Felix Baumgartner, Space-Jump Legend, Dies In Shocking Paragliding Accident!
Austrian sky-diver Felix Baumgartner, known for his record stratosphere leap, has died in a paragliding crash near Porto SantElpidio, Italy. Officials, including the towns mayor Massimiliano Ciarpella, confirmed that the accident took place just east of the local beach.
Multiple Italian news outlets say the 56-year-old athlete was flying along the Adriatic after launching from nearby Fermo. He apparently lost control of his wing for reasons still under investigation. A tourist on the beach saw the descent turn dangerous and called for help.
Baumgartner struck the shallow end of a pools at a crowded campsite, landing on a woman who suffered non-life-threatening injuries. Eyewitnesses said he appeared to suffer cardiac arrest before hitting the water.
Just a few hours before the tragedy, he had shared a light-hearted story on Instagram with the simple note, “Too much wind.” Massimiliano Ciarpella, the mayor of Porto SantElpidio, quickly posted on Facebook that the town was “deeply affected” and remember-ed Baumgartner as a symbol of courage.
Baumgartner had leaped from the Petronas Towers in Malaysia and even the giant Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio, but he became a household name in 2012 when he dove from a pressurized pod nearly 24 miles up.
Jump From The Stratosphere In 2012
Image: Red Bull Content Pool/ABACA/IMAGO
That record-setting jump from the stratosphere made him an icon; few dare to drift above 39 kilometers, yet he floated there with only his suit between him and the thin air.
When he finally let go, he fell fast enough to shatter the sound barrier, rushing past 1342 kilometers per hour, a speed that still sounds impossible. Standing outside his tiny capsule against the black sky, he took a second to drink it all in, time almost pausing at the edge of space.
As he plummeted toward Earth, his stomach dropped faster than a jet on take-off; by the time he crossed 128,000 feet, he was hurtling through the air at over 840 miles per hour, way past the speed of sound.
The jump-bannered Red Bull Stratos project-spent six long years in the workshop, dark rooms, and endless meetings, gradually turning wild ideas into practical checklists so nothing was left to chance.
“We figured we’d design the capsule, sew up the pressure suit, repeat tough training for a spell, then float to the stratosphere, rip off a big jump, and glide home at supersonic speed,” Baumgartner remembers.
“The truth is, we’d stroll into a briefing with three headaches and wind up dragging five new ones back, and eight hours later many problems were still unsolved.” Hoisting Baumgartner skyward meant building a helium balloon roughly the size of thirty-three football fields and tipping the scales at 3,708 pounds.
Moving it carefully-enough to avoid pinholes in material ten times thinner than your average sandwich bag-demanded a crew of twenty who had to act like a choreographed dance.
Yet the hidden dragon lurking beneath all those records was really inside Baumgartner himself: his brain had to swallow long minutes of silence, spin, and doubt at altitudes where no human had ever thawed.
The space-age suit, a soft-metal hodgepodge of circuits, glass, and fabric, also needed to pat him with gentle air pressure while triple-guarding him from chilly-osphere chills of minus seventy-two Celsius, or minus ninety-seven-point-six Fahrenheit.
“It’s really uncomfortable,” Baumgartner explained. “You can’t move at all. Breathing feels like it passes through a thick pillow. You’re cut off from everything outside. Once the visor clamps shut, all you hear is the sound of your own breath.”
Just After Touching Down The Earth
Just after touching down, he admitted it took a moment to grasp what he was feeling on the way back down to Earth.
“I wiped away tears more than once because I was floating there, remembering all the times I imagined how this would look and feel,” he said. “That picture in your mind becomes a tiny preview of the real experience, yet the reality is way bigger than I had anticipated.”
Who Is Felix Baumgartner?
Felix Baumgartner is an Austrian skydiver and BASE jumper most famous as the man who fell from the edge of space. He holds several world records in parachuting, BASE jumping, race car driving, and even in aerobatic helicopter flying, according to Red Bull.
As part of Red Bulls roster, he rode a helium balloon-up capsule and leaped from just over 128,000 feet above Roswell, New Mexico.
In 2012, Felix Baumgartner climbed more than 24 miles into the stratosphere and, with a giant helium balloon, slowly jumped back to Earth; during his nine-minute free-fall he broke the sound barrier-now he was traveling faster than a jet fighter. Red Bull clocks his top speed at 843.6 mph, roughly 1.25 times Mach 1.
That single jump also netted him three shiny new Guinness World Records.
What Exactly Is Paragliding?
Encyclopedia Britannica says paragliding is “the sport of flying parachutes with design tweaks that make them glide farther and faster.”
Unlike a hang glider, a paraglider has no hard metal frame for a pilot to cling to. Instead, its soft canopy acts like a wing, filled with air through specially placed vents at the front-that’s the “ram-air” effect everyone talks about, writes Britannica.
