The ultimate dream of flight – soaring through the air, with total freedom in all three dimensions, not within a heavy and complicated machine but with only one’s body and sensations – a dream everybody had at least once in their life.

Yves has always dedicated all his free time to flight and experimented all its forms. His dream was however to try to fly in the most natural way possible, by removing the need for the complicated enclosure an aircraft is. He was therefore drawn to the world of  free fall, and experimented by trial and error all ways that could allow him to stay longer in the air and control his trajectory, to turn a fall into a flight: sky surf, wingsuit.

Still not satisfied, he developed his first real wing, made of a rigid harness and inflatable wing panels, that he was to strap to his back to exceed the performance of all other attempts at “falling forward” that existed at the time.

The next step was naturally to gain total freedom by making the whole wing rigid and adding engines. Yves chose to go with model jet turbines, at first 2 of them, which allowed him to just hold level flight in 2005, and then 4 to finally conquer the 3rd dimension in 2006 – not within an enclosed space with mechanical controls and instruments, but by truly flying like a bird for 10 minutes at a time, with nothing but his body and feelings, floating like if the wing was a natural part of his body, so much that he doesn’t even feel it in flight. This was finally the reward of 10 years of development and more than 15 prototypes. All he has is an altimeter for safety, and a tiny throttle control in his hand.

[via Jetman]