One of the cardinal rules of aviation is to “never fly with anyone crazier than yourself.”
I believe this guy is a candidate for my “no fly” short list:
A retired French army colonel is aiming to take a stratospheric leap into the record books by completing a 1000mph skydive from the edge of space.
Aiming to become the first human being to break the sound barrier in free-fall, Michel Fournier will ascend to an altitude of 25 miles in a helium-filled weather balloon before plunging to earth at supersonic speed…
In the process of le Grand Saut or “Super Jump”, the 63-year-old hopes to complete a lofty hat-trick - breaking records for the highest ever parachute jump, the longest sky dive, and the highest altitude achieved by a person in a balloon.
Mr Fournier will be dressed in a £35,000 carbon fibre suit designed to protect him from freezing temperatures of -100C, as well as from extremely high temperatures caused by the air resistance created by his high-speed fall.
A re-enforced crash helmet will protect his ears from the thunderous sonic boom he will create as he breaks the sound barrier.
He will also have to spend hours before his leap inhaling pure oxygen to dispel any traces of nitrogen from his blood due to the thinness of the air at 40,000m.
It’s hard to know whether to wish this guy “bonne chance” or beg his family for an intervention.
(H/T to Capt. JMH for the link)
32 responses so far ↓
1
AFSister
// Aug 13, 2007 at 12:05 pm
I’m thinking he’ll end up as mush.
2
Kris, in New England
// Aug 13, 2007 at 12:14 pm
I don’t think he’ll “end as mush” - he’ll be mush long before his jump is over. He can be protected from the sound and temperatures, but what about the pressure?
3
P-3W
// Aug 13, 2007 at 12:25 pm
Hmm — “bonne chance” or intervention?
I call for an intervention. Some doofuses (doofi) just need to be saved from themselves.
Sheesh. Just because it hasn’t been done before doesn’t mean that it has to be done at all!
4
William Cobb
// Aug 13, 2007 at 12:33 pm
Actually that mad Frog isn’t the first man to jump from so high, or to break Mach 1 without an aircraft. Way back in 1960, Air Force pilot Joe Kittinger jumped from a Helium Balloon at 102,800 Feet and managed to achieve an Airspeed of 714 MPH during his freefall, which at such high altitudes meant he broke Mach 1 during his jump. His descent was slowed by a drogue chute, and his main didn’t open until he was at 18,000 feet.
Kittinger didn’t end up as much, the only injury received was a damaged hand due to the the pressurization on his glove failing…his hand swelled like a baloon. Kittinger was wearing a Mercury style Silver Space suit, and this jump managed to test the viability of the suit for the space program.
Joe Kittinger also shot down a Mig 21 with an F-4 in 1972 and served 3 combat tours during the Vietnam conflict. Unfortunately he was himself shot down shortly after his victory, and spent 11 months as a POW. In 1984 Colonel Kittinger also became the first man to cross the Atlantic solo in a Balloon.
Mad as a hatter maybe, but Kittinger is a hero in my book. So the Mad Frenchmen would only be doing a slightly more dramatic repeat of what has already been done, which does seem to be a habit of the French these days.
By the way, great blog and community Lex, I’m happy to read what you have to say.
Source. http://www.af.mil/history/person.asp?dec=&pid=123006518
Aloha,
William S. Cobb
CFI/MEI Aeroatlanta Flight School
5
SJBill
// Aug 13, 2007 at 12:45 pm
Right you are, Mr. Cobb. Joe Kittinger is a been-there, done-that sort of guy. Don’t forget his pressure suit failures during those jumps. No carbon fiber suit — only the materials and best guess knwoledge of the time.
Type his name into YouTube.com search window and you get damned near a page of videos on his exploits.
Hero? definitely. Nuts? Quite possibly. Or maybe, solid stones.
-SJBill
6
MaxDamage
// Aug 13, 2007 at 3:18 pm
Hmmm… Little back-of-the-envelope calculations, at 130K feet apmospheric pressure is well below 0.1psi, compared to the 14.7 at sea level and 6.7psi at the top of Everest. Not much to work against ya, so likely gravity will be enough to pull him through Mach 1 until he gets down a ways. The lack of pressure is the most difficult part of the jump, I’d think.
Luckily, adding pressure works a lot better than removing pressure, but during his ascent he’ll have to go slow enough to avoid dysbarism (diving sickness, or the bends as it’s commonly termed). That is not a trivial task in a balloon.
- Max
7
Dark Star
// Aug 13, 2007 at 5:56 pm
Check the August 13 New Yorker for a profile by Burkhard Bilger on Colonel Fournier. Good stuff.
8
lex
// Aug 14, 2007 at 9:06 am
Theodore, I should have said that you can’t hear the shockwave detaching, since it’s behind you. Since radio waves travel at the speed of light, and the conductive environment of the airplane is also supersonic you can hear all normal cockpit sounds.
9
MaxDamage
// Aug 14, 2007 at 10:28 pm
Exactly, B2. I’ve been pondering this a bit more. The “golden BB” bit of pollen isn’t much of a risk unless there’s turbulence in the air, updrafts and the sort. Yes, they’re light, and small. So is a bullet. E=MV^2 and he’s got a whole bagfull of V. But there’s a lot of atmosphere and little of him so what are the odds?
One that’s causing me to pull what remaining hair I have out is Bernoulli’s Principle and how that’s going to work with such low pressures and high velocity.
ObGeekExplanation: Bernoulli’s Principle is why aircraft fly. As you increase the speed of a fluid, and air acts as one, the pressure drops. So far so good. So we make an aircraft wing and we make the bottom flat and the top sort of curved, so it has a longer length than the bottom. We then fly through the air and the air flowing across the top of the wing speeds up, it having a longer length to pass over, thus the pressure drops, and we have lift. You can think of high pressure on the bottom of the wing lifting the aircraft, but it’s more accurate to think of the low pressure on the top of the wing sucking the aircraft upwards.
So, stick your hand out the window of your car sometime and feel that wind resistance. That’s not just the resistance caused by the high pressure of the air ahead of your hand, it’s also the low pressure of the air behind your hand working in concert.
There are not a lot of square inches to your hand. There are a lot of square inches to his body, especially in some sort of lightweight pressure suit (and carbon fiber tells me they went for light weight and minimal area). Toss in ten times the speed, or 100x the wind resistance, and the equations just start getting surreal real fast. Once past Mach the air doesn’t flow around you. It parts, and you’re dragging a huge vacuum behind you. This changes things dramatically, and is the reason the speed of sound was indeed a barrier for so long.
I wish him luck. With a nice drogue chute deployed soon after the jump he should be fine. If he wants to cowboy his way down the physics rapidly reach numbers we normally don’t see in building bridges, but approach those involving explosives.
I don’t do this sort of work for a living, my calculations could be off a bit, and of course the ascent is probably the most dangerous part for him. Still, while possible, taking such a risk just to be in a record book is not something I could professionally lend my support to.
- Max
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