Thinking+Inside+the+Box

Behind the Death-Defying, Record-Setting Wingsuit Jump
Two years ago, PM contributing editor James Vlahos profiled Jeb Corliss, a BASE jumper seeking to become the first person to survive a parachute-less jump in a wingsuit from 2000 feet up. But this week, while Corliss watched from California, Englishman Gary Connery pulled off the feat.

At around 3 pm this Wednesday, the renowned BASE jumper Jeb Corliss should have been zipping himself into a wingsuit. He should have boarded a black helicopter, flown up to 2400 feet, and jumped out. He should have spread his arms and legs, turning the suit’s nylon panels into wings, and streaked through the skies like a missile. And most of all, he should have been the one to finally shatter limits of flight and human mortality as he became the first wingsuit pilot to jump from an aircraft and land without the help of a parachute.

But it wasn't so. The feat has long been Corliss’s most cherished ambition (see the 2010 Popular Mechanics cover story about his plans) and almost nobody else on earth possesses the requisite skill and audacity to pull it off. But Corliss was at home in southern California on Wednesday, transfixed like any other spectator as an Internet video feed showed a 42-year-old British man named Gary Connery nabbing the coveted record by plunging into a landing pad of cardboard boxes.

The achievement wasn’t quite the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk or Chuck Yeager in his X-1. But a chute-less wingsuit landing has long a been a major goal of Corliss and a handful of the world’s other top wingsuit pilots—few of whom, apparently, had even heard of Connery until a couple of months ago. When Corliss first caught of wind of Connery’s plans, he suspected it was an April Fool’s joke. When he realized that this wasn’t the case, he thought that Connery "was absolutely insane. I genuinely believed that what he was going for was impossible," Corliss tells PM

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