Original subtitles

Downloaded from YTS.MX

PULSING ELECTRONIC MUSIC

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

I think instinctually, when you’re standing

on the edge of a cliff,

you’re faced with two different sides of your mind.

First of all, all humans

are naturally afraid of heights.

Second of all, all humans kind of dream of flying.

Fear is your friend, fear keeps you alive.

Fear makes you check your chute again and again.

You know, your heart’s pounding, you can almost hear your heart.

You’re completely living in that exact

present moment and it’s very addicting

to be that in tune with your body

and everything around you.

So you’re sitting there and it’s like, it’s wrong,

but at the same time, you want to do it.

The dream of human flight

is overpowering for some of us.

And it’s far more important than fear of the unknown.

In ancient times, most cultures believed

the sky was a domain reserved for demons,

gods, and mythical creatures.

Countless stories were written

about failed human attempts to leave their earthly domain

and enter the forbidden world of the air.

The most famous of these myths

is the Greek story of Icarus.

His father, Daedalus, crafted wings of wax and feathers

for himself and his son

to escape from the labyrinth prison

they lived in.

Daedalus warned the young Icarus

not to fly too close to the sun,

in case his wings might melt.

As Daedalus cautiously flew to safety,

the youthful Icarus was overwhelmed

by the exhilaration of flight,

and carelessly arched upward toward the heavens.

His wax wings melted and he plunged to his death.

And for eternity, the story has served

as a warning to misguided dreamers

trying to experience human flight.

Despite the obvious dangers, man has aspired to soar

like a bird since time immemorial,

but without much success.

In written records that document early human flight,

it’s difficult to separate fact from myth.

Only a few early designs had the potential

to glide small distances and no flying machines

could ever have achieved actual flight.

Until the end of the 19th century,

man didn’t even understand the science of bird flight.

These misinformed pioneers were doomed

to countless broken backs, limbs, or death,

but science continued to progress.

The first significant advancement in flight

is owed to Otto Lilenthal, the Glider King.

Otto studied bird flight in airfoils extensively.

Based on his studies, he started to design

fixed wing gliders in 1891.

Otto was credited as the first successful aviator

because his flights were actually repeatable.

From a running start on a hilltop,

he made thousands of flights,

some up to 1,000 feet in length.

But in 1896, he broke his spine on a test flight gone wrong.

On his deathbed, he said, "Small sacrifices must be made."

After reading about Otto’s death,

Orville and Wilbur Wright were inspired to research

his work and begin their own pursuit of flight.

After designing a few questionable prototypes,

they eventually created a stable working model in 1903,

complete with a rudder that could make turns

and glide hundreds of feet.

They felt confident they could add an engine

and attempt flight from level ground

instead of a hilltop.

After months of designing,

building an airplane, and waiting for perfect weather,

the first sustained human flight was achieved.

On the windswept sands of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina,

was written the opening verse of a new chapter

in the history of man.

But they did not rest on their laurels.

The Wright brothers continued to improve

and demonstrate their airplane in the United States and abroad

for another five years before the last doubting skeptic

was convinced that man had conquered the air.

To fly like a bird.

For ages, that has been man’s ambition.

How often, during the unrecorded centuries

of the past he has tried and failed, we do not know.

We do know that many courageous men

have given their lives so that we might fly

in safety and comfort.

But the modern airplane was a far departure

from man’s dream of flying effortlessly like a bird.

So a select few continued to pursue

man’s original dream of flight.

Army planes rolling overhead

at the national air races in Cleveland, Ohio,

thrill 40,000 spectators in the year’s

biggest flying show with stunning

wing-to-wing formation.

After World War I, pilots from the war

put on air shows for massive crowds

throughout Europe and North America.

The finale of most shows was the new sport of parachuting.

The jumpers often tried to outdo each other

to grab audiences’ attention.

Look, this fella’s in trouble, too. No, I guess not,

he’s only spilling the air out of his chute

to speed his descent. He’s all right.

Clem Sohn was one of these professional parachutists

who traveled the country from air show to air show

in the 1930s.

Like many dreamers before him,

he was enthralled by the concept

of flying like a bird.

So he came up with a simple design

based on flying squirrels and bats.

Continuing to evolve the ancient tradition

of constructing bird-like wings,

Clem stitched sail cloth to a metal frame.

His first flight with these wings

was at an air show in Florida in 1935.

He immediately went into a glide, and was

successfully able to perform banking turns

on his way down.

Clem Sohn, America’s Birdman,

takes off in his plane to give one more demonstration

of his marvelous powers of gliding down from 10,000 feet.

After thousands of years of failed attempts

at bird-like flight, a small-town boy

from Michigan had succeeded.

His flights made headlines around the world and suddenly,

he was making thousands of dollars to perform

at air shows.

Sponsors lined up and a Clem Sohn "Birdman" doll

for kids was created.

But Clem never saw himself as a novelty act.

He firmly believed he was advancing human flight

and continuously modified his wings

to improve his flights.

In 1937, Clem was invited by the French government

to fly at the Paris air show.

But when he pulled his chute, it malfunctioned.

And 200,000 people all but create a vacuum

as they draw in their breath with horror

when Clem’s parachute fails to open properly

and he hurdles down from 10,000 feet.

Down, down, down, to his death.

Despite his death, Clem inspired dozens of imitators

had started the birdmen phenomenon that continues

to this day.

But flying with heavy wings was not as easy

as Clem had made it look.

Many copycat birdmen were seriously injured

or died from going into uncontrollable spins.

One birdman described opening his wings in midair as,

"wrestling a tent in a hurricane."

The successor to Clem was Léo Valentin,

a famous parachutist from the French military.

Leo started flying with cloth wingsuits in 1950,

but after a few disastrous flights,

he quickly gave up, thinking that rigid wings

would be more controllable.

He was wrong.

It took years of modifying and testing

before he had a working pair in 1954.

Léo claimed to fly over three miles on his first flight.

For the next two years, he became an air show sensation.

But like most birdmen of the time,

he tragically met his death.

At a festival in England, he was about to jump

when the wind sucked him out sideways.

He struck the side of the plane,

and his wings splintered.

For decades, no birdmen attempted flight

with rigid wings.

Eventually, the Birdman movement

fizzled out in the 1960s,

and only a few skydivers experimented with wings,

until Patrick De Gayardon came along in the 1990s.

Before experimenting with wingsuits,

Patrick made a comfortable living as a professional

skydiver who dreamed up spectacular stunts to film,

such as sky surfing over the North Pole

and breaking the world record for the highest jump

without oxygen.

He was also an avid BASE jumper,

which involves jumping off a fixed object

with a parachute designed for quick openings.

His next big dream was to extend his time in the air,

and a wingsuit was the obvious way to do this.

He designed wings that inflated using ram air,

which is the same system that modern-day parachutes use.

Ram air systems use the air flow that occurs

around a body in freefall to pressurize the inside

of a two-layered fabric wing.

This enabled Patrick to fly with wings

similar to airplanes, and as a result,

his wings were much more stable and safe

than the canvas wings of the past.

So, Patrick De Gayardon was a very good skydiver

and I met him when I was in the French team

living in Gap.

And he invented the modern wingsuit

that inflates and that has a good performance

compared to the old ones.

Before Patrick, there was a lot of

persons-- Léo Valentin, Clem Sohn,

all these guys that made the mistakes

that we didn’t do afterwards.

Patrick was definitely headed towards more performance.

He was making the suit slightly bigger,

he was streamlining them to make them more efficient,

and he was definitely looking at trying to get

more performance and more glide out of the suit.

In 1998, Patrick died when his parachute malfunctioned

after he modified it in an attempt

to streamline his parachute with his wingsuit.

It was a devastating blow to the skydiving community.

Yet his death did not deter others to continue

his work with wingsuits.

Soon after Patrick’s death, a handful of skydivers,

including Loic Jean-Albert, began to make

their own wingsuits.

Loic designed and sold one of the first wingsuits

available to the general public

called The Crossbow.

Since I was a little kid, I liked to build toys

for what I need.

When I saw the first wingsuits of Patrick,

I had some ideas about how to improve it

and that’s how I got into building the suits.

I built the first one because I wanted

my toy, you know.

And then, um, people started asking

to have toys, also.

So, that’s when we started building suits for other people.

He had a wingsuit that was far more comfortable

with far better performance than any of his competitors

for the first five years that he was making them.

We made bigger suits, for North Face,

but also they are more stable and more maneuverable.

The only way to learn how to fly a wingsuit

is through skydiving.

Many skydiving operations

offer wingsuit flying instruction,

but a minimum of 200 regular skydive jumps

are recommended before attempting a wingsuit flight.

Today’s wingsuit designs allow experienced skydivers

to easily pilot the suits through the air

for several minutes.

I grew up on an airport.

Both my parents were skydiver instructors.

As soon as there was room in the plane,

I was hopping in.

I started skydiving when I was 15.

I got into BASE jumping, wingsuit flying,

all these things.

And I started flying light planes, bigger planes,

and I fly helicopters, also.

I’m just interested in everything that flies.

My introduction to wingsuit flying

came at Gap in France at Loic’s drop zone

using his suit, sort of within his circle of friends.

I’m kind of from Loic’s family of wingsuiting.

I think wingsuit flying is the closer you can get,

in term of what birds might feel,

but there’s a lot of interesting things

in other flying machines.

Like possibilities that you don’t have with wingsuits.

So I like mixing them to show that they can

fly together and they are all fun.

We all went to Gap to go skydiving.

And fly our wingsuits next to Loic,

who would be flying his airplane next to us.

And our goal was to be able to see

if we could fly our wingsuits

at the same level as his airplane.

The few times I’ve done this,

with one person in a wingsuit,

and this time they were a group,

which is even more nice because you have to set up

everyone together and it’s not too easy.

I will turn around like this, anyway.

So as you see me turning around,

you just follow like this.

Okay?

Try and keep a fast pace.

- Fast pace, no? - For sure.

I’ve flown wingsuits a lot with Mike and Matt and I knew that,

you know, we were able to fly together well.

That wasn’t gonna be a challenge for us,

but to be able to fly with an airplane

was something that we’d never done before.

Jumping with the three is Noah Bahnson,

an aerial cameraman.

We’re flying and all of a sudden, I looked down

and I see Loic flying his airplane up and behind us.

Just seeing this huge airplane that’s able to fly

right next to us, it was breathtaking, really.

It’s a very nice visual, and I always like to fly

with wingsuit flyers and planes.

Mixing both disciplines is really fun.

In the mid 1990s, as news of Patrick

and Loic’s wingsuit flying spread throughout

the skydive world, BASE jumpers recognized

the incredible potential for wingsuit flights

from cliffs.

BASE jumping is a high-risk sport

by any measure, but adding a wingsuit

makes it even more dangerous.

Only the most experienced and elite BASE jumpers

don wingsuits, and today,

the most progressive and advanced human flight

is happening in the wingsuit BASE-jumping environment.

Skydiving definitely helps prepare you

for wingsuit BASE jumping, and in fact,

it’s one of the most important things you can do.

Every wingsuit BASE jumper has to skydive

as much as possible.

Now, it only helps for certain things.

It helps you fly the suit, it helps you

become stable in the air.

It helps you sort of develop the foundation

that you’ll need to perfect your glide performance later

in the BASE jumping environment.

Modern wingsuits are relatively easy to fly.

In fact, if you just relax and sort of lay on top of them,

they’ll fly straight all by themselves.

All you have to do is sort of learn

how to give gentle inputs, and work with the suit

instead of fighting.

Clouds are sort of the ultimate training tool.

Clouds allow you to pick a point of reference,

and set up.

And try and fly as close as you can

to the edge of it without hitting it.

Turning in a wingsuit is very intuitive.

It can mean the difference between rotating your shoulders

a little bit, maybe changing the angle of your feet,

and even just moving your head

and having your body follow which way

your head’s going.

The movements that you’re making

are very small, but learning how to fly,

not only relative to other people while skydiving,

but flying around clouds and that sort of thing

is what kind of breeds the skills

to be able to fly along terrain,

making turns.

But skydiving doesn’t prepare you for the exit.

It doesn’t prepare you for learning how to

get your suit flying as soon as possible,

and that’s one of the most crucial aspects

of wingsuit BASE jumping.

That’s one thing that you need to learn

while in the BASE environment.

And your first few jumps need to be from an object

that’s very forgiving, that’s a very long,

vertical rock drop, so that you have time

to figure out how to get your wingsuit flying soon.

Later, more experienced BASE jumpers

can move to objects with shorter starts

where you throw a rock and maybe it only freefalls

for six or seven seconds.

So those short starts are reserved

for the most experienced wingsuit BASE jumpers.

Jumping off of a cliff adds a whole new aspect

that most people don’t consider.

A lot of people don’t think about

how the winds are affecting the mountain,

which is going to be pushing you in one direction

or the other, they don’t think about

what’s gonna happen if they pull a little bit lower

and have line twists.

In a skydive that’s not a big deal,

but in BASE jumping, these are things

that you have to be absolutely dialed in.

People who don’t practice these things

often tend to get hurt and most of them die.

The Dent de Crolles in France

is a really classic BASE jump.

For a long time, it’s been a test piece

of wingsuit BASE jumpers.

It’s something that I saw for the first time

about six years ago.

At that time, I had only heard

of one other jumper who was jumping

and that was Loic.

There’s a mandatory performance obstacle

that happens to be a giant ledge

with the town that’s on it.

If you don’t clear that, you need to land in a field

that’s on it.

If you make the decision too late

to try and land on one of those fields,

you probably won’t have enough altitude

to deploy your parachute safely.

If you ask me if I’d ever think

that I’d be able to jump that

and clear the town, I would’ve said no.

Maybe even up until a year or two ago.

No way.

So we’re gonna be flying past that entire village

down to that big town?

Is that what we’re trying to do?

Yeah, all the way over the plateau,

and down to the bottom of the valley.

Holy crap.

It’s kind of a bit of a glide

to the soccer field after, but it’s definitely possible.

Otherwise, there’s plenty of options to the left.

But we can’t see them from here.

Okay, so I’ll just make that call when I go

around the corner, I guess.

Once you clear the edge,

you’ll see lots of options.

We should be able to make it, right?

I think you can pass it, but if you feel like

you’re not going to, you have three bail-out fields

below on the right, and those are

your only options, basically, for landing.

And it does look like a pretty long glide.

I’m sure it’s gonna be fine.

Just decide early, but I’m sure

you guys will make it.

Cool.

Three, two, one.

My plan in my mind was, "Okay,

I’ll shoot for the plateau and the valley."

If I get to that spot, and I realize I’m high enough

to make it through the canyon,

then I’ll go to Plan B.

But I don’t really intend to fly all the way out

to the very bottom because I know

if I have that in my mind,

that I might make the wrong decision.

Super cool to fly my wingsuit over the town

that I was once looking up at the cliff going,

"That’s impossible and insane."

It’s funny how your perspective changes

not only based on the suits

and the progression with materials and technology,

but also with your skill and comfort level.

Those things are the recipe for innovation

and that’s what’s happening right now,

we’re flying in ways that we never thought

we’d fly, it’s truly amazing.

It was awesome!

Nice.

When wingsuit BASE jumping first came to be,

it was really exciting because all of a sudden

we could fly ourselves away from the object.

And that was just sort of mind-boggling.

You know, for decades, here we’d been,

freefalling right next to the cliff, you know,

with everything rushing just behind you.

It wasn’t really flying at all, it was falling.

And then wingsuits came along

and all of a sudden people were able to fly

not just, you know, hundreds of meters,

but even kilometers, or miles,

away from the cliff.

I mean, that was so impressive.

And so in the beginning, the holy grail

of wingsuit BASE jumping was distance and glide.

Who could fly furthest away from the cliff?

How far could you make it from Point A?

Typically, most of the jumps that we’re doing these days

are anywhere between 4,000 and 6,000 feet vertical.

What that translates to is most of the time,

we can fly twice as far as we are high.

So if I’m one mile high, I can jump off that cliff

and fly for at least two miles

before I have to deploy my parachute.

We don’t need a 6,000-foot sheer wall.

We just need 500 little feet of vertical

near the top of the mountain,

and then we have the entire mountain

to play with after we get our wingsuits flying.

Jumping with a wingsuit does offer

a lot more possibilities

in terms of where you can jump,

in terms of flights that you can do,

slowly changes the face of BASE jumping.

As wingsuits got better and pilots got better,

we could fly so far away from the cliff,

it almost feels like we jumped out

of an airplane.

It became too much like skydiving.

Here we are, two miles away from the cliff,

and thousands of feet over the ground,

that almost got to be a little bit boring.

In 2003, Loic performed the first documented

proximity flight, which is a wingsuit flight

in close proximity to the ground.

I did a lot of other proximity,

but not the same and not as close.

I think this video did open the eyes

on a lot of people on the possibilities

with a wingsuit.

The images of him flying his wingsuit

close to the snow slope in Verbier

totally blew my mind.

Loic was literally five or six years

ahead of everyone else in the sport,

and this is a sport that evolves a huge amount

in one or two years.

So, years before anyone else,

he was doing this over and over again,

and to a level that even today

is barely matched.

All of a sudden, the exciting thing to do

was not to fly as far away from the cliff

as possible, but to fly as close to the cliff

and as close to the terrain as possible.

Being able to see and judge glide

is very important, but being able to recognize that

while you’re doing 100 miles an hour,

close to terrain,

I think that’s one of the hardest things to learn

because there’s no real way to learn that

without doing it.

It’s always a difficult decision,

when you feel like you’re ready to start

flying close to something.

Everybody wants that as soon as possible.

They don’t want to wait. They want it now.

The slowest progression possible is the best and the safest.

And what a lot of wingsuit BASE jumpers nowadays

aren’t doing is starting slowly.

To be totally honest, I can’t say

that I started slowly, either,

even though I was in the sport for six years

before I really even flew close to anything at all.

You sort of have to balance your desire

with a slow enough progression to stay alive.

In most of these kinds of sports,

there’s a very small elite group

that participates in them.

Very few people have the ability to do it,

have the courage to do it,

to do something that’s really challenging

and really risky, and to succeed at that,

there’s certainly a reward for people to do something

that other people can’t do or won’t do.

I think that drives you to overcome

that aversion that most people have.

Motivation for some of these kinds of activities

or things that happen by accident

is that they’re life-altering experiences,

and once you’ve done that, you’ve had that feeling,

I think if it was that profound and that rewarding,

you’d tend to want to do it again.

So, we’re just getting to bed here at the refuge.

We’re at about 8,600 feet.

Tomorrow morning, we’re gonna get up early

to go do one of the longest,

coolest wingsuit BASE jumps of my life.

A lot of the newer exit points that are being opened up

are now expanding into different areas of the mountains.

Getting into these areas can be more technical,

and we can end up having to do even multiple-day ascents,

so it’s important that you’re comfortable

in a high alpine environment.

The jump in the Dolomites is about 6,000 feet

from where we exit to where we land.

It’s in a pretty remote area.

It got jumped for the first time two summers ago,

and because it’s a pretty high jump

and the access isn’t super simple,

it hasn’t seen a lot of BASE jumpers, actually,

so it’s relatively new and fresh,

and actually, I don’t even know

of any other Americans that have been up there,

I think we’re pretty much the first.

Who’s giving the count?

I’ll give the count.

Which way are we exiting?

Straight out, turning left.

-Ready? -Ready.

Here we go, have fun.

All right.

Three, two, one.

See ya.

People that don’t approach

that level of activity in their own lives

tend to look at these sorts of things as odd.

They are risky.

They are dangerous.

These guys are as normal as you and me,

they just have a higher level of need

to achieve a goal, a different kind of goal.

They’re trying to challenge themselves.

They’re seeking something that they can’t get

watching football on television

or driving a car fast.

They feel more alive for having done this.

Maybe the risk of high rate of injury or death

makes life more attractive to them.

Oh, man.

That was amazing.

That was totally incredible.

Sick.

Nice work.

Impressive exit, huh? - Yeah.

It comes out fast.

A lot of ledges down there.

It was the only thing that had sun on it.

We had a little sun on us on the exit,

and then right below us, it was like

this golden rock outcropping.

Accentuating your death.

Ahh...but it’s all good, and then we went left.

Not all wingsuit BASE jumpers are crazy.

Sure, there’s a couple,

but we come from all walks of life.

I mean, I’ve jumped with nurses and doctors,

airline pilots, psychologists,

all sorts of normal people.

I wouldn’t say that there’s a particular personality type

that suits wingsuit BASE jumping.

There’s people who use sort of a surfer mentality

to kind of feel the line and feel the technique,

and there’s people who sort of crunch the numbers

on their computers, and both work.

In sports like wingsuit BASE jumping,

I think you find more meticulous people.

I don’t think you find many yahoos out there

doing this kind of thing

because it takes a tremendous amount

of commitment and time and money and effort.

If you don’t take this kind of care and caution

and pay this kind of attention,

then you’re making an evolutionary decision

about natural selection.

People BASE jump because it is really exciting,

and you get a huge adrenaline rush,

but it’s also about getting out in the mountains,

and it’s about exploring and enjoying nature.

One of the main reasons I like to do this sport so much

is because I’m able to be up in the mountains

where few people ever go.

I’m seeing things from an angle that no one ever sees them from

or very few get to see them from.

I try to pretty much only BASE jump from cliffs

because for me, it’s all about the mountain experience,

I love being in the mountains and the back country,

away from civilization.

BASE wingsuit flying is really cool

because you walk in the mountains,

be cool and calm.

It’s a different aspect of wingsuit flying.

Once we’re on the edge and we get to the exit point,

we have to gear up.

To be honest, the wingsuit isn’t super comfortable.

It’s sort of tight in the wrong places

and baggy in other places, and you don’t really feel

like you’re in your natural environment.

You sort of feel out of place.

And so, once you put the wingsuit on,

basically, your natural environment becomes the air,

and you just want to fly.

It’s only when you leave the cliff

and you start flying, you feel at home.

Before you jump off of the cliff,

you’ve got a million things racing through your mind,

and then you count down, "Three, two, one,"

and then nothing, it’s completely silent.

The first two seconds after jumping

are totally calm.

There’s no wind noise.

That moment of freefall lasts so much longer

than any other moment of your life.

It’s incredible.

And gradually, everything sort of speeds up.

A train comes at you faster and faster,

the wind noises increases.

You’re completely living in that exact, present moment,

and it’s very addicting.

All the way up here to sit in the white room,

as you can see behind me.

That’s where I’m supposed to be jumping.

Hanging out in a cloud on a mountain in Switzerland.

Worse things, worse places.

All right.

Three, two, one, gypsy tears.

How was that?

That was awesome.

Wow!

Three, two, one.

Ellen’s pretty interesting.

There aren’t many women in our sport

doing kind of this fringe stuff

as far as proximity flying.

Pretty much all of my spare time that I’ve had

has been paragliding, rock climbing,

going to the gym, running, hiking.

All of that is focused towards making BASE jumping

a more productive sport for me.

Living in the States, it’s very hard

to go wingsuit BASE jumping.

There’s not very many cliffs that are accessible,

so I’ve been spending all of my spare time,

you know, if it’s even just for a week,

I fly out to Europe.

Every time I come out, I meet new people

to wingsuit with because it’s such a small community.

It’s really great to be able to connect with everyone.

The relationships you make in BASE jumping

seem to be a lot stronger than any other relationship you have

because you’re able to share something that’s so unique,

and few other people understand the feelings

you get from BASE jumping.

People who don’t do the same sports

don’t really understand how I work.

I will drop anything if it’s a calm, beautiful morning

and go off and jump off a cliff,

and a lot of people just can’t understand

why I need to go do that, but it’s something I need.

Woo-hoo!

Jeb Corliss has joined the group in the Swiss Alps

for a group jump called "flocking."

While common in skydiving,

flocking is very rare in BASE jumping

due to the complexity of multiple pilots

jumping from a cliff together and flying near the terrain.

Jumping with Jeb was special.

There are definitely a lot of people that were involved

in the progression of wingsuits,

whether it was wingsuit BASE jumping

or skydiving with wingsuits, he’s one of the people

that’s been in the sport for a long time,

and I’ve looked up to him for a number of years,

so actually being able to do a jump with him

is pretty cool.

Jeb, an icon in the sport,

purchased his first wingsuit in the late ’90s.

To this day, he continues to push the limits

of wingsuit flying and is one of the most

experienced wingsuit BASE jumpers alive.

I feel really comfortable flying with my friends

’cause I know what their skill level is.

I’m very particular to who I choose to jump with,

and especially if I’m gonna be sharing the air space with them,

it ought to be somebody I really know and trust.

With that many people on an exit point,

which can be the size of a picnic table,

is kind of a challenge within itself.

If somebody slipped, if somebody bumped somebody else on exit,

you really have to know who you’re jumping with.

Being with somebody else in the air, close to terrain,

by far one of the coolest experiences I’ve ever had.

Very good work, guys, that was awesome.

It was really, really fun.

That was actually--it was my most fun jump here so far.

I think mine, too, honestly.

Yeah, it’s definitely the most fun.

So much cooler seeing people around you.

It really is.

The visual of other humans in the sky flying

is so awesome.

It’s like, "Oh, that’s what this feels like,

I can see the feeling."

I can see them do it at the same time!

My family definitely has concerns,

like any family would,

about what I do and my safety.

Their feelings do affect me,

but I think they understand

that this is something that I need to do.

If I’m not doing this, then I’m not who I am.

If you deal with the reality

of the consequences of mistake,

99 times out of a 100, you’re not gonna walk away

from that accident,

somewhere you’ve come to an accommodation

of that fact.

At that speed, if you clipped a tree

or touch the ground, it’s game over.

Lights out, you’re done, for sure.

It’s hard to hit anything

at more than 100 miles an hour without dying.

I’m scared every time.

What is pushing that fear down

are the skills and the time and the energy

and everything that I’ve put into getting to that point.

But you have to have a high level of expectation

that this could end badly today.

I would suspect that they’ve accepted

that this is the real risk.

This is really part of the deal.

Because it is such a calculated sport,

you need to be able to take in

a lot of things into consideration,

and the most important thing is you need to be able to know

when to say no and to hike back down.

It’s a very unforgiving sport,

because once you make a decision to BASE jump,

you become subject to all of the variables

and all of the conditions,

so really, the only way to guarantee

that you stay alive is to not jump.

I’ve had three or four fairly close friends die

wingsuit proximity flying.

It’s something that is a reality.

I was still taking pretty high risks

when I had my two kids,

and I broke my back in the end of 2007,

and when you’re in a bed lying for a few months,

you have time also to think about life in general.

It was really fun, I’m really happy

of everything that I did, but I don’t think

I want to take that much risk anymore.

I mean, I’ve done enough.

I’ve spent a lot of time doing it,

and I’ve lost a lot of friends also.

When you do this type of thing,

and you know all the guys who are doing

this type of thing, you know a lot of--

you have a lot of friends that die doing it.

Skill does help,

but it does not erase the risk.

It’s really cool to watch

how Matt is progressing in the sport.

He lives over here, and he’s getting to jump a lot.

Having the precision and the control

to be able to fly through two objects

that are no more than 20 feet apart

is really cool to watch.

Three, two, one.

Our generation grew up

with all of these fantastic sci-fi movies in the ’80s.

I’ll never forget the image of Ewoks

speeding through the forest on their Speeder Bikes

or Luke Skywalker diving into canyons on the Death Star,

or even just the classic image of Superman flying headfirst.

To me, wingsuiting is all those things rolled into one.

It’s like the ultimate dream of flight realized.

It’s definitely the ultimate rush.

Flying your body close to something

and having control over where you’re at

is the ultimate.

It’s what we’ve been dreaming about forever.

One of the most technically-challenging

wingsuit BASE jumps is called the "crack."

It requires the pilot to fly nearly one mile out

before swooping down between two trees

no more than 20 feet apart.

This leads to a long, narrow canyon

which the pilot must fly through

before having enough room to safely deploy his parachute.

So, there’s really just a handful

of wingsuit pilots in the world

who are flying their wingsuits at this level,

but what we’re gonna see in the next few years

is that number explode exponentially

because wingsuits are becoming more comfortable to fly

and the performance is increasing every year.

It’s very difficult to say what the future

of wingsuiting will bring because five years ago,

I think that a lot of wingsuit BASE jumpers

never imagined that we would be doing

the type of flights that we’re doing now.

After decades of development,

through trial and error and after many deaths,

the wingsuit has evolved into a spectacular vehicle

for human flight.

While wingsuit designs will continue to be modified

to make flying safer and easier,

cloth wingsuit performance will always be limited

by the framework of the human body.

The wingspan is dictated by the pilot’s size,

and the length of flight is completely dependent

upon our limited human muscle strength,

which usually becomes exhausted

after three minutes of flight time.

Yves Rossy believes he has found a solution

to these natural restraints.

He’s gone back to Léo Valentin’s idea

of a rigid wing

and utilizes mini turbine engines

to achieve airplane-like flight,

essentially turning himself into a jet aircraft.

There are some possibilities in hard wings

to take off, land, safely with engines,

and also you can fly with your body

which gives the feeling of flight.

I think that’s quite cool, it’s quite interesting.

The technical skills you’d have to have

to be able to strap two jet engines to your body

and jump out of something and fly

is pretty far out there.

I think being a Rocket Man will happen for a select few,

but it’s definitely not gonna be something mainstream,

even in the wingsuit community.

A more realistic future for birdmen

is combining technology

with a traditional nylon wingsuit.

In Switzerland, significant progress

has been made in this field in the last couple of years.

My name is Raffaello D’Andrea,

I’m a professor of Dynamic Systems and Control

at ETH Zurich.

Geo was a Ph.D. student in our group.

We wrote a paper together

on longitudinal stability of wingsuit flight.

First time that anyone had ever written a paper

about wingsuit flying to that level.

You’re looking at the luckiest man in the world

because I’ve managed to combine

this recreational interest in wingsuit flying

with my professional and academic background

in engineering and mathematics.

All right.

Geo had the talent and the courage

to be a wingsuit flyer, but he was also a scientist.

What’s the probability of having both of those aptitudes

in one human being, and Geo really had them,

and I think it really was interesting to see

how scientific he was, he was very rigorous.

He wanted to be able to write mathematical models

and to use those models to figure out

how to make humans fly better.

The paper covered the dynamics of wingsuit flying,

showing that these models that are used for airplanes

also apply to human beings,

and showing that it is feasible

to fly with thrusters,

although you’re prone to instabilities,

and that you can control these instabilities.

Our plan, which we describe in our paper,

is to use steerable nozzles, vector thrust,

and an onboard computer,

and basically a fly-by-wire cruise control system

to stabilize the flight.

Raffaello and his students have developed complex algorithms

used in modified quadrocopters

which can keep a rod perfectly balanced.

While a human maneuvers the quadrocopter

with a remote wand,

it balances the rod upright autonomously.

Since these human-controlled maneuvers

are random and not pre-programmed,

the quadrocopter is designed to learn

how to balance the rod by itself.

Geo visualized a similar system

to keep a pilot perfectly balanced during flight

while the pilot chose whichever flight path he desired.

So, the human being wouldn’t even know

that there was a computer system

doing all this fine control.

As far as the human being is concerned,

they’re just flying, and they want to turn right,

they would turn right, and the system would react

to what the human being wanted to do

and make the vector thrusts do what it’s supposed to do.

Perfect exit point.

And this opens up a world of opportunities.

Instead of flying down steep mountain slopes,

you could actually fly over flat ground,

which would be amazing.

He always used to say that,

"If something ever happens to me,

it’s gonna be because of equipment failure,

not because I miscalculated."

Geo was a very analytical BASE jumper,

and using calculations, he had decided

that it would be possible to fly his wingsuit

through a col in South Africa,

and like many pioneers that came before him,

his attempt at pushing the limits ended badly,

and it’s totally unfortunate because he was a brilliant mind

and a really nice person.

I mean, generally speaking, people as smart as him

are way too smart to get into wingsuit BASE jumping,

so he was definitely a rarity.

Around a century ago, the Wright brothers

thought they started human flight.

It’s ironic that it’s taken another hundred years

for us to start to look at the type of bird-like flight

that our ancestors would have dreamed of thousands of years.

Woo-hoo!

It’s a magical and life-changing experience

just stepping off a cliff, spreading your arms,

and flying like a bird, you really do feel like a bird.

That’s my research.

I’m a very lucky man.

Woo-hoo!

He was, without question, a pioneer in our sport,

and it’s really sad that we lost him

because he was definitely taking it in a direction

that few of us could even imagine,

let alone conceptualize.

Another new exit point, another day.

I think what happened was the adventurer in him came out,

and he just wanted to push the boundary,

and he tried something that maybe he shouldn’t have tried,

but, you know, he easily could have cleared it as well,

and then we’d all be talking here about it,

and it’d be a different story.

Oh, yeah, life is good!

Geo died a week later

attempting a different flight from the same exit point.

His flight path required that he fly over a ridgeline

that he wasn’t able to clear.

Geo’s groundbreaking work has not been continued

by anyone to date.

Thousands of years after humans first leapt into the unknown,

a select few of us have achieved

the very kind of flight that our ancestors

have been envisioning for eons.

Perhaps the transformation to true birdmen

is not yet complete,

but as technological innovations lead to newer designs,

the boundaries of human flight remain wide open

for the adventurous and courageous spirits

who long to fly like birds.

MUSIC RISES