If all goes according to plan, he will land two minutes later in a trawler-like fishing net 20 stories above the ground and only about a third the size of a football field.
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Luke Aikins, 42, who has 18,000 jumps under his belt, completed the jump in Simi Valley, landing in a net measuring 100 feet by 100 feet (30 metres by 30 metres) in a feat broadcast on Fox. In any case, Aikens would have never pulled the ripcord and therefore making it quite pointless. “I’ll just have to deal with the consequences when I land, of wearing the parachute on my back and what it’s going to do to my body”. Just minutes before jump the host for the show relayed the news that the requirement had been lifted.
In a live broadcast from the plane he’ll jump from Aikins says wearing a parachute will make the jump more risky because he’ll have its canister on his back when he hits the net at about 120 miles per hour.
Moments before Aikins falls, you can hear someone explaining they were monitoring weather conditions very closely and that he was told to put the parachute on at one point, but then he was told he could take it off, so he did … which is not something anyone wants to hear before watching a man leap out of a plane.
He jumped with three other skydivers, each wearing parachutes.
The other three opened their chutes at 5,000 feet, leaving Aikins alone with no one to hand him a chute in midair as he has been done before.
When his friend Chris Talley came up with the idea two years ago, Aikins acknowledged he turned it down cold. “She doesn’t support this project”, he said with a sheepish smile.
A couple of weeks later he changed his mind. He’d been the backup jumper in 2012 when Felix Baumgartner became the first skydiver to break the speed of sound during a jump from 24 miles above Earth. He’s been racking them up at several hundred a year ever since.
His father and grandfather were skydivers, and his wife has made 2,000 jumps. The family owns Skydive Kapowsin near Tacoma, Wash.
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Further to his credit, Aiken is a safety and training advisor for the United States Parachute Association (USPA) where he provides advanced skydiving training to elite military Special Forces.
