Friday, April 1, 2011

The Man Who Falls To Earth

Rating ***

This article is about skydiver Pascal Coudé’s unique technique to stay in the air as long as possible and his story is very impressive.

Most skydivers are very pleased to get 60 seconds of beautiful scenery over the farm country, North of Montreal but Pascal was able to come close to his goal of flying longer than any human before, in fact he free fell in the sky for a solid 4 minutes and 9 seconds. (Longer than it takes to soft-boil and egg!) What he attempted was compared to bench-pressing the atmosphere. When he landed he was 12.5 kilometers straight down from where he dove out of the plane. Mathematically that is impossible unless Pascal Coudé has the super power to stop time or grow wings. Surprisingly, in this article I learned that he did use wings… it’s actually called a wing suit. Similar to a skydiving suit but in-between his two legs, and his arms his suit was webbed. Wing suits have been around since the 1990’s and they are the closest things to flight nonpowered by humans that exist. He continues trying to beat the longest time spent in the air by a Spanish wing suit team, which was 6 minutes and 47 seconds. Until then, “the sky is the limit.”

To watch footage of Pascal’s 4 minute and 9 second experience, follow this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mPbTghm_Ec&feature=player_embedded

Grierson, Bruce. “The Man Who Falls To Earth” Explore Magazine September/Octobre 2010 issue. Online, http://explore-mag.com/article/people/man-who-falls-earth/

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