And yeah, there is something ineffable about hanging onto the outside of a plane at 15,000
ft. Also free fall is the closest you can come to flying outside of wing suits.
I fucked up the landing in two ways that combined to hurt me. You flare right before landing and that converts your downward momentum into forward momentum. I flared a couple feet too low. I also was trying to counter a slight crosswind with harness input, which put my body sort of into a 45 degree angle from the direction of travel with my feet first. Because I planed out about 2 ft off the ground, I didn’t have time to straighten out (and I should have been straight before I even flared, but I was new to harness input and trying to not use toggle input to correct for the crosswind). As a result, I was going 29 mph forward and wasn’t going down really at all.(I have a fly sight which is basically a 3d tracker, hence how I know) when the inside of my right foot, pointed closer to perpendicular to my direction of travel hit the ground.
I remember feeling my foot first glide a bit through the grass tops just after flaring and having time to think “shit” before I hit.
If I flared higher I would have been fine. If it been using toggle inputs rather than harness input, I could have still slid it in on my padded butt. Both together? Ouch.
Thanks for your kind words.
And yeah, there is something ineffable about hanging onto the outside of a plane at 15,000 ft. Also free fall is the closest you can come to flying outside of wing suits.
I fucked up the landing in two ways that combined to hurt me. You flare right before landing and that converts your downward momentum into forward momentum. I flared a couple feet too low. I also was trying to counter a slight crosswind with harness input, which put my body sort of into a 45 degree angle from the direction of travel with my feet first. Because I planed out about 2 ft off the ground, I didn’t have time to straighten out (and I should have been straight before I even flared, but I was new to harness input and trying to not use toggle input to correct for the crosswind). As a result, I was going 29 mph forward and wasn’t going down really at all.(I have a fly sight which is basically a 3d tracker, hence how I know) when the inside of my right foot, pointed closer to perpendicular to my direction of travel hit the ground.
I remember feeling my foot first glide a bit through the grass tops just after flaring and having time to think “shit” before I hit.
If I flared higher I would have been fine. If it been using toggle inputs rather than harness input, I could have still slid it in on my padded butt. Both together? Ouch.