As legendary stuntman Felix Baumgartner has died whilst paragliding in Italy, the Mirror looks back at his historic jump from the edge of space that shot him to fame
In a tragic incident whilst paragliding in Italy, legendary stuntman Felix Baumgartner has died aged 56.
The stuntman is said to have crash-landed in a holiday resort’s swimming pool in Porto Sant’Elpidio, Fermo, according to local media, sadly injuring an employee who was on the ground.
She has been taken to hospital but is not reported to be in a serious condition. The daredevil is said to have complained of feeling unwell whilst he was paragliding, before the commercially trained pilot lost control of the craft.
The Austrian stuntman shot to fame after embarking on a daredevil jump from the edge of space itself back in 2012.
Felix, it is thought, went into cardiac arrest whilst he was still in the air, and after crashing into the pool, which was filled with playing children, he was rushed by air ambulance to the Torrette Hospital in Ancona. Despite the best efforts of the emergency services, he was pronounced dead.
READ MORE: Felix Baumgartner’s last tragic Instagram post before fatal paragilde crash
It was nearly 13 years ago when Felix undertook the stunt for Red Bull Stratos that would quickly catapult him to fame due to its unbelievably risky and high-profile nature – and it took him six years to prepare.
After his many years of preparation, he stood on the very edge of space, poised to jump from 127,852 feet – a whopping 24 miles.
“I’m standing there on top of the world outside of a capsule in space and in the stratosphere. I looked around the sky above me was completely black,” Baumgartner said to CNN Sports, “I was really trying to inhale that moment.”
Over eight million people watched the stunt on livestream, and heard the Austrian stuntman utter the now-iconic words, “Sometimes you have to go up to understand how small you are. I’m coming home now.”
Felix had to don a pressure space suit for the jump, which broke the sound barrier and, a deeply uncomfortable item, it took him a long time to get used it.
Only able to hear his own breath and feeling totally cut off from the rest of the world once he was wearing it, the stuntman struggled, so he enlisted the help of experts like sports psychologists and psychiatrists to help him build the mental endurance to wear it for many hours at a time.
The suit was not the only difficult aspect of the preparation: there was also the small matter of constructing the apparatus to get Felix up to the edge of space in the first place.
The team designed a helium balloon that was incredibly delicate – and vast. The size of more than 30 football pitches, the material was extremely thin, and could easily be ripped, so it took around 20 people to move it carefully.
The first part of the jump was unlike anything Felix had ever undertaken before, and he was completely unable to train for it. Skydiving in space isn’t like a normal skydive – the same gravitational rules don’t apply – so for over four minutes he was in total freefall, spinning in one direction, and then another, at ever-increasing speed.
The stuntman couldn’t train for this aspect of his daredevil jump, so he found the sensation truly “alarming”.
“This was a very alarming moment because there is no protocol,” He said, about the jump, which saw him fall towards the earth faster than the speed of sound, at 1357.64 miles per hour. “It’s like sailing without wind meaning your skills do not work.”
Eventually, conditions returned to familiarity, allowing him to lean into the experience and enjoy it more, and once he was finally able to utilise up his parachute, he could also open his space suit’s visor, allowing him to breathe real air for the first time in hours.
Once he was on the ground, he had to wait for confirmation that he had managed to break the record he was looking for and broken the speed of sound, and he was satisfied to learn he had managed it, and that his hard work was not in vain.
“At that moment, I was really happy and satisfied because to me, breaking the speed of sound as a human, the first human in history, that was definitely something,” he told CNN.