We have been flying many times, but always in an airplane. This time we will try to fly on our own – in a wind tunnel.

A few months ago we were named the third best travel blog in Norway. Because of this we got to choose an experience and decided to try out a wind tunnel.

What to expect we really didn’t know. Excited we showed up and got briefed on how it worked. We had to take off all loose items, even wedding rings, because in a wind tunnel there is a lot of… ehm… wind!

We also got air plugs, helmets, protective glasses and some kind of boiler suit to wear. Lookin’ good!

There is a lot of noise in wind tunnels, so we were instructed on hand signals and communication in advance. An instructor was with us all the time and that was good, otherwise we would probably not have done much flying on our own.

Because on our first try it was far from easy to keep the balance. We “fell” on the floor of the tunnel and was blown back up again. It sounds simple, but it was so easy to lose balance and crash into one of the walls.

Getting out of the wind tunnel was also an interesting experience, as we went from being weightless with the wind on the inside to feeling the gravity very much on the outside. Luckily it all went well, but one of the other guys in the group accidentally went bellyflopping while exiting.

On the second try it felt a lot better and we managed to hover a bit on our own without support. It didn’t last long before we started getting out of balance, but thanks to handle bars on the boiler suit the instructor could correct our flight and keep us hovering.

The flights were split into 1.5 minute runs. We had 3 minutes in total and therefore got to try twice. We would recommend others to have a bit more time as the first two runs give you an idea of how it works and what affects your balance. Those that had 6 minutes seemed to be able to do a lot more on their last to runs.

The feeling itself of flying is hard to describe. You very much feel the wind on the body and it is therefore very different from being weightless. At the same time it doesn’t feel like falling as the world around you stays still. Stationary fall? Yes, I think that’s the closest we can describe it. We also asked the instructor how it compares to skydiving. He said that the feeling of the wind against the body is the same, but the feeling of jumping out of a flying aircraft is definitively different and so is the lack of walls around you.

For us this was a very nice way of trying something that could resemble skydiving without all the preparations and hassle.

The experience was a prize for finishing third in Norway’s best travel blogger contest arranged by TrueStory. Writing about the experience or promoting the organiser was not required or asked for and we therefore do not see this as a sponsored experience.