BirdMan

From ExtremeWiki

BIRDMAN is the most well-known skydiving brand and the leading wingsuit manufacturer in the world.

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[edit] History

BIRDMAN INTERNATIONAL LTD was founded in Helsinki, Finland 1999 by a professional skydiver, entrepreneur and adventurer Jari Kuosma. BIRDMAN was the first company ever to produce wingsuits for skydivers and the first company ever to start training skydivers to fly them and instructors to train them. BIRDMAN First Flight Course was introduced 1999 and the BIRDMAN Instructor Course was created the year after.

Prior 1999 skyflying (wingsuitflying) was virtually non existent and considered a certain death if one was crazy enough to attempt it. Throughout the history man's greatest dream was always the ability to define gravity and fly but a few had actually survived the experience. Since the ancient times every known culture had legends and talked about such a men like Daedalus and Icaros in ancient Creece. The success of these flights varied from total failure to celebrated success, just like in real life. Twentieth century was the era of birdmen. As airplanes evolved people wanted to jump out from, some for saving their lives from crashing machines and some for fun. Those who did it for fun had great difficulties controlling themselves during the freefall which often resulted in death or serious injury. The answer to master the freefall was to imitate birds, those heavenly creatures who mastered flight, they had something we did not have, wings. Many brave men (Carl Laurin, Tommy Boyd, Glen Sohn, Victor Andro and Leo Valentin, just to name a few) built their own wings from canvas, wood, metal, bamboo, even feathers in order to fly. Those men were called the birdmen and they flew - mostly to their death.

Famous French skydiver, or "skygod", called Patrick DeGayardon made wingsuit famous during mid -90's with his self made wingsuit that is widely considered to be the first predecessor of all the modern wingsuits. Patrick's genius ram-air design was effective and safe and he made numerous stunts and commercials with it before his fatal accident on one of the flights in Hawaii in April 1998. Patrick's flying spirit did not die with him though and it was destined to be BIRDMAN who carried his spirit and made his prediction of the future true. "One day wingsuit flying is as popular as any other skydiving discipline and skydivers with only 200 jumps will be flying them" - Patrick DeGayardon at ParaMag interview just before his death 1998.