Adventures / Furthest Flight
Website: www.furthestflight.com
“It was love of the air and sky and flying, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of beauty. Where immortality is touched through danger and life meets death on equal plane, where man is more than man and existence is both supreme and valueless in the same instant.” Charles A Lindbergh
Another of Dr. Glenn Singleman’s long held dreams is to launch a wingsuit from an altitude of 39,000 ft or 12,000 metres and fly as far as possible (hopefully around 30kms) before opening a canopy and floating safely back to earth.
Glenn, Heather and their team made their first attempt at achieving this in June 2008. As often happens with highly ambitious projects like this, things did not go as planned and they achieved only three of the four benchmarks they wanted so Furthest Flight Mark II is slated for winter 2009.
The challenge of designing the oxygen and communications systems required to make the jump successfully, continues to captivate Glenn. It was a small problem with the oxygen system that caused the 2008 attempt to go awry, so he has reworked the systems to avoid the problem on the next attempt.
They plan to make the flight over central Australia in winter, taking advantage of the jet stream winds.
There are many facets to this challenge - the wingsuits, the balloon, the oxygen, the environment, communications, the navigation and retrieval, the permissions, the team, the funding, the filming and pulling all those things together to make it all work successfully.
The current record for the longest personal human flight is held by a team of Spanish adventurers. They jumped from a military aircraft at 35,000 feet and flew an impressive 20.5 kilometres across the Straits of Gibraltar.
Glenn and Heather will use Phoenix-Fly ‘Stealth’ wingsuits for their flight. They have logged hundreds of jumps in the high performance V1, V2 and Stealth suits over a number of years. They made the jump from Mt Meru in India in V1s and have tested the V2 and Stealth from high altitude so they are familiar with the challenges of launching the suits successfully in the thin, still air.
A person exposed to the low pressure and low oxygen content at 39,000 feet would lose consciousness in about a minute and die in about five, so supplemental oxygen must be worn during the ascent and descent. To avoid the ‘bends’ Glenn and Heather must pre-breathe pure oxygen for at least an hour before take off. Glenn is a doctor of Emergency and Critical Care Medicine and has integrated a commercially available oxygen system into the wingsuits. This system has been successfully tested to 37,000 feet. The other environmental difficulty at 39,000ft is cold. The temperature on the 2008 flight was -53 degrees celcius.
Glenn and Heather learned a lot about flying their wingsuits in extremely low temperatures during their World Record wingsuit BASEjump in India and for the flight they have developed high-tech, layered, thermal protection in conjunction with international outdoor gear manufacturers.
The potential for separation on the wingsuit flight is high because Glenn and Heather will be travelling across the ground at speeds above 400km/hr. While they have practiced flying together for years, there are still a number of ways they could become separated in flight, thus being able to communicate with each other is critical. They trialled many systems before Glenn finally perfected one that allows them to talk and hear each other clearly in flight. They will also be able to communicate with their ground crew and, most importantly, their retrieval team. When they land, they will potentially be in the middle of nowhere in the harsh Australian desert, so they’ll need to communicate their position to their helicopter retrieval team as quickly as possible. They will be equipped with two GPS systems to ensure they can report their position accurately. The GPS units will also record the flight details.
The planning and permissions for the flight are extensive. Glenn developed a complete high altitude parachuting course as required by the Australian Parachute Federation and also a highly detailed operations plan for CASA and Air Services Australia.
To make a project like this work, you need the right team and Glenn and Heather have been always been fortunate with theirs. A network of friends and colleagues supports them and the 2008 Furthest Flight team have all signed on to be part of the 2009 project.
One of the biggest challenges is funding. In the current economic climate this may prove the greatest hurdle.
The Furthest Flight is a huge technical and personal challenge but, as with all things hard, that is what makes it so rewarding.
