Flashback: Daredevil Sets Crazy World Record for Airplane Jump Without Parachute
There are some sports that most of us would never even consider attempting, from extreme rock climbing to the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, Spain.
But those pale in comparison to falling 25,000 feet out of an airplane without a parachute on purpose, a “sport” that on the safety scale ranks just below pulling a gun on a police officer.
Enter Luke Aikins, who on July 30, 2016, became the first person in history to fall that far intentionally without a parachute or wingsuit and live to tell the tale, getting his name into the Guinness Book of World Records in the process.
It wasn’t the highest fall anyone’s ever survived — that honor goes to Yugoslavian flight attendant Vesna Vulovic, who passed away of natural causes 34 years after surviving a 1972 terrorist attack that blew up the plane she was on and sent her falling 33,000 feet out of a DC-9. But Vulovic’s misadventure wasn’t done for any thrill greater than having been given a travel visa to go to Denmark and buy Western consumer products while doing her job.
Aikins, unlike Vulovic, didn’t hit the bare ground.
Waiting for him at the end of his 25,000-foot journey was a 10,000-square-foot “high-tech net” that promised to break his fall.
And lo and behold, the laws of physics work in ways that show how modern man can look at the law of gravity and throw rotten apples at it.
The stunt aired live on the Fox Network as part of a stunt called “Heaven Sent.”
The funny thing is, as Aikins explained, the science of the stunt makes perfect sense and all the math adds up.
For one thing, unlike in, say, video games, where you can accelerate to infinite speeds while falling, a human being spread out flat against the air will reach a terminal velocity of 120 miles per hour in about 15 seconds or so; it takes over two minutes to fall 25,000 feet. Parachutes are intended to open at 2,500 feet or so precisely because opening them any higher offers no additional benefit but comes with the drawback of increased risk of being blown way off course.
For another, deceleration is a function of time. This is demonstrated by a car crash: Hit a wall at 50 miles per hour and you transfer all your forward momentum into your body at once, which is a desired outcome only if meeting St. Peter was in your plans for the day. Hit the wall at 50 mph but get slowed down to zero in a second or two by an airbag instead of milliseconds by a wall and you may be a bit shaken up, but you’ll probably walk away under your own power.
That’s where the net comes in.
By slowing Aikins down over the course of a couple of seconds instead of how Vulovic got slowed down instantly by the ground, Aikins got out of the net, hugged his family and entered his name into the record books.
Indeed, the only thing limiting how far a skydiver can fall without killing himself is not the speed of the fall — if that were the sole consideration, it wouldn’t matter if the diver fell from 2,500 feet or from the moon — but rather how high up a human can go without passing out from the thin atmosphere or from the much higher speeds attainable in a thin-air environment before friction slows the fall to 120 mph closer to the ground, therefore being unable to control the descent toward the net.
Which does leave open the question of whether a world record exists for a no-parachute fall with an oxygen tank.
Someone get that guy who jumped from the edge of space on the phone.
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