In Batman and countless other caped superhero movies, there's always a moment when our hero jumps from a plane or high building and uses the cape on his suit to fly safely to earth. Now a group of space engineering students at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology say they've got a working model of a real-life Batsuit. The main problem isn't flying, though. It's reducing the pain.

Apparently the biggest problem the students faced when testing versions of the suit was that people wearing it suffered excruciating pain from the load. According to the Jerusalem Post:

Knowing that such an "extreme sport" would require top physical fitness, [the students] sent friends who were in good condition to a gym to get an idea of their physical limitations. "We discovered that some of the loads the wearer could experience were great enough to turn gliding from fun into torture," [suit developer Yair] Segev said. "After defining the physical limitations of the flier, we built a simple aerodynamic model of a human in a light, winged suit."

I guess smashing your face directly into the wind isn't as fun as Christian Bale makes it look?

Technion Students Design Batman Suit [via Jerusalem Post]

Send an email to Annalee Newitz, the author of this post, at annalee@io9.com.