- I got an email from the world champion wingsuit team that said,
"Would you like to learn to fly in the world's only diagonal wind tunnel?"
I've got to start saying no to these things.
- My name is Jarno Cordia.
As part of the Wingsuit Tunnel here
I've actually been setting up the coaching here the last two years.
And together now with Jenna, I teach here and try to get everybody flying.
Currently Jenna and myself, we won the last World Cup in Italy
in both indoor skydiving and outdoor skydiving.
We're at the moment the reigning team in wingsuit acrobatics.
This wind tunnel was around since 1935.
Used for testing aeroplanes , cars and those kind of things.
I think they tested the Saab aeroplane and the Huygens space capsule here.
This tunnel was up for auction a few years ago
and then four of the local Swedish guys, who are also skydivers,
they basically thought, what if we can convert this
into an angled wind tunnel where you can actually fly wingsuits.
And because that hadn't been done yet, nobody
really knew if such a thing would be possible.
So, they basically took the horizontal wind tunnel here.
They put a small angled tube in it.
Once they had done the initial testing,
I was called in to actually see, besides stable flying,
what else can we do in the tunnel.
When that was all a big success, they raised the money
and actually built this amazing machine.
Now it's essentially an angled tube that is on a pivot point
and that can actually rotate the tunnel up and down with a piston.
I would say in terms of physical workout for a beginner, it's insanely heavy.
And that is mainly because, in the beginning,
you are not flying super efficient.
So you're using a lot of muscle tension.
You're tending to bend the arm which creates a round wing
that really creates drag on your body.
In the beginning, maybe 40 minutes a day is the max
and then people really feel like they ran three marathons.
I currently have the world record,
which is definitely the most boring thing I ever did,
but somehow the most watched thing, and it's
flying six and a half hours non-stop in the tunnel
without touching the floor, walls or anything.
- I can't think right now.
Ah.
The last 10 seconds, you were giving me instructions
but my brain just wasn't parsing anything.
- What we start with is this cable system
where essentially you're on two pulleys that are on
the ceiling that allow you to move around, but they
don't allow you to actually get close to the walls.
The cables definitely influence you a little bit as well
with like the bounciness of cables, but it
essentially limits the motion to safely learn to just control your body.
Kind of like an aeroplane.
Like you lean a bit left, the wing goes left.
You raise the chin and the chest gets air.
That changes your angle, pushes you backward.
With those kind of motions, you need to
really learn to fly.
And even for skydivers that have a lot of wingsuit experience,
they tend to fly more by instinct
and even for them, this is a lot more precise
than what you normally do outdoors.
- So am I too far back or too far forward?
- Too far forward.
From that point where you can actually control yourself on the cables,
there you can continue to flying without the cables.
There's a small, intermediate step we do,
which is flying with a leash on the belly
Which allows us to let people fly free but
in case they do anything less smart,
we can still put them on the floor.
The difference between flying in the tunnel
and flying in the air is definitely the lack of space.
So in the air, if you're learning to fly and you're
essentially all over the place, that is not an issue.
In the tunnel if you're all over the place,
you can be all over the place for about two metres
and then the wall stops you.
Another thing that is definitely different is
your reflexes that you have from the ground.
Like if you're flying on your back and you're falling backwards,
we tend to put our butt down to cushion our fall,
which of course in the sky, you would never do.
And definitely the walls and the floor, they introduce these reflexes
that we've trained over the years
to put your arms in front of you or to the sides
that in flying don't have the best effect.
A big thing that the tunnel brings that skydiving doesn't get you
is the amount of training you can do and the reference you get
where normally in the sky, if I'm flying with a training partner,
when we're having a little bit of movement between each other,
we don't see who is making the movement.
In the tunnel, because you have a static reference,
you see every little move so you learn
so much faster because this gives you so much more feedback
in terms of what you're doing.
Once they showed that they can fly well with the belly leash,
that comes off as well and then you're flying fully free.
And then from there it's quite a rapid progression
to learn to fly on your back
and then actually learn to do the transitions,
carving around the tunnel.
Typically that whole progression takes around
two to three hours of flying for most people.
in general, it's quite cool to see that where normally
people would have 200-300 skydives before they could even try this,
now we're taking people off the street and teaching them to fly in one or two days.
- I did not get to the point where, like, I could just fly free in the tunnel,
but there was four or five seconds in there where I felt stable.
And I don't think you were pulling on me?
- No, no no.
- Thank you.
-You're more than welcome! Super good, man.
- Thank you very much. I'm done!
- The amount of flying you did now is what the super trained people usually do
after building that stamina.
So you flew more than most people do on the first day in a very short time span
so all the muscles you're feeling that you've never used before, that's quite normal.
- Yeah!
But you did really good.
And you're going to sleep really well tonight.
- Yeah! Yeah I am!
- Should we just turn off the lights here and leave you here?
- No, because then it's a slow slide down into that!
All right we're good. We got an outro.` Thank you so much.
All right, yeah. We're good.