“Their purpose is simply to steal!” Yves Grosse, the president of the French School of Skydiving Nancy Lorraine welcomes this weekend about forty wingsuiteurs. These women and men glide through the air using a suit with wings at an altitude of 4000 meters. The speed can exceed 250 kilometers per hour. When a parachute jump lasts an average of 50 seconds, the wingsuit allows you to hover for more than 3 minutes in the air. To admire these “bat men”, cameramen also jump and the images are broadcast on the ground for the pleasure of the spectators.
Max Diebold, double French wingsuit champion, prepares his equipment before the big jump. “We have a skydiving bag, we just add a wingsuit on it. It’s a kind of small paragliding wing, the air enters the box, which will give the wing stiffness and shape.”
This champion started like all by skydiving. It is necessary to perform at least 150 jumps before putting on the wings. “I was expecting something very physical, really sheathed, really hard. But by jumping, you’re really on the air. You go from a 50-second jump on a classic skydiving jump to a jump of three minutes, four minutes. We fly for miles, we really have time to walk around and see the landscape. Everything becomes longer, everything becomes slower and suddenly, it’s super pleasant.”
Qualifying French championships for the worlds
Max Diebold also appreciates all the ultra technical part of this discipline where you are the only master on board. “We are not in a nacelle, we are not in a cockpit, it is really the body and suddenly all the modifications that we make, it impacts the flight.”
For the French championship events, there is an individual “performance” event and another duo championship, the acrobatic part with a cameraman. For the “performance”, several technical tests are set up (speed, duration of flight, placement in the air). A jury judges by video and according to the competitors’ onboard GPS data. This weekend, the best will be able to try to win a selection for the world championships in Arizona in the United States next October.