Why can’t you just slowly bleed off speed and just land like a flying squirrel or other animals that glide? Why do you need a parachute?
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A wingsuit doesn’t really work like a patachute (or at all, TBH). It just barely slows descent and is very, very difficult to steer. It isn’t powerful enough to slow descent to a safe landing speed. Parachutes are necessary for that, inasmuch as landing in a parachute is “safe.”
Wingsuits still have a relatively terrible glide ratio (how fast you lose altitude compared to how fast you go forward) compared to small gliding animals. That means you’re descending *fast* and you’re moving *very* quickly.
In *theory* you can pull up in to a stall and manage to achieve a survivable sink rate at the same time your groundspeed drops low enough to not just go into a 100 mph somersault, but the timing to do so is nearly impossible and margin for error is effectively zero. And there’s no real way to practice it…the first time you try it without knowing what you’re doing, you’ll die.
It doesn’t let you fly, it lets you fall slightly slower and at a different angle. As Buzz Light-year put it “Falling, with style”. If you hit the ground at the speed you’re going in a wing suit, you’re still a smear on the ground.
[People have done it – Gary Connery for example.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5_ITt2LM0A) You’re still travelling pretty quickly, its still gonna _hurt_.
[And this guy into water.](https://youtu.be/o2xmAWS4akE?t=122) – they’re still going pretty fast, if he had face-planted it could have easily broken his neck.
The problem is, once you flare (and trade airspeed for altitude), you’re no longer flying fast enough for your wingsuit to give you any lift, so you’ll pop up… and then plummet straight down. A wingsuit isnt’ really much of a lift generating body, its more of a controlled descent.
People in wingsuits are frequently dropped from miles above the ground. Even with a wingsuit, the minimum vertical speed that you can reach while falling is still around 40 miles per hour. If you’re really careful, you can get that to 15 miles per hour temporarily.
In order to land, you need to manage to convert your downward momentum into sideways momentum, then stop that sideways momentum at the precise moment that you need to land.
The pinpoint accuracy needed to pull this maneuver off while super close to the ground is crazy and impossible for all intents and purposes. Even if it were possible, the risks associated with messing it up would be very high.
In rough terms the lift force you get is a factor of both speed and wing area. If you want to glide then the force of lift needs to match the force of gravity so we can consider it constant. This means that you can either fly fast or have a big wing in order to glide. But you can not go slow with a small wing.
A wingsuit is a tiny wing and you therefore have to go pretty fast in order to generate enough lift to glide well. A wingsuit does slow you down a bit compared to freefall but not very much. You are still going pretty close to terminal velocity, just mostly sideways. A parachute though is a much larger wing so you can go much slower and still maintain enough lift. This is important when trying to land without dying. Smaller animals can get away with gliding because they are much lighter and therefore have a much lower terminal velocity.
Wingsuits DO NOT enable you to fly. Repeat after Woody
Wingsuits enable you “to fall with style” still really fast and to your death or a paraplegic life (if you don’t prepare a bunch of cardboard boxes to crash land into,some youtube guy did a video on not using a parachute to fall slowly to earth)
Wingsuits do NOT allow you to fly! You’re simply falling slightly more slowly, but still fast enough to break every bone in your body when the ground gets in the way of your fall. Hence the parachute.
thats like asking “if planes let you fly, why do you need a parachute?”
They don’t allow you to fly. They allow you to fall at an angle. Your downward falling speed is still not survivable as you glide sideways.
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