Soooo… do you think he had life insurance for his wife & kid in case something went wrong?
I can’t imagine any insurance company giving this guy a policy.
“Yes, hello, I need some life insurance. I’m going to jump out of a plane with no parachute.”
I have jumped a number of times & balloon regularly; the two activities do/not occur in similar weather. The start/stop of a gust near the ground could come to late to make adjustments for. The net was 100’ x 100’; therefore dead center is 50’ in. He landed about 15’ from the edge. He used up 70% of his margin of error. The day it happened was obviously chosen in advance as it’s not easy to get crowds & live TV to a spur-of-the-moment event. As I said earlier, having crowds in the stands & live TV only adds to the pressure of doing it if the weather was marginal that day. Finally, if there was a bad outcome, his wife & young son would witness his demise, which is always good for years of therapy.
I agree he doesn’t deserve a Darwin Award, which is why I specifically mentioned the Darwin Honorable Mention category. Something that he fits to a T.
The Darwin Awards are given to people who remove themselves from the gene pool in some spectacularly stupid way. The only live winner I know of is the guy who replaced a burned-out fuse in his truck with a .22 caliber cartridge. When the replacement “fuse” blew, it removed his ability to reproduce.
Luke Aikens gambled, against all odds, that he could fall straight down into a 100’ x 100’ foot net 25,000 ft. from his jump vehicle. The chance of having no cross winds, updrafts or downdrafts on a 4.7 mile fall is very nearly nil. He missed a Darwin Award by a mere 15 feet. Controlled risk, indeed!
This is not a heroic or especially smart fellow.
Yeah, but I’m pretty sure he got laid last night.
Do you have a cite for the part I bolded? Watching the video, he seems to be at least 25-30 feet from the edge of the net to me.
You must have a different definition of “survivor” and “blunder” than I do. Either that or you don’t quite understand the Darwin Awards.
<sigh> Luke Aikins did not gamble against all odds. If he’d have had someone dump him out of the plane while he was sedated as part of plan for him to land in the net safely, he would be gambling against all odds. This was the exact opposite of that: a carefully planned and rehearsed and engineered performance.
And he didn’t miss a Darwin Award by 15 feet. Do you think Roger Chafee, Gus Grissom and Ed White deserve a Darwin Award? :dubious:
Just like passengers airlines cheat when using guidance lights on landing?
It does remind me of a VASI or PAPI approach guidance system.
Diving to a target far below is not extremely challenging for an experienced skydiver. It is difficult and requires a lot of training, practice and skill (and money- skydiving isn’t cheap), but what Aikins did isn’t that much different from a skydiver diving to a formation a long way below him or her. In fact, a lot of skydivers really enjoy diving and being one of the last ones out of the plane is a desirable position when building a large formation. So from a technical standpoint lining up with and getting to a target is something lots of skydivers can do.
To help him stay on track, Aikins had a light system surrounding the net (I posted a video link in post #32). Another factor critical to his success was selecting the right exit point. The plane used GPS for that. Wind could have been a problem but they sent up a weather balloon before the plane took off which gave them valuable data on winds aloft. There was also a meteorologist in the hangar monitoring conditions on the ground. They showed his station several times and the wind was steady out of the southwest at 5-8 mph. The strongest gust I saw was 12 mph, not enough to cause any problems.
What made it so risky is the fact that he gets one shot at it; if he misses he dies. If a skydiver misses the formation he/she makes fall rate or course corrections and tries again. The ground is still (hopefully) thousands of feet below. So Aikins’ odds of failure weren’t terribly high, it was the stakes that were high.
Upthread Spiderman called it a stunt and I agree. I said I wouldn’t try it in a million years. I like having two parachutes on my back in case something goes wrong with Plan A. I have never made a BASE jump (another activity where you usually only get one shot at success) and I have no desire to. That type of activity is all about the adrenaline rush. Don’t get me wrong, an adrenaline rush is great but it’s not why I enjoyed skydiving. And after doing it a while I stopped getting that rush. What I enjoyed was the feeling of flying around in the sky like Superman. There’s no other experience like it. Diving down to a formation and linking up with other skydivers is incredible, as is doing flips, barrel rolls and so on. But having a safety backup (which I never had to use) is important to me, and Aikins didn’t have a Plan B.