn’t regain. We got the dock when I understood how to approach him from below only with the power of my body, using the wings only after the first touch so I could have range to stay on him.
All those little things accumulated made us struggle a lot for something that looks super easy when you look at other people doing it on Instagram. It took us 18/20 jumps to finally make it when we thought it would take us less than 10. But we learned a lot and we had heaps of fun! It was really interesting for both of us.
- Canopy pilot: Morgan Sologny
instagram.com/morgansologny/
- Wingsuit pilot: David Laffargue
instagram.com/davidlaffargue/
- Canopy: HK2 64 from Fluid Wings
- Wingsuit: Mako from Intrudair
Thanks to Julian Barthel for the precious tips and Skydive Spain for adding jumps on our accounts when we got sad.
Негізгі бет Спорт Our first steps in XRW
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