[Aaron Wypyszynski] or [Wyp] for short had a dream as a youngster about jumping out of a plane and “carving through the sky” (paraphrasing the video embedded after the break), so when he grew up [Wyp] went ahead and pursued that dream.
What that boyhood dream produced is [Wyp] offering to pull you through the sky on what looks like a proper model of a blunt nosed paper airplane glider. Seems to be a bit like wakeboarding for skydivers, cause that needed to be a thing.
[Wyp] holds a PhD in Aeronautical Engineering, which explains how the scale model is shown working surprisingly well in the videos. Sadly, the WingBoard Kickstarter campaign fell a little short ($4,637 pledged of $32,000 goal) back in October of 2014. But he has continued to work on the concept, and over the last few months has been posting video demonstrations of a 40% scale model of the current prototype.
Being towed down the runway strapped to this thing during takeoff… what could possibly go wrong? Still, if skydiving (and perhaps snowboarding while doing so) has lost its buzz for you, this is a worthy escalation for thrill-seekers.
Here at Hackaday we like our dreams of a flying human or a flying Ford Pinto as much as the next guy or gal, but we also try to keep our feet on the ground.
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