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How Indoor Skydiving Works – All the fun of skydiving with a lot less danger
by Marshall Brain | February 23, 2011
If you ever get on YouTube and type in “skydiving accidents”, you realize there are lots of different ways to die in skydiving… Many of these problems can be eliminated with indoor skydiving, where you get the fun of flying without the ground rushing toward you at 120 MPH. In the following video, you can [...]
Mind-blowing Video: The Project Excelsior Skydive
by Robert Lamb | December 30, 2010
It doesn’t get much more mind-blowing than this. By the late 1950s, the U.S. Air Force needed to upgrade their flight crew ejection technology to meet the needs of increasingly high-speed and high-altitude aircraft. So along came Project Excelsior, which culminated in Captain Joseph W. Kittinger Jr.’s record-setting skydive from an altitude of nearly 20 miles above the Earth’s surface.
Come on inside, we’ve got footage.
How Speed Flying works – perhaps better than a wingsuit?
by Marshall Brain | November 16, 2010
You have probably seen wingsuits: – Want to try a wingsuit? – Interesting – The powered wingsuit Wingsuits look like a lot of fun. Is there something better? This might be it – it is called speed flying: You don’t have to use skis – you can speed fly on foot as well: So what [...]
Is it possible to get vertigo from a video? This would be the one, as a worker free-climbs to the top of a 1,768 foot tall transmission tower to make a repair. In the process you get to learn a lot about how a transmission tower works…
Skydiver Prepares to Break the Sound Barrier
by Charles W. Bryant | April 1, 2010
I written about this guy before, Felix Baumgartner. He’s pretty much the baddest dude on the planet when it comes to jumping out of airplanes. He also does a lot of BASE jumping – like when you jump off a building or say the Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil. I wrote about Baumgartner when he glided 22 miles, with a pair of what looked like jet wings attached to his back, clear across the English Channel. Wicked cool.
This time around Baumgartner has his sights set on a couple of records — the highest jump at an astounding 120,000 feet, and the first person to break the sound barrier in free fall.
Good question – How can you have fun if you have a lot of snow?
by Marshall Brain | February 9, 2010
There are parts of the United States that are inundated in snow right now. What can you do with it? Idea #1 – use the snow as a landing pad as you leap from the roof of a building. Understand that you need a lot of snow in a soft drift for this to work: [...]
You asked: How do parachutes work? — Jack, Milton, W. Va. Marshall answered: Old-style round parachutes use the idea of drag to slow down the parachutist. Without a parachute, a skydiver will fall through the air at about 125 mph. The round parachute increases the surface area, and therefore the drag, by a factor of [...]
Safety chutes deploy automatically when the primary parachute fails. Learn more about safety chutes in this HowStuffWorks podcast.
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