HOEXTER, GERMANY (dpa) – At speeds of up to 300 kilometres per hour, Christoph Aarns is whizzing through the skies.
The thing is, the skydiving instructor is not dropping vertically – but rather, he’s sailing along horizontally and so his free-fall period lasts nearly two minutes, or a minute longer than a normal skydive.
It’s all thanks to an invention called the “sky ray” which the 37-year-old is wearing on his back, in addition to his parachute. The “sky ray” is a delta-shaped wing construction weighing six to seven kilograms and which gives the skydiver the same kind of lift that a wing does for an airplane.
Aarns has been testing the sky ray which is the invention of Munich designer and parachute jumper Alban Geisler.
“People have often before tried to fly with some kind of wing construction on their backs,” Geisler said, adding that so far all the attempts had failed.
The idea was all but forgotten when humans began flying airplanes. But Geisler went back to the original dream and began building his wings – in all, six prototypes made of carbon fibres and the synthetic material kevlar, both light but extremely strong.
Using computer-aided designs and experiments in wind tunnesl, the inventor kept perfecting the sky ray’s aerodynamics. But it was left up to Aarns, a six-time German champion in formation skydiving, to test the invention. Aarns has now made about 120 test jumps.
The Sky Ray, he says, functions similar to a plane’s wings.
“After a speed of at least 200 kilometres per hour, pressure builds up beneath the wing, while being reduced above the wing, thereby creating lift,” Aarns explains.
With the sky ray on his back, Aarns does not simply drop vertically, but instead can zoom through the sky horizontally and cover considerable distances while building up a velocity of up to 300 kilometres per hour.
Helmut Bastuck, managing director of the German Sports Parachuting Federation DFV, is impressed: “The invention of Sky Ray is certainly outstanding, technologically and aerodynamically speaking.”
But, he adds, the wings are not going to revolutionise the sport of parachuting – their use is restricted to a small group of highly-experienced sky divers.
The DFV, Bastuck notes, has succeeded in persuading insurance companies to provide coverage for those using the Sky Ray. But the skydivers must fulfill certain criteria, including at least 300 jumps, experience in formation skydiving and intensive training in how to use the equipment.
“A device like this with such strong performance parametres is unique anywhere in the world,” Aarns says about the Sky Ray. He says that if a flight does go out of control, the skydiver merely needs to jettison the wings, which he says “lands with its own parachute”.
