All photos courtesy of Indoor Wingsuit Flying
“Basically, I got the idea for a very large, inclined wind tunnel that could have flying homo sapiens in it,” e-mails Anton Westman of ‘Indoor Wingsuit Flying’, a new Stockholm-based project which offers exactly what it says on the tin.
There’s not much basic about it though. When the centre opens its doors in September 2017 it will be the first of its kind in the world. Nobody else has even attempted to make such a thing a reality.
Thankfully Anton is available to explain the concept further on the phone.
“We were inspired by biologists at Lund University [in Sweden],” he says. “They do these amazing studies with birds and bats there in a small tilted wind tunnel. I saw what they were doing over there and already knew about LT1, and that gave me the idea.”
The referred to ‘LT1’ is a low-speed wind tunnel created in the 1930s to produce research, which would be used to build and improve the Swedish air force.