Skydiver predicted his own demise
A D R I A N N I C H O L A S
Adrian Nicholas, known as “the man who can fly,” died on Saturday in a skydiving accident in Holland. He was 43.
With curly fair hair and dashing good looks, Nicholas was an adventurer in the best British tradition of derring-do. He seemed to spend almost as much time in the air as on the ground, making more than 6,500 jumps in five years in 30 different countries. He bailed out of a Russian jumbo jet on to the North Pole; jumped into a Dolgan Eskimo village in Siberia; made the first free-fall flights through the Grand Canyon and over the Great Wall of China; and won numerous medals for extreme sports.
In 1998, wearing a webbed Wingsuit, he set two world records. Two years later he decided to test the theory that Leonardo da Vinci had designed the world’s first working parachute.
In 1485 Leonardo had scribbled a simple sketch of a foursided pyramid covered in linen. Alongside, he had written: “If a man is provided with a length of gummed linen cloth with a length of 12 yards on each side and 12 yards high, he can jump from any great height whatsoever without injury.”
On June 25, 2000, with a parachute constructed according to Leonardo’s design, Nicholas launched himself from a hot air balloon 10,000 feet over South Africa. Although aeronautical experts had predicted it would tip over, fall apart or spin uncontrollably, Leonardo’s parachute made a smooth and slow descent.
He made his first parachute jump out of a plane at the age of 17 and went on to become a cave diver, skydiver, snowboarder, wrestler, jet pilot and rally driver before joining Capital Radio as the station’s Eye in the Sky traffic and travel correspondent.
In 1994 Nicholas decided to concentrate on skydiving fulltime after meeting Patrick de Gayardon, a pioneer of sky surfing. They became friends and dived together everywhere, but in 1998 Nicholas watched in horror as de Gayardon plunged to his death trying to become the first man to fly wearing a specially adapted Wingsuit.
Instead of giving up, Nicholas determined to carry on where his friend had left off, and after making further adaptations to de Gayardon’s Wingsuit, Nicholas attempted to break two world records. He jumped over California from 35,850 feet, wearing an oxygen mask and nearly died in the attempt. “ As I stepped out of the airplane, the exhaust valve in my oxygen mask froze solid,” he recalled. “ At 35,000 feet the temperature is - 120C. It meant that, though I had taken in a breath of air, I couldn’t breathe out. I couldn’t take the mask off either because at that height I would have died.”
He was not able to breathe properly for about four minutes, but despite nearly choking to death, Nicholas flew for four minutes 55 seconds and covered 10 miles, establishing two new world records for the longest sky dive and the furthest human flight. “I don’t think of myself as a nutter, but I believe I can fly,” he said afterwards. “I’m a real-life Peter Pan.”
In a 2000 documentary about his life, Nicholas predicted, “I’ll die skydiving. It will happen. We all die skydiving, eventually. But it will be worth it.”
The Daily Telegraph