Daredevil jumps 5 miles from plane with NO parachute!a
IT HAS to be the most pointless health-and-safety advice ever issued. As skydiver Luke Aikins leapt from a plane without a parachute, Fox TV warned its spellbound viewers: Don’t try this yourselves.
Daredevil Aikins has now become the first man to jump out of a plane and land safely without a chute.
He plunged almost five miles and landed in a giant net. Then he climbed out and hugged his four-year-old son, Logan, and wife, Monica.
‘I’m almost levitating, it’s incredible. This thing just happened! I can’t even get the words out of my mouth,’ the jubilant jumper declared.
Aikins, 42, reached speeds of 150mph during his record-breaking feat over Simi Valley, California, yesterday.
His father, two brothers and sister also watched him jump — but for his mother it was too much to bear and she was not there. ‘My mum supports me. She doesn’t support this project,’ he said with a sheepish smile.
The jump was broadcast live by the Fox network — with a slight delay.
His death-defying descent took just over two minutes, and Aikins managed to steer himself perfectly to the ‘sweetspot’ centre of the 100ft-by-100ft net.
From high in the sky, the net would have seemed like a dot on the landscape below. But experienced skydivers can adjust their direction as they fall by moving the position of their arms and legs to change the airflow around their bodies.
Leaning left causes the air to push them in that direction, while pushing out legs and pulling in arms propels them forwards.
Aikins had decided not to wear a parachute on his back as a backup measure, saying that it would make it harder for him to manoeuvre to the target area and more dangerous because he would still have the compressed-air canister — used for opening the chute — on his back when he hit the net at top speed.
Aikins initially used an oxygen tank because the air is too thin to breath at high altitudes.
Then he discarded the tank and another skilled skydiver who jumped with him then retrieved it in mid-air.
In theory, if Aikins had been blown way off course, with no chance of being able to reach his net, one of the three support jumpers could have tried to grab him, and share their parachute, before it was too late.
But, in the event, the trio opened their chutes at 5,000ft, leaving Aikins to plunge the final segment to Earth alone.
He said later: ‘My vision was always proper preparation, and that if you train right, you can make anything happen.’
A veteran of numerous jumps, Aikins has also performed stunts for the action movie Iron Man 3. Speaking before the descent, he admitted: ‘If I wasn’t nervous, I would be stupid.’
His friend Chris Talley came up with the idea two years ago, but Aikins initially turned it down cold. He recalled: ‘I kind of laughed and said: “OK, that’s great. I’ll help you find somebody to do it. But it’s not for me. I’ve got a wife and son, and it’s really not for me.”’
But a couple of weeks later, he changed his mind.
Talley, who had worked with him on other stunt projects, said Aikins was the only skydiver he
‘If I wasn’t nervous, I would be stupid’
was confident could actually pull this off.
Aikins, whose family owns Skydive Kapowsin, near Tacoma, Washington, started jumping as a teenager. He has been racking up skydives at several hundred a year ever since.