Story of the birdmen

The balloon rises gently over the quilted landscape of the Finnish countryside. The cosy houses drifting below the basket have little idea that a history attempt is about to be made, to fulfil a dream of man since the dawn of mankind: the first unassisted human free level flight.
A man is sitting on a ledge next to the balloon. He is our hero, and is wearing what looks like a white jumpsuit, a helmet with wing attachments, a dial gauge on his chest, and, most interestingly, two cylindrical metal objects,one strapped to each calf.
“Of course, this is quite dangerous,” says Jari Kuosma, friend and collaborator with the man on the edge of the balloon, “You have nylon and fire very close to each other.”
The man casts off, and drops, fast.

From Icarus onwards, human history has been filled with inventors, dreamers and various vainglorious individuals who have tried to fly off every precipice they could find, risking and often losing their lives. Peasants, kings and scholars have leapt from every rooftop, cliff, and towers wearing as many different types of feather set ups as they broke bones when they came down and landed.
Then came the Wright brothers, and now we sit in cramped tubes in economy class. But the dream never really went away.
In the era of the barnstormers, the 1930s, people who called themselves batmen and semi rigid wings that made them look like baroque human first world war fighter planes used to entertain crowds at airshows by jumping off the wings of air planes. Some of them even survived. The difficulty was that the wings, made of canvas and held up by balsawood, were too big, and inflexible: when the batman pulled the ripcord the wings tended to get entangled in the parachute, plunging the batman to his death. According to one writer, 72 out of 75 batmen died between 1930s – 60s. The persistence is impressive. One is reminded of the Darwin Award, the mock science prize granted each year to the person who performs the best service to mankind by removing himself from the gene pool.

Jari Kuosma is a 38-year-old business administration graduate who just didn’t fit in at his job at Finland’s telecommunications company. He wore a suit and tie; but preferred excitement. His first love was skydiving stunts: he was once part of the Finnish record for the largest free-falling formation, 57 divers. Later, in Estonia, he learnt a Russian technique for jumping at extremely low altitudes: 100 metres, from a plane travelling at 250mph. He became an expert in hook turns, in which the diver takes a sharp degree turn shortly before landing in his parachute to rapidly increase the speed of the final descent so as to finish with a flourish. The diver skims across high grass and bushes, just a metre off the ground, before landing in a predetermined place such as a small raft on a pond. In skydivers’ slang it is called femuring; the femur, the thighbone, is the bone that most often breaks.

The art of diving with wings remained a largely lethal sport until a legendary French diver Patrick Gayardon began building wingsuits of nylon with porous air cells that filled up with air and gave enough rigidity and shape to fly. Kuosma, having just jumped from an 800metre mountain in Italy with a friend, saw a postcard of Gayardon and thought: this is even better than regular skydiving. Gayardon died a few months later in Hawaiian banana field.
Undeterred, Kuosma and a colleague set about building their own. The shape of the wingsuit is defined by the outstretched arms and legs of the person in the suit. In experiments, Kuosma determined the correct angle by holding a book at different angles. It was much easier to hold up a book if the angle was slightly tilted backwards.
Neither was an engineer, and when he made his first jump with his girlfriend – clearly devoted - he estimated his chances of their survival at 50-50: the pilot said goodbye, says Kuosma. But the jump was successful, and awesome. Unlike the roar of skydiving, wingsuit flying was in total silence, and they flew for several minutes; a normal jump is 60 seconds. The drop speed is 45mph, but can be as low as 25mph. In contrast, regular skydivers fall as fast as 160mph.
On further jumps Kuosma took pleasure in overtaking cars, noting that “there are no speed limits in the sky.” He was jailed once in Georgia, USA, for speeding.

Kuosma went to Slovenia and put all the money he had into a wingsuit making venture with a well-known Croatian designer of parachutes. He made dozens of suits, smuggling them through customs because he couldn’t afford to pay duty. And went from airshow to airshow and diving clubs across Europe demonstrating his concept.
Skydivers were keen, but several clubs barred him because “we want to keep our members alive”. Twelve people have died in wingsuit flying so far.
But 2,000 have tried and survived. Some of them are girls: batbabes.
Regarding these figures, the writer Michael Abrams, who has written a book about wingsuit flying, says the number of fatalities per year remains largely the same, but that’s only because the new gear lets experienced skydivers take greater risks. “The number of beginner fatalities per year has plunged to next to zero. Since only individuals who have completed 200 dives are allowed to use wingsuits, they presumably know what they are setting themselves up for.”
Kuosma adds that Birdman – the successful company he set up to make wingsuits - offers qualified instructors’ courses. “We wanted to remove the stigma that wingsuit flying was dangerous; the programmes not only allowed people to experience the joys of flight safely, it also allowed for the creation of more instructors who would be able to train beginners all over the skydiving world.”

There was one barrier still to be conquered: under the inexorable laws of physics, even wingsuited flyers have to descend to the ground eventually, at a ratio of 2.5:1.

Back in the balloon, the man tumbles away, downward, fast. Suddenly there is a flash: the cylinders attached to his legs fire up, there is a swoop and then a levelling up as the man roars away. The human jet continues for several kilometres horizontally; when the fuel from the 16kg thrusters, usually used in model jet airplanes, the parachute bursts like a flower, and, after a descent of 2,000 metres, there is a safe landing. Kuosma’s friend Visa Parvianian (“the crazy Finn”) has just made history: he had become the first man unassisted by a vehicle to fly more or less horizontally with wings no wider than his arm span for any length of time. It’s the 25th October 2005.

There have been thirty or forty jet flights since; the team are working hard on achieving the next goal: to land unassisted by a parachute. Kuosma is a little tight-lipped about this, but then several other teams are trying to achieve the same, using their own style techniques.
A longer term aim is to make flights last longer: the fuel was contained in two kerosene hot water bottles squeezed under Parviainen’s wingsuits. Two litres won’t go far. But just how much fuel can a man carry? “We have shown it is possible,” says Kuosma. “The only thing is to make the flight sustainable. It’s the holy grail.”

Abram puts it: “Undoubtedly sometime in the next decade someone will land in a wingsuit without using a parachute. And who knows, if nanotechnology allows for materials to get light enough, skyflyers may be able to jump out of a plane, let their wings unfold and fly all day using thermals. You’ve got to remember these are people who were not warned away, but inspired, by the story Icarus.”

Why do they do it? Kuosma has siaid, very philosophically, that "You feel smaller up there, but much bigger. Because you know how small you feel and the knowledge makes you feel bigger."
I like the words of the pilot writer Antoine de Saint Exupery (Author of the little prince) who described the airman as the kataskopos, originally in Greek, he who sees everything. The word later came to mean spy or explorer. And what he saw, piloting a small plane to Argentina when he did the air run as a postal pilot in the 1920s, was the need for unity.
"It was a dark night, with only occasional scattered lights glittering like stars on the plain. Each one, in that ocean of shadows, was a sign of the miracle of consciousness. In one home, people were reading, or thinking, or sharing confidences. In another, perhaps, they were searching through space, wearying themselves with the mathematics of the Andromeda nebula. In another they were making love. These small flames shone far apart in the landscape, demanding their fuel. Each one, in that ocean of shadows, was a sign of the miracle of consciousness ... the flame of the poet, the teacher, or the carpenter. But among these living stars, how many closed windows, how many extinct stars, how many sleeping men.”
"We must", Saint-Ex concluded, "surely seek unity. We must surely seek to communicate with some of those fires burning far apart in the landscape."
One wonders if the birdmen, sharing the intense camaraderie of the sky, sharpened by the possibility of death, are not trying to do just that.