Engineer Angelo Grubisic uses a wingsuit to skydive in Italy.

COURTESY OF DR. ANGELO GRUBISIC

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Flight Test

Designing a suit to help daredevils fly safely

What if your homework was to design a new flight suit to help skydivers go farther and faster than ever before? And when you finished, your teacher put on that flight suit and jumped out of an airplane? 

That’s the assignment for engineering students at the University of Southampton in England. Their instructor, Angelo Grubisic, isn’t just an engineer. He’s also a skydiver. He hopes to use his students’ creation, called a wingsuit, to make a record-breaking jump. 

Born to Engineer
Watch a video about designing a wingsuit for real skydives.

A Safer Suit

Extreme athletes have been using wingsuits for decades. The fabric suits have a soft flap under each arm and another between the legs. 

When a skydiver jumps, the flaps inflate into stiff wings. Those create , or upward force, so the jumper coasts forward instead of falling straight down. “It allows you to transform a human into an aircraft,” says Grubisic.

Using a wingsuit is risky. If a skydiver isn’t moving fast enough, the suit can stall. That’s when air flowing over the wings doesn’t create enough lift, and the person falls. Most divers wear backup parachutes, but they can still be injured or killed if something goes wrong.

Grubisic and his students want to make the wingsuit safer by making it more . The more smoothly the suit slices through the air, the faster it will go—and the less likely it is to stall.  

COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON

Students adjust a skydiving suit before testing it in a wind tunnel.

Flight School

To make a more aerodynamic wingsuit, Grubisic’s students are studying airplane wing designs. Copying these shapes helps them improve the suit. The students are also changing things like the shape of the helmet and the position of the vents that inflate the wings. 

To test each new idea, the students are developing a , or model, wingsuit. Grubisic puts it on, then steps into a harness that holds him up in a wind tunnel. Giant fans blow air all around him, mimicking what he’ll experience in flight. Sensors in the tunnel measure how air flows around Grubisic’s body. Then the students use that data to adjust the suit.

When he’s sure the suit is safe, Grubisic will jump from a plane 13.5 kilometers (8.5 miles) up. If he succeeds, it will be the highest-ever wingsuit jump. 

Grubisic hopes the suit will be ready to fly in a year or two. But the dive itself isn’t his most important goal. “What I really enjoy is inspiring the next generation of scientists and engineers,” he says.

lift

an upward force that pushes an object against the pull of gravity

aerodynamic

designed to move through the air very easily and quickly

prototype

the first version of an invention that tests an idea to see if it will work

videos (1)
Video
Born to Engineer

Physical Science

Watch a video about designing a wingsuit for real skydives.

Text-to-Speech