The Complete Handbook of Air Suits

Chapter 1: Understanding Air Suits

An air suit, commonly called a wingsuit, is a specialized skydiving garment designed to increase the horizontal distance a jumper travels per unit of vertical fall. It achieves this by adding an aerodynamic surface area to the human body. This is not a cosmetic modification or a loose-fitting costume. It is a set of precisely shaped, air-inflated cells that transform the falling human body into a lifting body, an aircraft configuration where the fuselage itself generates the lift rather than a separate wing. The suit itself is the wing, and the pilot is the fuselage, the source of control input, and the payload, all in one.

To understand how an air suit works, you must first discard the idea that a person in freefall is simply falling. A skydiver without a suit has a terminal velocity of roughly 120 miles per hour in a belly-to-earth position. The human body is not aerodynamic, and it produces significant drag. A wingsuit changes this equation fundamentally. The suit does not make you fall slower in the way a larger parachute does. Instead, it converts the energy of your fall into horizontal movement. A well-flown wingsuit can achieve a forward speed of 120 to 160 miles per hour while reducing vertical speed to around 40 to 60 miles per hour. The ratio of horizontal distance to vertical distance, known as the glide ratio, typically ranges from 2.5 to 3.5 for modern suits. A ratio of 3.0 means that for