At the edge · Skydiving
Twenty-five thousand feet, no parachute
In 2016, Luke Aikins stepped out of a plane without a parachute or a wingsuit, and landed in a net.
Luke Aikins · Simi Valley, 2016
On 30 July 2016, above Simi Valley in California, Luke Aikins jumped from 25,000 feet. He had no parachute and no wingsuit. Below him, at Big Sky Movie Ranch, a net 100 feet square had been engineered for exactly this. He fell for about two minutes and landed in it.
It sounds like a stunt. It was closer to the opposite. Aikins had made around 18,000 jumps by then. He did his first tandem jump at 12 and his first solo jump at 16. What happened that afternoon was the product of a lifetime in the air, and of an engineering team on the ground who had worked out the net.
The day before, he told the Associated Press:
If I wasn't nervous I would be stupid.
Luke Aikins, 29 July 2016
His wife, Monica, their four-year-old son, Logan, and his father were among the people watching.
After
When he climbed out of the net, what he talked about wasn't the record.
I'm almost levitating, it's incredible.
Luke Aikins, after landing
Almost nobody will ever want to do what he did. But the shape of it is familiar: years of practice, a clear aim, the fear admitted rather than ignored, and then the moment when everything you prepared for simply happens.
Sources
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