He has made 18,000 parachute jumps, helped train some of the world’s most elite skydivers and done some of the stunts for Ironman 3, but the plunge Luke Aikins says he will be remembered for is the one he is to make without a parachute. Or a wingsuit.
Or anything, really, other than the clothes he will be wearing when he jumps out of an airplane at about 7,600m this weekend, attempting to become the first person to land safely on the ground in a net from that altitude.
The Fox network is to broadcast the two-minute jump live at 8pm today as part of an hour-long TV special called Heaven Sent.
Photo: AP
And, no, you do not 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 all-time greatest reality TV stunt floated the idea by him a couple years ago.
“I said: ‘You won’t believe these guys,’” the affable skydiver said with a robust laugh. “They want 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.”
However, in the weeks that followed he could not shake one persistent thought: Could anybody actually do this and live to tell the tale?
Because if anyone could, Aikins wanted to be that guy.
The 42-year-old daredevil has practically lived his life in the sky. He made his first tandem jump when he was 12, following with his first solo leap four years later. He has been racking them up at about 800 per year ever since.
He took his wife, Monica, on her first jump when they were dating and she is up to 2,000 now. The couple lives with their four-year-old son, Logan, in Washington state, where Aikins’ family owns Skydive Kapowsin near Tacoma.
Over the years Aikins has taught skydiving, taught others to teach skydiving and participated in world-record stacking events, in which skydivers line up atop one another as they fly their open chutes across the sky.
He tells of having his chute tangle with others on a couple of those efforts and having to come down under his reserve parachute. In all, he has used his reserve 30 times, not a bad number for 18,000 jumps.
However, this time he will not have any parachute.
“If I wasn’t nervous I would be stupid,” the compact, muscular athlete said with a grin, sittung under a canopy near the drop zone.
“We’re talking about jumping without a parachute, and I take that very seriously. It’s not a joke,” he said.
Nearby, a pair of tall cranes defines the boundaries where the net in which Aikins expects to land is being erected.
It is about one-third the size of a football field and 20 stories high, providing enough space to cushion his fall without allowing him to bounce out of it, he said.
The landing target, which has been described as similar to a fishing trawler net, has been tested repeatedly using dummies.
One 91kg dummy did not bounce out — it crashed right through.
The drop zone, surrounded by rolling hills, presents some challenges, Aikins said, adding that he would be constantly fighting shifting winds as he falls at 193kph.
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