A daredevil skydiver on Saturday became the first to jump from a height of 25,000 feet (7,620 metres) without a parachute, landing in a net in southern California.
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“I’m nearly levitating, it’s incredible”, Aikins told an interviewer at the end of the Fox broadcast. I mean the words I want to say I can’t even get out of my mouth.
One of them was tasked with helping him remove the oxygen mask he had to wear for the first 10,000ft of the jump.
After a two-minute free-fall, Aikins flipped onto his back as he hit the net, which was suspended 200ft above ground.
Aikins initially wore a parachute for precautionary measures, and right before the jump he decided otherwise saying, “the need to wear a parachute would have made the jump more risky because of the need to adjust his position as he approached the net” he told The Telegraph. The skydiver said he was committed to using the net, and would never pull the parachute’s ripcord, but was more anxious about the additional weight on his back and how it would affect his landing. Aikins left the plane without the chute.
“Whenever people attempt to push the limits of what’s considered humanly possible, they’re invariably described as insane”, said Aikins before the jump. Two years back when his friend Chris Talley approached him with the idea, Aikins had turned it down.
A skydiver by profession, he has eighteen thousand jumps under his belt.
Aikins had previously done more than 18,000 parachute jumps and performed a variety of stunts, including from “Ironman 3”.
His father and grandfather were skydivers, and his wife has made 2 000 jumps.
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He has also provided advanced skydiving training to some of America’s elite military special forces.
