Unstable in a Wingsuit

One of the best things to do when you start learning how to fly a wingsuit is to get unstable lots of times.

This gets us comfortable being unstable at an early stage.

You learn in a smaller wingsuit, so its perfect for this. Making attempts to backfly can result in going unstable, but I think this is a great thing.

Its not a particularly nice feeling as you don't know which way is what, but the smaller wingsuits are forgiving and it doesn't take a lot of work to get back on to your belly again and resume flying.

Each suit you upsize to will become increasing harder to recover from, and that feeling that is not very nice, gets worse.

If you ever decide to jump advanced wingsuits such as The Apache, Jedei, Aura, Colugo, C-Race, Vampire, Hunter etc. Most of these you really don't want to be unstable, but if it does happen then hopefully you can remain as calm as possible and deal with the situation. By having previous experience of being unstable will help you keep calm.

I speak with a lot of wingsuiters, and I was suprised at how many of them have never had an instance of being unstable deliberately. I think straight out of the dock when you learn, most new jumpers are scared of it, so tend to avoid doing anything that could make them unstable.

This is where you will end up being lulled into a false sense of security, you may get to 100 jumps without a hitch, but when you do have a problem, its likely you will shit your pants and pull a panic move.

Right after my first flight course I flew to Portugal (not in the wingsuit) and spent around 30 - 40 jumps jumping from a Cessna 206 with a bloody step in the way, so almost every exit I went head down and into some sort of spiral twist as I couldn't master and good stable exit with the sodding step there.

But because of that, if I end up doing the same thing again, I feel semi-comfortable with it.

Here is an exit I did on jump number 3 after passing my first flight course at Z-hills. It wasn't on purpose, I looked down when I exited instead of keeping my chest up and head high. I looked down and went down! I recovered pretty quickly but I did flap about in a panic for a second or two haha.