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Re:Electrified wingsuit from BMW reaches 186MPH on first flight by chrisweekly on Sunday November 15, 2020 @02:05PM (#25103748)
IIRC terminal velocity for a skydiver in free-fall is approx 180mph. (It's at least in that vicinity.) So the direction of "flight" certainly matters a lot in making sense of numbers.

Also, when I was in 5th or 6th grade (over 30 years ago) I was obsessed with the F-15. Talk about thrust:weight ratio. The idea that you could take off, point the nose to vertical, and accelerate past the speed of sound, then level off and get to mach 2.4 or so... simply amazing machines.

Re:Electrified wingsuit from BMW reaches 186MPH on first flight by Retric on Sunday November 15, 2020 @09:04PM (#25107149)
First a belly down skydiver falls at about 120 MPH. Face down with streamlining they can do up to about 300MPH.

So someone starting with a deep dive in a wingsuit can level out and get very fast horizontal movement. There are a few videos of people doing this and reaching almost level flight though their slowing down. It’s maintaining speed that requires thrust, but speed is enough for level flight.

Also, while you could effectively balance on a jet engine to hover, that amount of thrust would also allow you to do not just level horizontal flight but rapidly gain altitude, making it kind of a meaningless from a minimum speed to requirements for minimum thrust perspective.