And it might lead to more than just bragging rights, too: the new suit could help save lives. In an increasingly dangerous branch of the sport called wingsuit proximity flying - a form of Base jumping - people leap from cliffs, rather than planes, and fly just tens of feet above mountain slopes and treelines, sometimes even passing through slim gullies and holes in the rock. A wingsuit that keeps you in the air longer could make all the difference. Some experts say better suits will only lead to more forms of risk taking, however.

Grubisic's team are planning to test the students suit from the air. "We are very risk averse and methodical," he says. Called Project Icarus, their record-attempt programme involves capturing the three-dimensional geometry of wingsuits in flight. This is being done by making a special chest rig – like a piece of roman chest armour – that, as its name suggests, is strapped to the flyer’s chest. The wingsuit pilot is then hung from the ceiling of the wind tunnel by posts that bolt on to the chest rig. When pinned in place the pilot is laser-scanned in various wind conditions to create accurate 3D computer models.

Next, those captured models are injected into computational fluid dynamics software running on a cluster of computers that collectively crunch data at supercomputer speeds to accurately model the passage of air around the pinned wingsuit pilot. This lets the team's aerodynamicists analyse how air flows around the suit, how eddies form and cause drag, and hint at ways they can change the suit – and the flyer's helmet – to get the best aerodynamic performance possible.

Having done that, they can then make novel suits and test them in the wind tunnel ahead of actual flight tests. The chest rig is attached to a system that moves across six different axes and “that lets us measure all the forces generated by the wingsuit to a very high accuracy," says Grubisic.