2 guys catching a flight

February 16, 2019 7:27 PM

A door in the sky: 2 wingsuit flyers BASE jump into a plane in mid-air
posted by growabrain (31 comments total)

The phrase "more money than sense" occurs.
posted by Pembquist at 8:07 PM on February 16, 2019 [12 favorites]

Now I want a world record for "number of times you jumped out of a plane without touching the ground in between"
posted by vibratory manner of working at 8:20 PM on February 16, 2019 [13 favorites]

Now I want a world record for "number of times you jumped out of a plane without touching the ground in between"


That would be pretty interesting. Do you have to land in the same plane, or can you land in a different plane?
posted by zekesonxx at 8:41 PM on February 16, 2019 [1 favorite]

No.
posted by The_Auditor at 8:41 PM on February 16, 2019 [3 favorites]

That looks like a lot of skill plus a lot of luck. The failed attempts are terrifying. You just bounced off the side of a plane traveling at 80 miles an hour. So many things that could go wrong
posted by not_the_water at 9:18 PM on February 16, 2019 [2 favorites]

But relative to the wingsuiters the plane is moving quiet slowly. Probably only a few mph difference. So it'd be roughly equivalent to walking into the fuselage on accident if you missed the door? Not the most comfortable thing but they're wearing helmets so it's probably not life threatening.
posted by axiom at 9:23 PM on February 16, 2019 [1 favorite]

But the propeller...
posted by biogeo at 9:33 PM on February 16, 2019 [6 favorites]

...is at the nose of the plane? I mean sure that's dangerous but I can't picture how one would miss the door and then gain speed so as to get tangled up with the propeller.
posted by axiom at 9:49 PM on February 16, 2019

Battlefield did it first!
posted by meowzilla at 10:23 PM on February 16, 2019 [1 favorite]

I went to high school with one of the base jumping dudes on the Red Bull team - neither of these. Last I read he had base jumped more than anyone else in the world.

Red Bull gives you wings! Shitting your pants is on you!
posted by bendy at 11:06 PM on February 16, 2019 [6 favorites]

I'm still waiting for them to land on the ground without a net or parachute. 20 year old beer bet on that.

Pretty cool though.
posted by zengargoyle at 11:14 PM on February 16, 2019 [1 favorite]

Why not jump into a perfectly good airplane?
posted by peeedro at 11:29 PM on February 16, 2019 [9 favorites]

Hell of a way to get past TSA screening.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:27 AM on February 17, 2019 [17 favorites]

Panning a little to the left near the end would have shown the cliff face where two base jumpers were killed a couple of years ago because stupid men.

I saw a house I knew down in the valley. It's lovely in the summer.
posted by humuhumu at 1:22 AM on February 17, 2019 [3 favorites]

One of the guys who died was known for wing-suiting through a two-metre wide hole in a rockface. It's the highest rated wingsuit / base jump video.
posted by humuhumu at 1:29 AM on February 17, 2019

Pfffft...amateurs; any MeFite could do this. There's even crew in the plane to make it an easy thing. Try doing it like the professionals, riding a motorbike and with no pilot.
posted by Wordshore at 2:33 AM on February 17, 2019 [3 favorites]

Good piece by Alex Honnold written about risk after his friend Dean Potter died wingsuit BASE jumping.

Some argued that it was immoral to risk his life, yet many Americans risk their health every day through largely avoidable diet and lifestyle choices. I was 19 when my father died from a heart attack. He was a 55-year-old college professor and had led what was by all appearances a risk-free life. But he was overweight, and heart disease runs in our family. No matter the risks we take, we always consider the end to be too soon, even though in life more than anything else quality should be more important than quantity.

posted by JonB at 4:58 AM on February 17, 2019 [10 favorites]

It's interesting to see how the angle of the airplane shows the true rate of descent whereas the wingsuits make it appear as though the tragectory is fairly flat.
posted by slkinsey at 5:17 AM on February 17, 2019 [7 favorites]

Well, now I finally have a visual reference for "I used to bull's-eye womp rats in my T-16 back home. They're not much bigger than two meters."
posted by chavenet at 6:00 AM on February 17, 2019 [11 favorites]

Red Bull gives you wings! Shitting your pants is on you!

I... guess... you could fix this problem by BASE jumping naked below the waist. Then it would be on other people.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:35 AM on February 17, 2019 [3 favorites]

Not much for lawyering up or even bothering with most of the corporate leaglise silly stuff but the Red Bull release paperwork must be an utter work of legal art.

I hereby release said corporation of all .... < this that long elaborate boilerplate, etc etc > of all accidents, horrific blood splattering, plane clean up by forensic specialists, psychological trauma of observers, body parts crashing through roofs, pets in the valley choking on severed body parts...
posted by sammyo at 7:24 AM on February 17, 2019 [7 favorites]

Is a sponsor generally liable for those kinds of things?
posted by romanb at 7:45 AM on February 17, 2019

I'm still waiting for them to land on the ground without a net or parachute.
Box rig?
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 8:01 AM on February 17, 2019 [1 favorite]

I feel like redbull and anyone else sponsoring people doing this ultra-risky kind of stuff should bear some legal liability when they die.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 9:11 AM on February 17, 2019 [1 favorite]

Kalessin it isn't the horizontal speed it is the vertical speed that kills you. I don't know if a wing suit can ever go fast enough to generate enough lift to not be plummeting downward at a lethal speed.

This reminded me that somebody did an airplane to airplane jump a long time ago, I think they did it for a movie while wearing a parachute and then they did it for themselves without one. I don't know if it was this guy: or not.
posted by Pembquist at 9:18 AM on February 17, 2019 [1 favorite]

Looks like people have "landed" safely in a wingsuit by using a "runway" of many cardboard boxes. As you say, still a significant downward velocity
posted by JonB at 9:46 AM on February 17, 2019

Yeah, I think they'd have to be hugging a slope that closely matches their glide slope and catch enough headwind to get the relative velocities down to a survivable touchdown. Boxes, nets, rover landing air bags etc. don't quite fit the bill for the bet.

I'll accept a bit of advanced planning (or luck) at landing conditions but it's supposed to be more like flying squirrel than stunt.
posted by zengargoyle at 1:30 PM on February 17, 2019

Could theoretically be done with a ramp, and IIRC someone (maybe Jeb Corliss before his Table Mountain accident?) was talking about doing it. In Vegas, naturally.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 1:31 PM on February 17, 2019

Youtube comment: "[A]mazing they could maintain enough airspeed with the drag from their enormous testicles slowing them down."
posted by bz at 1:34 PM on February 17, 2019 [2 favorites]

Boxes were used in the rope bridge fall stunt in A Man Who Would be King, I thought Connery did the stunt but I guess it was a stuntman.
posted by sammyo at 3:05 PM on February 17, 2019

That's some James Bond shit right there.
posted by kirkaracha at 4:33 PM on February 17, 2019 [1 favorite]