Tony Suits Apache Rebel Review, Reality Check Edition

[lurch 0]

Scott, I doubt that wingsuit climbs like the ones I'm producing will ever get anywhere near the scale you describe. I'd say your description is fairly exact, thats exactly what this is, is just a popup.

The mechanic I'm taking advantage of here is the same that happens every time we do a high speed exit. Bottom line is that I'd guess the limits for a popup wingsuit climb at a couple hundred feet of gain, max, and that'd be if it were executed from a full-on headdown dive of 150mph or better. The most I'm getting here looks like about 36 feet which makes sense... I've just barely got enough wing to actually show the effect.

I'm not claiming to be able to do it productively, as in done for any real purpose, there is no real use for the move, and I see no potential for this to be any more than a trivial amusement. As competition goes, its a pure waste of energy. But it does produce some fascinating, and extremely entertaining, visuals, (entire field of view moving in the wrong direction) and inner ear zero-g rollercoaster sensations of an intensity directly corresponding to the climbrates shown on the GPS later. Its only a few seconds, but god, is it so much fun.

Half the reason this amuses me as much as it does is specifically because so many regard the whole thing as impossible with such conviction that they will hold to that opinion disregarding any amount of redundant evidence I can produce.


By now I'm convinced I could get it on video regaining my pitiful 36 feet flying past a blimp or a balloon, seen by the spectators at eye level, with laser trackers aimed at me, 5 types of GPS, an inertial tracking system, an accelerometer, several altimeters and a tape measure hanging from the side of the blimp and people will still insist "Its an instrumentation error combined with an optical illusion, it can't happen, its impossible, you were not going up."

Therefore I'm done here. I've said my piece. I'm going to do a series of experiments exploring the boundaries to determine what happens at all speeds I can reach with this suit, but I will not publish them, here, or most likely anywhere. I seldom come to this site anymore because the forum has long degenerated into repetitive crap and I had all but abandoned the site before getting the suit. I think now I have abandoned it. If I don't bother coming back and this turns out to be my last post, I guess that will mean I have.

I came back here because I felt I had something interesting to contribute to the community for the first time in years. Brief flare climbs like these have been repeatedly reported many places for years, but as I said before, to my knowledge nobody has systematically explored the conditions necessary to do it, or worked out how to do so at will, and I think most of the reason for that was that up till now suits making it relatively easy to do did not exist.

If anyone wishes to follow the progress of this little niche exploration, feel free to message me or find me on facebook. Messages sent to me here send an alert to my real email so I'm going to leave it active for anyone I know who may not know any other way to find or reach me.
Its been surreal guys, learned a lot on here.
Peace. I'm out.
-B

Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

[LukeH 0]

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Half the reason this amuses me as much as it does is specifically because so many regard the whole thing as impossible with such conviction that they will hold to that opinion disregarding any amount of redundant evidence I can produce.

I really didn't want to reply again after the last round of childish insults you slung, but you presist in trying to twist what I said so I'll persist in correcting you. I NEVER said a climb was not possible, I don't think anyone else did either.

A dive can be used to increase airspeed and produce a planeout. Without getting into the specifics obviously with enough of a dive, a climb should be possible. How many times do I have to repeat that before you stop whinging that I'm calling you a liar? (I NEVER said that either.)

You own GPS tracks clearly show the dives, and now you are making a semantic argument about a "dive" dive. Really? WTF!

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it does not require an actual "dive" dive to do this. Just let the nose drop a little and pile on some speed

Get over yourself and move on, and please stop trying to put words in my posts that aren't there, you are only making yourself look silly.

[hjumper33 0]

Wow, a real thread on a performance and technique with arguements, counterpoints, and name calling. WELCOME BACK WINGSUIT FORUM!!! ITS ABOUT FUCKING TIME!!!!

feel free to get back to revert back to arguements about who's flock is bigger now and how you measure it whenever you feel like it.

[imsparticus 0]

Congrats on the documended increase in altitude during flair, though there is nothing in your experiance or anyone elses for that matter that supports classic to x2 generational jumps. sounds like youve just got a bit more fabric supporting you slower stall speeds that allow the increases during flair, classic to x2 show almost doubling of gr i dont think this suit has gained any gr or significant speed on the x2 for quiet significant fabric penalty which i did point out and you did reject. which is probably why your getting the responses you are, i think luke is just trying to stop the back peddling when our initial comments were closer to the truth than yours.

[imsparticus 0]

Hjumper was your impression of the apache a classic to x2 type increase in performance??

[hjumper33 0]

Mines a weird prototype apache, so who knows. Its got smaller wings, but seems to stay up with the normal apache. I think we are getting to the point of diminishing returns with wing size. But in a classic I was doing 60s and in an apache mid 20s, so I guess -20mph sounds about right. But as many will tell you, I suck at flying wingsuits.

[Lucignol080 0]

I think u both guys need to do a 2way jump togheter, without wingsuit, and have a great fun...

...and obviously a beer after landing

"Parachutes sometimes malfunction, even when they are properly designed, built, assembled, packed, maintained and used"
"Ty honey..."

[lurch 0]

Ok THIS is why I just have to step back in.
I just can't walk away from a damn good argument. Its a shame Skymonkey doesn't stop by here much anymore. He'd have finished the opponent with a single sentence so foul and entertaining that it simply nukes the argument itself out of existence.

I've seen him do it. There were a few awestruck straggler posts staggering around the smoking wreckage looking for meaning afterwards, but no further relevant thread activity. Kinda like the brain activity of a cow after you drop a safe on it. Anything left sticking out twitches, but the game is over.
-B

Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

[hjumper33 0]

haha exactly, I love it! those were the good old days, when people could still jump a wingsuit at 100 jumps and there was no law to stop them, and there was no GPS to back up any claims. Fuck you all!

[imsparticus 0]

Shame you didnt just tell it like it is and had to go and wipe the gloss of what otherwise is a wonderful achievement.

[lurch 0]

Ah.
While back I asked you what your problem is buddy. You finally answered the question.

"I'll persist in correcting you"

There it is. The uptight angry schoolmarm thing. Your actual motivation and the reason for your manner. The impulse that drives some teachers, hearing a kid say "ain't" to grab the kid by the arm, get in their face and angrily demand that the kid say "isn't" out loud. The purpose isn't to get things straight or find who is right or wrong, the purpose is to force submission and force the submittee to specifically acknowledge having been humbled corrected and forced to submit.

Being possessed of what could jocularly be described as a "Fuck You Complex", you're not going to get the satisfaction from me and I'm going to enjoy causing you the same frustration you made it your mission to try to cause me.

Your purpose here hasn't been to discuss the performance. Over and over you grab what I said, and try to play that semantics game to cast it as a lie. You found a way to try to cast yourself as my superior, and use it to try to "correct" me.

Even after I stated the numbers, produced by the flight from which I wrote the original post, you persist. You decided to make it your little mission to "correct Lurch" and you were gonna keep at it till Lurch acknowledges being corrected. Even stuff I said that was obviously subjective as all hell, and was meant to be, was fair game because you weren't interested in the facts... just trying to make me be "corrected." And my defiance, as you already pointed out yourself, not just defending my words but expanding on them, drove you totally up a wall. "He won't say Isn't? I'll MAKE him say it!"

Incidentally, you haven't even SEEN the GPS track you claim "shows the dive". You've seen the ones I did AFTER, that HAD dives, deliberately, to show the climb phenomenon. The original flawed track produced on the 1G setting that provoked this whole thing, I haven't even put up yet. Not that it matters, visually you can't see much difference except the acceleration curves are a lot slower.

Funny part is, you're having to resort to a sort of "play dumb and pretend you don't know what I was talking about" to do it by now. When I say something like "I didn't even need to dive to do it", every single performance pilot I have discussed this with in private understood exactly what I was saying without needing explanation or making some sort of a crusade out of trying to force me to backpedal or change my description or force an argument about what a dive is or isn't. They just heard what I said and got it immediately.

I got nasty earlier because brother, you asked for it. You've come off with an antagonistic attitude since you started. As another friend said to me in an aside, "He's got some good points but he doesn't have to be such a douche." You don't want to debate performance, your specific goal has been to discredit me and try to force me to admit and acknowledge it.

And you can stuff it. Just because you get off on it, I'm going to deny it to you, so I can enjoy causing you the same frustration you've tried again and again to cause me. You wouldn't believe how many people have messaged me either here or by facebook to say "don't sweat the d**kwads on DZ.com we think what you're doing is awesome, keep going!"

Defending and expanding on my earlier statements about certain speeds really seemed to outrage you so I'm going to do it again.

So you want to play the semantics game about diving.
Lets play.

First, lets define our terms. Can't have a discussion when we don't agree on whats meant when we say things now can we?

There are two distinct states of flight relevant to the discussion, or specifically the latest nit you're trying to pick in your mission to "correct" me.

State 1: Basic flight... flying flat, call it wingsuit bellyfly, by analogy to wingless skydives. Its anything that, done without wings, would be considered basic plain old bellyflying. Its what everybody spends 90% of their time doing while flying with each other. And it covers fallrates of anywhere from cruising in the 20s and 30s or even lower in bursts, to holding a slot in a vertical stack with your wings all scrunched cookin' along at 85 or more. It can be also defined by absence, as in specifically what you're doing when you're NOT diving.

It typically maxes out at a fallrate somewhere around 100 depending on how scrunchy the pilot knows how to fly.

State 2: a Dive. I'm gonna capitalize it for ya just to set it apart from any other reference or use of the word. Now you can try to chase me around and dispute the definition of dive but for the purposes of this discussion I'm going to lay it out real clear for you. The distinction between Dive and not-Dive as I have used it is, Dive is a state of flight defined as having made a transition from bellyflying the suit, to a typically angled form of what would be called head-down or Atmonauti if we were doing it without wingsuits. The key distinction here is that there is a transition involved. Wings or no wings it is the exact same transition a wingless jumper experiences switching from belly to a head-down or belly to atmo. It involves putting one's head down, punching it into the airflow, and changing one's orientation to the relative wind so that instead of the majority of the air striking one's underside, the pilot begins cutting through the air and most of the airflow is coming from the top of the head on down. It is frequently accompanied by a feel and awareness of radically increased airflow over the top of the wings.

Engaging a Dive is a very specific maneuver used carefully because it involves a sudden acceleration combined with losing the drag limitations of flying flat, and it typically maxes out at fallrates far, far beyond anything a bird can do on their belly. The purpose of the move is to achieve speeds that can't be hit any other way. It is used to go after things you can't catch by flying on your belly.

I often see newbs who do not know how to Dive yet, stuck floating helplessly above a flock they do not know how to reach. Scrunch is the only method of going down that they really know at that stage and they often don't really think to try even that, and they can't get to the flock. They could reach it, but they'd have to Dive, and they're typically either afraid to try it or mostly unaware of it as an available maneuver at all.

Now.
The point of a debate or argument isn't to "beat" the other guy. The purpose of a well-made argument is to make your opponent understand you, and to make an effort to understand them.

Since you persist in playing your little game, I'm going to tell you a little story. When its done, it will make my point about "dive dive" quite clear, and then I'm going to finish up with one of those turns of phrase you've tried so hard to use against me just to drive the point in real good and no matter how hard you try, you will not be able to make it look like a falsehood in need of "correcting".

The Skydive:

I get out, scrunched. Skwrl follows. I stay scrunched as Skwrl settles into flight. I stayed as "down" as I could relative to him for a bit so he could get some pics, then moved in to see if I could fly with him. Bit by bit I let out a little wing till I found how much wing I could have out without starting to float on him. It wasn't much.

Skwrl began to tire. The fallrate went up. Skwrl began to fall away. I scrunched harder and followed. The whole purpose of the exercise was to see if and how long I could stay with Skwrl without resorting to a Dive.

Now, the things I got wrong or missed, mistaken impressions, I'll freely admit. I already stated that the fallrates I hit before the first major climb were a lot higher than I thought at the time. Another thing I completely missed while concentrating on Skwrl was how fast our horizontal speed got cranked up while this was happening. When I first looked at the resulting GPS track I was confused. It didn't look anything like what I'd have expected given the way I'd been flying and showed a top horizontal speed of 148.3 mph which at first, just didn't make any sense to me at ALL. Looking at it I was thinking "this must be wrong...how the fuck..." But after awhile, it all came clear, and revealed a few startling things about the suit in the process. Here's what happened.

Skwrl continued to drop, faster... I scrunched more, and more, and yet more till I couldn't get any smaller. I continued to fall behind. Staying above and keeping up horizontally, but by the time I gave up and broke off, the reason WHY I gave up and broke off is because resorting to an actual Dive, transitioning into a classic "missile mode" angled headdown was the only way left I could have caught him and I did not want to do that.

Focused exclusively on Skwrl and the speed picture relative to HIM, I was almost totally oblivious to how fast I was actually going horizontally and awareness of it only kicked in the moment I gave up on him, turned my attention away, briefly noted the landscape's scrolling rate, and spread my wings.

Having remained on my belly the entire time and having specifically rejected the option of tilting over, punching my head into the airflow and escalating my pursuit to a Dive because that wasn't part of the dive plan, I then turned away, opened my wings, and punched it. The amount of power on tap startled the bejesus out of me, and as I realized it, I grinned, bore down on the wings, rocked back on my heels and LEANED on it... producing the maneuver my alti logged as a 21mph climb.

And I didn't even need to dive to do it.

I, Repeat: An actual dive, was not even necessary.

Now, do you understand? Yes, or, No?

The next experiments I tried DID involve Dive transitions, because my purpose then was to explore what happens when I DO dive and to show deliberately produced climbs, which shows clearly on the tracks I put up and which continue to be used as an argument against me by people missing the fact that they're using the wrong track to support their argument. The goal of the two dives I HAVE put up tracks for was to deliberately produce climbs on the GPS and show the parameters for doing so and that was simply the fastest way to get the desired energy.

What I learned from studying the results of that first one is, that the suit will hit horizontal speeds I'd have thought unthinkable while flying scrunched. And that with this thing, an actual dive is not even necessary to produce effects that show on the alti as climbs. It can be done just by flying scrunched on your belly.

If you persist, I will put up that track, flawed or not, just to show the acceleration curve. It is much more gradual than the ones I put up already. Why? Because when I produced that climb, I wasn't diving.

Am, I, Clear? Yes? Or, No?
-B

I'm starting to enjoy the responses in here...you people wanted a real genuine argument and debate about performance and technique plus a little decorative fighting? You got one.

Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

[normiss 800]

Seriously?

ALL this over the fact that you like a new suit by Brand X?



I'm so over the majority of the wingsuit community.

[Butters 0]

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I'm so over the majority of the wingsuit community.

This thread reminds me of placing a handful of Mentos up your backside before getting a Coca-Cola enema. Not fun and s**t everywhere ...

"That looks dangerous." Leopold Stotch

[normiss 800]

At least I haven't been banned for calling someone out again.

























yet.

[jakee 1,489]

Dude, you said yourself you would laugh at anyone claiming the flight results you claimed because they seemed so unbelievable.

Instead of remembering that and acting accordingly, you're doing your best to come over all butthurt because not everyone else is as excited about your new suit as you are (and I'm sure it's awesome and it's great that you're loving it). You did make some overblown claims in your first post, they're not fully corroborated by the data you've posted, why not just chill out and leave it at that?

Do you want to have an ideagasm?

[johnmatrix 21]

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m46looxIi41qe9tnzo1_400.jpg

[Electronaut 0]

Quote

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I'm so over the majority of the wingsuit community.

This thread reminds me of placing a handful of Mentos up your backside before getting a Coca-Cola enema. Not fun and s**t everywhere ...

I'd pay to see that episode of Mythbusters.

[DiverMike 5]

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Seriously?
ALL this over the fact that you like a new suit by Brand X?
I'm so over the majority of the wingsuit community.

+1

For the same reason I jump off a perfectly good diving board.

[ifell 0]

Quote

Quote

Quote

I'm so over the majority of the wingsuit community.

This thread reminds me of placing a handful of Mentos up your backside before getting a Coca-Cola enema. Not fun and s**t everywhere ...

I'd pay to see that episode of Mythbusters.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XxKYUEqCt8

[decompresion 2]

Alt+Print Screen is your friend
You can grab the picture just off the current highlighted window, without all the taskbar. So we would not be able to tell that you are downloading Pr0n on uTorrent

There are no dangerous dives
Only dangerous divers

[VectorBoy 0]

[reply

I'm so over the majority of the wingsuit community.

[normiss 800]

Nah. Only 700-ish or so.
I got bored with flocking. If I wanted to exit and freeze in position...I'd do RW...or tandems.


But what's so funny about style and accuracy anyway???
You have any data to graph in support of your anti-wingsuit post????

[VectorBoy 0]

That is the whole point of large flocks & RW formations. To freeze and not be seen. God forbid you get noticed.

I was just curious and didn't know you flew wingsuits, So I had to ask. Nowadays if you're not grinding the crack, are a major organizor, bombarding the USPA BOD with one sided reports or uploading your grandmother's EKG er I mean your glide vector upward thrust ratio squigly line thing nobody knows who you are in this forum.

[The111 1]

Mark has a long history of both flying wingsuits and driving wingsuiters around Puerto Rico in a mini-van. And Mark himself is the only one here who will even laugh at that reference...

www.WingsuitPhotos.com

[normiss 800]

We're either waiting for someone late, AGAIN, or Omar thinks we've already passed the DZ.