Bird Dream

by Matt Higgins

  A week later, Heller pursued a motion for dismissal of the charges, arguing that Jeb could not be guilty of reckless endangerment because his client hadn’t actually jumped, and anyway, he had a constitutional right to jump. “This gentleman, I maintain, is an artist and has freedom of expression,” Heller told the court. “His art is not with pen or music; his art is with his body movement.”

  It was an inspired defense, but it would be months before they knew if it was enough to win Jeb his freedom.

  • • •

  In London, Gary continued his own flirtation with the limits of the law. With the city dark before dawn on November 28, 2006, he splashed into the frigid waters of the Thames in central London wearing a dry suit and clutching a dry bag containing his parachute. He wore a wool beanie on his head and wet-suit gloves. Beneath his dry suit he had a radio and a knife.

  During the previous two weeks he had visited Jubilee Gardens, along the river, ten times to gaze at the London Eye, the 443-foot iconic Ferris wheel, a city landmark looming across the Thames from Parliament, Big Ben, and Westminster Abbey. He studied and probed the security setup. Each time he returned, Gary wore different clothes so he wouldn’t be recognized, sometimes donning a cap or glasses or growing a beard. He wandered into a restricted area and observed how security reacted. He talked to the guards and learned that a fresh crew swapped over for a new shift at 7 a.m. “I knew that at five or six o’clock they were probably at their lowest ebb. That was probably a good time for me to strike.”

  For six years, since the structure had been built in observance of the millennium, Gary had fantasized about jumping the London Eye. He had aborted plans several times due to concerns about the tide or winds, but on this day all conditions lined up favorably. He entered the water around 4 a.m. about a quarter of a mile downriver at Festival Pier, and rode an incoming tide beneath the Hungerford Bridge. As he floated in the dark, cold water, the shadow of Westminster Bridge loomed ahead.

  It took Gary forty minutes to bob up on the tide to London Eye Pier, beneath the big wheel. An accomplice watched from shore as Gary arrived and signaled two other men to begin a staged fight, which attracted the attention of eight security guards. That was when Gary got the signal, a voice crackling over static on his radio to make his move. He climbed out of the water and sprinted to the wheel, launching onto a spiral staircase that led into the wheel’s drive mechanism. Once there he cut open his dry suit. He was wearing a dinner jacket and tie beneath, and a harness, which he fastened to the rim of the wheel, hanging on for a ride up. It was 4:40 a.m.

  At ground level a cleaning crew had arrived, working on each car, rotating the wheel to bring the next one into position, and inadvertently giving Gary a ride up.

  Clutching a walkie-talkie, Vivienne waited with her children, Lydia and Kali, in the frigid darkness at a deserted Jubilee Gardens, monitoring Gary’s progress. “We couldn’t draw attention to him,” Vivienne says. “His stunt friends were distracting security. We weren’t watching and looking up. We had to be quiet about it.”

  Hours passed, and finally at the top, four hundred feet above the city at daybreak, Gary cut free from his dry suit and prepared his parachute. Sunrise came at 7:40 that day and Gary watched warm light wash over the waking city. “The visuals for me were amazing,” he says. He waved to the people on the ground to indicate he was jumping soon. A photographer he had hired stood by to capture the moment. And at 7:45 Gary launched. “He gave us the go-ahead, in terms of It’s going to start, on the walkie-talkie,” Vivienne recalls. “But then it was looking up and watching, really. We just see him go, hoping the parachute deploys properly and he lands safely.”

  The jump came off so smoothly that Gary went undetected as he landed in the grass of Jubilee Gardens, behind a long row of plane trees, bark peeling and leaves golden in the autumn air. “The security guards never even knew he jumped the wheel,” says Vivienne, who, along with the kids, gave Gary a hug. After posing for photos, Gary strolled off in his dinner wear, looking like James Bond, in search of a place to grab breakfast with his family.

  He would sell photos of the stunt to the Daily Mail and tell the paper: “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. I’m just attracted to the thrill of jumping off dramatic structures. It’s a sheer adrenaline rush.

  “I certainly wasn’t trying to expose any security concerns. If anything I wanted to highlight what a wonderful attraction the London Eye is.”

  Security did not learn of the stunt until a Mail reporter called for comment. A spokesman for Scotland Yard said it had no complaint regarding the incident and would not be investigating.

  Gary had gotten away clean. But if he thought that notoriety from his jump at the wheel would act as a catalyst to securing support for a landing attempt with a wingsuit, he was mistaken. “Straightaway I thought, Someone is going to pay for that, because this is the Holy Grail,” Gary says, recalling his views about a landing. “Imagine jumping and not deploying a parachute. Wingsuits is a young sport, and I was really excited.”

  But the offers weren’t there. Although he had earned money and a small measure of renown as a BASE jumper, skydiving and wingsuit flying never paid Gary’s bills. Tending to his family, Gary stuck mainly to stunts in TV and the movies. “I just didn’t pursue it,” he says about landing. “I was still maintaining a public presence with BASE jumping, but I wasn’t doing anything in the wingsuit world.”

  Not yet anyway.

  Chapter 12

  THE WINGSUIT LANDING PROJECT

  Fortune favors the bold.

  —Virgil

  RIO DE JANEIRO, APRIL 24, 2007

  In January 2007, Judge Ambrecht threw out the indictment, saying he was moved by Jeb Corliss’s preparation and the care he had taken not to cause injury, to either himself or others. He cited the fact that Jeb had worn a parachute and studied traffic-light patterns at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street in order to land when all the cars were stopped. In an eight-page decision, he wrote: “Before this court is a professional BASE jumper, attempting to jump off of the Empire State Building with appropriate safety equipment. To hold that defendant’s conduct rises to this level of blameworthiness is manifestly unjust and contrary to prevailing law.”

  To commemorate his victory, Jeb climbed out a window at Heller’s office, onto a ledge nine stories above the sidewalk, for a photographer for the New York Times. Clad in his black coat, a black knit cap pulled low to his shades to guard against the winter chill, he stood high above New York’s streets, looking serious, but triumphant.

  But in the Times and other papers the following day, legal experts, police, and a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office expressed outrage and dismay at the court’s decision. They wondered if the court really wanted the Empire State Building and other landmarks to become magnets for jumpers. And District Attorney Robert Morgenthau’s office mulled options for an appeal.

  In the meantime, the owners of the Empire State Building had sued Jeb for $12 million for “endangering customers, employees, tenants, visitors, and the building’s reputation.”

  • • •

  To pry Jeb’s mind from the coming legal showdown, Jeb’s friend Luigi Cani, who had been so instrumental with wingsuit testing in preparation for landing, coaxed his friend to Rio de Janeiro. Luigi wanted help with a project promoting efforts to have Christ the Redeemer (Cristo Redentor), the iconic seven-hundred-ton statue of reinforced concrete and soapstone rising from the half-mile-high granite dome of Corcovado—named one of the New Seven Wonders of the World. Standing 125 feet tall, arms outstretched north and south in cruciform, Christ the Redeemer offers residents of Rio’s rich and poor sectors—the latter living in the infamous favelas—a familiar benediction upon stepping out each morning.

  Three days shy of the first anniversary of the Empire State Building episode, Jeb and Luigi rode in a red helicopter clattering a half mile above Rio’s breathtaking scenery. Beyond the green mountains, hillside slums, and h
igh-rise complexes, the coastline sweeps all the way to Sugar Loaf, a thirteen-hundred-foot hunk of rock like a canine tooth in the mouth of Guanabara Bay. The view beyond the city took in islands and peninsulas breaching the blue Atlantic like the spine of some great sea monster. Stepping beneath the whirring blades and onto the skids they launched for Corcovado, buzzing the big statue and thrilling throngs of tourists gathered on the pedestal.

  Back on the ground, they discussed getting closer to the statue. Jeb planned to fly near enough to dip beneath an outstretched arm eighty feet off the deck. On the skids, Jeb blocked out the arresting scenery and homed in on the statue’s arm, then slashed beneath.

  When it was his turn, Luigi aimed for the upper portion of the statue, closing within fifty feet of the shoulder with an ease that surprised him. Soaking in the reaction of the spectators below, he lost his bearings for a moment and, moving at more than a hundred miles an hour, suddenly found the mountain fast approaching his face. Fear in his throat, Luigi figured he was going in, a splash of blue sky and lush vegetation his last sight. But a survival instinct kicked in, and an evasive maneuver left him brushing the bushes that, like a beard, cover the face of the craggy mountain. Green blurred beneath Luigi’s chin, fabric from his wingsuit snagging and snapping off branches like the vibrating arm on an electric hedge trimmer. What happened next was not the result of conscious thought. Operating on years of fine-tuned muscle memory, Luigi reflexively tracked away from the mountain and over a rain forest. With altitude between him and the forest, Luigi reached back and pulled his parachute handle. Lines stretching, the canopy opened, slowing everything down—except Luigi’s heartbeat. His body gorged with cortisol and adrenaline, his fine motor skills abandoned him. With his hands palsied from fright, he recalls, “I couldn’t control my parachute handles.”

  When Luigi landed unhurt, an inspection of his wingsuit revealed bits of bushes, twigs, and leaves clinging to the nylon fabric. He had become the first to survive contact with the ground while flying a wingsuit. It was a stunning achievement, and he received a round of congratulations. But Luigi was badly shaken and simply grateful to be alive.

  Jeb, though, was profoundly impressed and inspired. A vision for landing took shape in his mind. The statue’s scale and height, a half mile above the city, had allowed them to line up their flight paths from the helicopter. If Jeb built a massive marker—say, of balloons—he would have something to line up on while jumping from a helicopter a great distance away. Another realization was that the statue’s perch, two thousand feet above the city, had also permitted them to soar by with sufficient time and altitude remaining to deploy their chutes before landing. The margin was so great that Luigi had even made contact and lost control and still had plenty of altitude to correct and get his parachute performing. Parachutes are reliably effective at an altitude of two hundred feet or greater. Once below 150 feet with a wingsuit, you would be taking your chances. A pilot at that altitude would be more or less committed to landing: he would either make it or die trying. But if a landing area were hundreds of feet high, a pilot could approach and then, if not lined up properly, bail out and pitch his chute at the last moment. In other words, he would not be locked in. He would have a crucial out.

  Taken together, on the flight back to California from Brazil, Jeb figured he finally had a blueprint for landing.

  • • •

  An ocean away in Gap, a city of 38,000 in the French Alps, Loïc had, after flying down the mountain over Verbier in such dramatic and celebrated fashion five years earlier, docked on the wing of an airborne glider while flying his wingsuit. Setting his wingsuit down on terra firma was another matter altogether. “I’m not really pursuing right now,” he said about a wingsuit landing. “But the idea is interesting. I think it’s doable.”

  Loïc believed that a skilled pilot could land on a snow slope, though he acknowledged that forward speed could pose a problem. Even slowing to seventy-five miles an hour “is quite fast to land headfirst on snow,” he explained with a laugh. “A big try! The basic idea is getting parallel to the snow so we don’t have a vertical speed at all, so we don’t have a shock when we touch the snow, then touch and slide. You can try it now, and you can stand out of it now with the technique I have right now. But I don’t really feel like taking this risk, because I think it’s a little stupid and not really interesting because you might do it well one time and try another time and crash and die. It will be interesting to do if it’s controlled and not just a try.”

  Eight thousand miles to the south of Loïc, in Bo-Kaap, Cape Town’s charming Muslim quarter, where a shrill call to prayer punctures the afternoon from the minaret of a mosque, Maria von Egidy was in search of a pilot willing to test her design ideas. The world’s unlikeliest wingsuit designer, von Egidy had never been skydiving. But she became obsessed with human flight from the moment she set eyes on a wingsuit, when a pilot approached about sewing a pocket on his suit to hold a GPS device. “Because it’s such an unusual-looking thing, I was fascinated by it,” she would remember.

  She had fashioned a career from creating costumes for the make-believe of movies and TV. Yet a wingsuit conveyed the power of flight for real. “Human flight is such an ancient dream,” she says. “Everybody’s got that dream. It’s something so archetypal and inside of us all.”

  With the eye of a seamstress, she fixed what she believed were design flaws, cranking out prototypes on a sewing machine, which were tested by a rangy South African pilot named Julian Boulle. They created a suit called the GS1, incorporating fresh design elements, such as a wing that stretched from wrist to ankle, for more surface area. They brought the suit to market under the brand name Jii-Wings in 2005. The suit received good reviews, but they didn’t sell many.

  In the meantime, von Egidy had a vision of a suit that wouldn’t require a parachute—a suit that would contain properties necessary for landing. She had drawings and sought investors for the $400,000 she would need for prototypes and testing. After a falling-out with Boulle, she needed a test pilot, and she approached Jeb. “He’s a believer, and I think that’s really important,” she would say. “You have to believe it can be done.”

  Jeb was skeptical, though; not of landing but of von Egidy’s method. “She makes great wingsuits,” he said. “She’s nice, but her ideas on landing are not reality—no way I would go for her plan.”

  • • •

  Which plan was best, and created optimal conditions for a successful landing, continued to be a matter of debate and deliberation. One person who weighed in on the discussion was Jean Potvin, a physics Ph.D. and professor of physics and calculus at St. Louis University. For thirteen years Potvin had performed parachute-inflation research for the U.S. Army, a field of study he continued at the Parks College Parachute Research Group, at St. Louis University. A skydiver himself, Potvin had made more than 2,500 jumps, though none with a wingsuit. “All of this is technically all possible,” he said in a pleasant Quebecois timbre when asked about landing without a parachute. “The thing I’m not sure is, what’s your margins in terms of safety or likelihood to crash?”

  Potvin thought of wingsuits in terms of airplanes, which have ailerons, rudders on the wings that rely on deflection to allow a plane to turn. The slower a plane flies, the more deflection is required to turn. Faster-moving planes require less deflection, but there’s a trade-off in precision. “When you go fast, your inputs have to be much smaller and metered more accurately,” Potvin explained. It was the same with wingsuits. Screaming along at seventy miles an hour or more, even a slight movement would be exaggerated. Any slipup at such speeds, while flying close to the ground or a landing apparatus, would mean hitting the deck hard.

  Still, Potvin believed a landing could be performed, and that to do so would require a flare. The key to a flare is glide, which means increasing lift to cover a lot more ground for every foot of descent. Airplanes and birds both flare on landing. Although weighing several hundred thousand pounds, a com
mercial airliner comes in and performs a flare to increase lift and drag, swooping almost parallel to the ground and touching down first on its rear landing gear, adroitly reducing what could potentially be a catastrophic impact. Mimicking the action of a bird’s feathers, aircraft flare by altering their wings using flaps along the trailing edge, resulting in less downward and forward speed and an uneventful landing.

  Parachutes flare on landing, too. “Ram-air canopies have a basically 3:1,” Potvin said about glide slope. “For every foot of descent, they cover three feet forward. For your landing, what you need to do is have a flat glide slope.”

  Even under a parachute, hitting the ground at forty miles an hour would be a painful endeavor. So a parachutist flying a ram-air canopy flares, say, a dozen feet off the deck, by pulling down on toggles that alter the shape of the canopy, converting forward speed into temporary lift. It’s an act that relies on timing and precise action.

  Wingsuits, though, due to their design and small surface area, do not allow for much of a flare. To flare a wingsuit sufficiently for landing on flat ground would require either radically modifying the suit or training a pilot to execute a near-impossible maneuver moments before impact. “If you land on a horizontal surface, you need to be able to flare your landing,” Potvin said. “That is, to increase the glide tremendously so you’re almost moving parallel to the ground so that your descent rate is very small.”

  But there’s one other way to move parallel to the ground: land on a decline. “Imagine you’re falling at a 1:1 glide ratio,” he explained. “If you have a slope that’s 1:1 or a little less than that, you’re going to hit the ground—relative to the ground—at small speed. And that makes the whole thing possible.”