Skydiver will work with a net, but no parachute
He’s made 18,000 parachute jumps, helped train some of the world’s most elite skydivers, and did some stunts for Iron Man 3.Butthe plunge that Luke Aikins knows he’ll be remembered for is the one he’ll make without a parachute or wingsuit.
Or anything, really, other than the clothes he’ll be wearing when he jumps out of an airplane at 7,600 meters this weekend, attempting to become the first person to land safely on the ground in a net.
The Fox television network will broadcast the twominute jump live on Saturday.
You don’t have to tell Aikins it sounds crazy — he knows that.
He said as much to his wife after a couple of Hollywood guys looking to create the alltime-greatest reality TV stunt floated the idea to him two years ago.
“I said, ‘You won’t believe these guys’,” Aikins recalled telling his wife. “‘They want
Luke Aikins, skydiver
me to jump out without a parachute.’ She said, ‘Oh, with a wingsuit.’ I said, ‘No, they want me to do it with nothing.’ We both had a good laugh about that.’’
In the weeks that followed, however, he couldn’t shake the thought: Could anybody actually do this and live to tell the tale?
Because, if anyone could, Aikins wanted to be the one.
After all, the 42-year-old daredevil has practically lived his life in the sky. He made his first tandem jump when he was 12, followed by his first solo leap four years later. He’s been racking up about 800 jumps a year ever since.
He took his wife, Monica, on her first jump when they were dating, and she’s up to 2,000 now. The couple lives with a 4-year-old son, Logan, in Washington state.
“If I wasn’t nervous I would be stupid,’’ the compact, muscular athlete said with a grin as he sat beneath a canopy near Saturday’s drop zone.
“We’re talking about jumping without a parachute, and I take that very seriously. It’s not a joke,’’ he added.
The drop zone, surrounded by rolling hills, presents some challenges. Aikins said he’ll constantly be fighting shifting winds as he falls at 193 kilometers per hour.
Other skydivers have jumped from planes without parachutes and had someone hand them one in midair. But Aikins won’t even have that. Why?
“I’m proving that we can do stuff that we don’t think we can do, if we approach it the right way,’’ he said.
I’m proving that we can do stuff that we don’t think we can do, if we approach it the right way.”