Parachuting out of a plane is a good way to get someplace on the ground, but you tend to end up not too far from where you jumped. Doesn’t give you too much flexibility, if you’re say, James Bond, and you want to travel a couple hundred klicks from where the plane….ah dropped you off. Enter the carbon-fiber wing, a lightweight system that allows a paratrooper to travel up to 124 miles from the drop point. Of course, to get that kinda glide time, the troopers have to bail out at 30,000 feet. The German company developing the wing is working on a small turbo-jet drive so the same range can be had without the extreme altitude.
Hardware Beyond the Hype