Wingman

What kind of lunatic straps jet engines to his back and leaps out of an airplane? The kind of lunatic who may well deliver the personal flying machine of our dreams, that’s what kind.

Eric Hagerman reports on a revolutionary Channel crossing

By Eric Hagerman Posted 01.14.2009 at 7:33 pm 29 Comments

The Swiss Pilot on Terra Firma Near His Home North of Lake Geneva: Jonathan Worth (See it bigger!)

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Rossy lives north of Geneva in Nyon, within view of Lake Geneva, in a scruffy two-story stucco with Majorelle-blue shutters, no curtains and, on the day I visit, dandelions sprouting from the lawn. Inside, a stuffed eagle with spread wings perched on a speaker surveys the barren living room. His parachute, the same one that drew cheers when it opened above Dover a few days ago, lies strewn across the parquet floor. Among the sparse furniture, a painted pine bookshelf contains volumes on flying, mountaineering, philosophy and marriage counseling. Exit, a book of Brokken's skydiving photos, is inscribed Merci, Yves, pour tous ces moments forts: Thanks for all those inspiring moments. The decor suggests that this is the home of a man otherwise occupied -- and, as I would discover, it seems he has always been.

Rossy earned his pilot's license before his driver's license, and by the time he joined the Swiss Army flight school for his obligatory military training, he had 34 hours under his belt. He wasn't the top pilot, but he proved his all-around excellence with the highest score in a test that included flying, shooting and physical drills and received a placard that he keeps with his first airline ticket. It reads Pret au Vol: Ready to Fly.

He's been airborne ever since. Rossy has flown Northrop F-5 Tiger IIs and Hawker Hunters and logged more than 1,000 hours in the Dassault Mirage III. He's flown commercial jets for 20 years and completed at least 1,400 skydiving jumps. In 1992 he took up skysurfing -- freestyle snowboarding in the air -- placing second in his division at the inaugural skysurfing world championships the following year. That's when he met one of the sport's icons, the Frenchman Patrick de Gayardon, who was experimenting with a winged skydiving suit introduced in the 1930s. De Gayardon's design featured a double layer of nylon webbing between the arms and legs that stretched open like bat wings and filled with air like modern parachutes, allowing him to soar longer and farther than his predecessors. Rossy was inspired by the innovation but had his own ideas about how to stall freefall, and he designed a five-foot-wide board to surf on, something de Gayardon and others said was dangerous. In 1998 de Gayardon died while testing his wingsuit in Hawaii. Not two weeks later, Rossy dared to fly a prototype of his board for the first time.

The rig worked fine until he pulled the ripcord. Underpressure sucked his drag chute beneath the board about 5,000 feet up, preventing it from deploying the main chute. He reached back to unfurl it by hand, but the lines got tangled and his efforts to sort them out proved hopeless. Whirling like a tetherball in a sickening centrifuge, he ditched the board and cut away his main chute. Then he was freefalling again. He popped his reserve chute at 1,900 feet, about 12 seconds before impact. Maybe de Gayardon was right: Surfing a huge plank was too dangerous. But somehow the close call only galvanized him to find another approach. To Rossy it wasn't an omen; it was a challenge. "I don't know where it comes from, but I cannot stop," he says.

He considered picking up where de Gayardon left off with wingsuit technology, but he thought he could do better. If he wanted to fly, he'd need real wings. Not the flimsy bat flaps that stretched from de Gayardon's torso to his arms, but a solid structure that spanned out like the wings of an airplane. His first prototype, which he crafted from plywood and Styrofoam, extended his freefall by half a minute -- enough to start him on a furious decade of designing, building, testing, breaking, and over again.

The truly crazy part? Through all the testing, he's never been injured. Like any good pilot, Rossy is meticulous about safety. His first order of business was to build a cutaway harness that would make it easy to eject the wing, which he made out of seatbelts. Now his harness is a custom-molded, stiff plastic back brace that wraps around his ribs. Rossy designed it so that he can pull a cord to release the wing, which in turn automatically shuts down the jets and deploys a parachute. At least 20 times he's gone into an uncontrollable spin and had to jettison the wing, hoping that its chute delivers his dream machine safely to the ground. He says he always has a plan B, and his best safety provision is altitude: He wears a helmet with an audible altimeter and knows that he has to open his chute by 2,600 feet.

Although Rossy has been spared physically, his quest has wrought other damage. He's nearly lost his airline job, and did lose his marriage. "I was always thinking about my wing, aggressive when it didn't work the way I wanted it to work, and she suffered for that," Rossy says of his ex-wife. "To have all the ideas, from the concepts to the drawings to the flying, it's the most gratifying thing I've done. It's what I really profoundly want, and I had to ask this question during my divorce."

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