Watch This BASE Jumper Cheat Death
My job involves wearing ironed pants and pressing tiny buttons with letters on them. If I wanted to die, I’d have to make a decent effort. Professional BASE jumper Jeb Corliss dresses up like a monstrous bird of prey and flies off mountains. Any day he does not die — even when he crashes into a mountain and falls thousands of feet — must be a pleasant surprise.
On Monday, the 35-year-old, who’s made a name for himself jumping off really, really high stuff (Eiffel Tower, the Space Needle in Seattle) while wearing a real-life Batsuit, snagged a cliff on Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa, breaking both legs in midair. Watch it here.
From The Telegraph:
A spokesman for Table Mountain, Merle Collins, said Mr Corliss was “lucky to be alive” after he fell more than 200 feet from the 3,500 foot mountain before landing on a sloped side known as Africa Face.
“He managed to release his emergency chute and we believe he would have died without it,” she said.
He was recovered from close to the base of the mountain by air ambulance and taken to a private hospital in the city where he was admitted to intensive care.
It’s frustrating trying to make out what happens in the YouTube clip, and so it’s hard to determine exactly how this happened. It could’ve been “a strange gust of wind,” says Corliss source and fellow jumper Joby Ogwyn. At 0:16, all you see are the ground and some cliffs — and a tiny human speck that seems to glide over it. At 0:33, you can see Corliss fly into the rocks and carom away from “cameraman flyer” Jeff Nebelkopf. Then you see Corliss’ team putting him on a stretcher. Kinda disappointing.
Goddamn, I can’t wait for a postcrash interview with this guy. A hospital spokesman who talked to Corliss during treatment (surgical intensive care for multiple fractures) told The Telegraph, “He smiled at me and said, ‘Tell them I feel the best I ever have.’” Of course.
Because pain and injury are nothing to a guy who was arrested trying to jump off the Empire State Building and who regularly dives 3,500 feet without using a parachute.
The risks involved are literally immeasurable. The New York Times quotes a skydiving physics professor at Saint Louis University who confesses, “The thing I’m not sure of is your margins in terms of safety, or likelihood to crash.” A guy who goes by the nickname Flying Dude tells the paper, “You might do it well one time and try another time and crash and die.”
Watch Jeb’s wing-suit demo here:
PREVIOUSLY IN MAN’S FLYING:
• Wingsuit Stuntman Soars Through China Mountains
• THIS Is How You Advertise a New Camera
