Wingsuit jumper Espen Fadnes
The desire to take flight seems to be strangely fundamental to the human race.
It’s as though we’ve been locked in a battle with physics ever since Icarus
crafted his fallible wings from feathers and wax. From Peter Pan to planes,
blimps and helicopters, the idea of taking to the sky obsesses us like few
other “unobtainable” physical pursuits.
Today, no one gets closer to the free-as-a-bird feeling of flight as wingsuit
jumpers. This variation of BASE
jumping sees men and women jump from thousands of feet and soar
through the air using a specially designed suit, before opening a parachute
and drifting to the ground. Unlike with a conventional BASE jump, the suit
allows its wearer to travel laterally and control direction – while still
reaching speeds of 200mph.
For wingsuit jumpers – or pilots – danger goes with the territory. The
tragic deaths of Dan Vicary and Ludovic Woerth while
attempting a jump in the Swiss Lütschental valley on Saturday is the latest
in a line of accidents that has dogged wingsuit flying in recent years. Last
year, Mark
Sutton, the stuntman who took part in the Olympics opening ceremony dressed
as James Bond, was killed after crashing into a ridge near Martigny at the
Swiss-French border, while Jeb Corliss’s crash on Table Mountain went viral
after it was released online (Corliss survived, but with multiple broken
bones.)
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Robert Pecnik, 47, who is considered the ‘Father of Wingsuit Flying’ after
designing the first commercially acceptable suit in 1998, says the accidents
have become a sad part of life in the wingsuit flying community.
“Recently, it’s happening so much”, says Pecnik, who is the founder
of wingsuit manufacturer Pheonix Fly. “Ludovig was my good friend and
my company cameraman. Learning about someone’s death is always horrible. But
the truth is that I’ve been involved in aeronautical sport for 32 years. You
get used to it”.
Vicary and Woerth were two of the world’s most experienced wingsuit flyers – Telegraph
Men published footage of Vicary’s dramatic three-mile flight in
the Swiss Alps, but Pecnik says the early evidence suggests “human error”
could be to blame for Saturday’s accident. “According to the
information I have, they jumped blindly over terrain and found it was too
flat. There’s also speculation that there was a high wind. Whatever the
case, it’s very, very sad.”
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If even the world’s most experienced wingsuiters can lose their lives on a
jump, should we assume that wingsuiting is recklessly dangerous? Pecnik is
adamant that’s not the case. “Wingsuit flying is one of the safest ways
of doing a BASE jump. The suits themselves are very safe. But even if you
sit in the safest car in the world, you still have to obey common sense. You
can always put yourself in jeopardy.
“People are questioning wingsuiting more and more because deaths keep
happening. But after a few days, everything goes back to normal. If it
wasn’t human error, it would be harder. We’d stop and think: something is
wrong here. But really it’s the case of the community learning from other’s
mistakes. It sounds brutal, but it’s true.”
The danger attached to BASE jumping is clear to the naked eye – and the few
statistics that exist on the subject reflect a pursuit that flirts with
danger in its genome. Between 1981 and 2014, there were 229
known BASE jumping fatalities (not including deaths that
resulted from wingsuit jumping out of a plane). A 2012 study of jumpers by
Dr. Omer Mei-Dan found that 72 per cent “had witnessed death or serious
injury of other participants in the sport, 43 per cent had suffered a
significant BASE jump injury, and 76 per cent had at least one ‘near miss’
incident”.
Pecnik, who has completed around 1,000 wingsuit flights and hundreds of BASE
jumps, says the biggest risk in wingsuit jumping relates to a lack of
preparation. “Recently, wingsuiting has exploded; it’s getting
attention beyond expectation. Skydivers are coming across [to wingsuiting]
more and more. Now, the problem for the community is that the technology is
very good, but the skill of the jumpers is much lower.”
To attempt a wingsuit jump, the general rule of thumb is that you must first
complete 200 skydives. The first wingsuited jump should then be attempted
from a super safe place (many seek out an overhanging cliff in Italy that’s
around 1,200 high). None of this is set in stone, however, which leaves the
door open for ‘fast-track’ jumping. For someone as experienced as Pecnik,
it’s exasperating: “The big problem we have now is that young people
want to go from zero to hero in three weeks”.
The irony is that the specially designed suits are supposed to add safety
to BASE jumping. “Wingsuiting began as a tool to bring us away from the
cliffs when BASE jumping,” Pecnik says. “Then, slowly, the sport
progressed, and people started to use the suit to get closer to the
cliff. There used to be two critical parts of a jump: the exit, then the
pull. Now we have added a third element: terrain flying.”
That terrain flying has given wingsuiting a category conundrum. Is it a hobby
or a sport? Pecnik thinks it’s neither – instead, it’s a “skill”.
But the competitive element can’t be ignored. As jumpers look to do ever
more outlandish things, the element of danger is hardly likely to decrease.
So what of the future? Will high-profile deaths put an end to wingsuit
jumping, or will people fly on regardless? Pecnik says a model can be found
in motorcycling.
“I like to compare wingsuiting to motorcycling. Wingsuiting is not
socially acceptable now. When motorcycling began, everyone was talking about
the amount of deaths it was causing. Now, thousands of people die and no one
notices. It’s socially acceptable. I believe in 100 years time no one will
notice if someone dies when wingsuiting.