Click on the video above to see Luke Aikins jump out of a plane at 25,000ft without a parachute before landing safely.
Advertisement
Moments before hitting the safety net, Aikins rolled over onto his back to land in the right position.
And like they say, “behind every successful man there is a woman”, well, we don’t know about that but he sure did jump into the arms of his wife, Monica, after the stunt.
He didn’t elaborate but the jump is being broadcast on Fox television as part of a one-hour TV special. “It’s incredible, this thing that just happened”.
But Aikins nearly didn’t get his chance to complete the jump as he wanted to.
But Aikins disclosed that wearing a parachute would have made the turn onto his back just before impact with the net “far more unsafe”.
Just minutes before jump the host for the show relayed the news that the requirement had been lifted.
After two minutes of freefall, he will attempt to become the first skydiver to safely land in a net.
Aikins is 42 years old and had previously executed over 18,000 jumps. Then, the three accompanying skydivers opened their chutes and seemed to rise up away from Aikins, as he fell alone. If he can pull it off, he will put his name in the history books as the only skydiver to go from plane to planet Earth without a parachute. One skydiver videotaped the jump, another trailed smoke to mark Aikins’ descent and a third collected the oxygen tank Aikins needed for the first 10,000 feet of his fall. “And we’ll show you what’s possible”, Mr Aikins said.
Advertisement
The idea of pulling off the death-defying stunt was not actually Aikins’, but that of his friend, Chris Talley, who proposed it about two years ago. “I’ll help you find somebody to do it, ‘” he told The Associated Press as he trained for the jump last week. He’s been racking them up at several hundred a year ever since.
