Sunday, September 11, 2011

Flying! for real

I went flying this past weekend with some friends. It was kind of along the lines as in Douglas Adams' A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - I just fell forward and forgot about landing. Or something of the sort.

In Sentosa Resort World here in Singapore, there's a new facility with a huge wind tunnel. As soon as I saw a video my brother posted on Facebook of a similar wind tunnel, I decided to check it out. And then I saw the video on iFly Singapore's website, and I knew I had to check it out.

So this past weekend some friends and I went down to Sentosa (the first time I've ever been there, even though I've been in Singapore for a year) with the express purpose of trying iFly. It was pretty incredible. Imagine jumping into a room and essentially being weightless, and then being able to control your motion in all directions. It makes parachuting free-fall way more attractive. After a short training, we jumped in - here's a video of our experience.

(as an aside, the frontman for the band whose music I used in the video is from the area in India where I'm doing research - we met while I was there this past summer - check them out on iTunes)

http://youtu.be/bxG3WAKHYUc

2 comments:

Jason Mundok said...

Awesome! How did the teacher stay on the ground?

Hiram said...

it was really sweet! basically, you control how you fly with your wind resistance. Since he was vertical, he didn't get picked up. The more I flattened out and spread out, the higher I flew.

Changing the tilt of your arms makes the wind push you one direction or another. It's hard to stay still.