by Matt Higgins
Although unsure precisely how he would pull it off, Gary reckoned that those details could be worked out along the way. Money would not hold him back. He would self-fund if necessary. He scarcely mentioned his ambition to anyone outside of close friends. He tended to keep plans close to the vest anyway. Besides, he had not been an active pilot among the close-knit worldwide wingsuit community, and he would not be an obvious candidate to attempt a landing. He needed help, though, and providence would provide it in Italy and Zephyrhills, a small town in central Florida.
Chapter 15
A FLYING PHILISTINE
You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
—Ray Bradbury
ZEPHYRHILLS, FLORIDA
In the central part of the Sunshine State, the flat, marshy topography of the Florida coast gives way to green rolling hills, where cumulonimbus clouds throw thick shadows on beef cattle, bent at the neck, grazing near stately oaks dripping gray with Spanish moss. This is a rural place, conservative by temperament, and not an obvious incubator of innovative ideas and products. Yet at the corner of Sky Dive Lane and Air Time Avenue, in a square building, bleached by the sun, an aviation laboratory cranking out wingsuits would radically alter human flight.
The building was headquarters for TonySuits Inc., the largest wingsuit manufacturer in North America, a factory filled with fabric spools of reds, silver, grays, copper, blues (sky, navy, royal), purples, greens (from forest to lime), black, white, yellow, pink, and gold. Inside, workers snatched spools and trimmed lengths of color to be placed on cutting-machine tables. Computer coordinates mapping out size and shape cut fabric, then fed it under sewing machine needles thrumming with thread. The hum of machinery, the movement, and the people talking all lend the factory floor a distinct life and rhythm.
But the liveliest and most colorful aspect of the operation occupies a separate room toward the back, where the eponymous Tony, Tony Uragallo, owner and chief designer, can be found most days hunched monastically at a Juki sewing machine, surrounded by scraps of bright nylon fabric strewn across the floor, the Beatles straining from nearby speakers.
On the verge of turning sixty in 2011, he looked his age. He had a paunch, thinning white hair, and skin freckled by exposure to the Florida sun. His bright blue eyes, though, were lively, flickering with fresh ideas that arrived as suddenly and intensely as the thunderclaps that sweep across central Florida. “I’m not organized,” he would readily admit in a bright cockney accent, describing his methods. “I just start picking up bits and sewing. I found that on the floor. Pick up any fabric you can find.”
In an idiosyncratic sport, he was considered an eccentric. And although he did not embrace the scientific method, Tony was keen to adopt the latest technology. The sports he served with his business were suddenly flooded with technology. Pilots had begun wearing goggles equipped with GPS, depicting speed and altitude in real time on an LCD in the lower right corner. Another GPS device, called a FlySight, created specifically for wingsuiting, provides instant in-flight feedback by beeping into headphones when you reach a designated glide ratio. On the ground, flight data can be downloaded to a laptop to analyze altitude, forward speed, vertical speed, and distance traveled. Linked up with Google Earth satellite data, it even allows users to plot their flight path.
Tony adopted the developments, but he also relied on his instincts. This caused competitors to call him a Philistine, he said. He was an unlikely designer anyway.
As a young man, Tony had worked as a bricklayer on cold, wet job sites while living at his parents’ flat in east London. Weekends he passed in the pub with his mates. He had picked up skydiving in the army and continued after resuming civilian life.
A big part of skydiving calls for sewing skills, needed to build and repair parachutes and jumpsuits, and Tony started fooling around on his mum’s machine. One weekend at the drop zone, he spotted a guy from Arizona wearing a white jumpsuit with a rainbow design. Tony didn’t have money to buy one, so he set out to make one. He biked across London with a quiver of fabric as his raw materials. Listening to rock ’n’ roll while sitting in a warm, dry flat at a sewing machine beat the hell out of the backbreaking labor of bricklaying at the mercy of the elements, and Tony got a notion to start a business catering to skydivers. His father was aghast when Tony asked him for a loan. Men don’t sew for a living, he said. This was 1976.
Undaunted, Tony continued making jumpsuits for sale, slowly building his brand. When he traveled to Florida for a skydiving competition, the sunshine and warm weather convinced him to bolt from rainy old England. “They said, ‘Don’t go to America, there’s too much competition,’” he recalls. “There was a lot of competition, and I was the foreigner. They did reject me for the longest time, and I got a lot of shit from the establishment.”
Again he stuck it out, capturing the notice of the market and eventually becoming the number-one jumpsuit maker. By the 1990s, he had the contract for the French national skydive team, and it was a Tony design that Patrick de Gayardon had modified to fashion his original wingsuit, the very template for the modern suit.
But a decade would pass before Tony made his own wingsuits in 2006. A wingsuit pilot from Boston named Jeff Nebelkopf, who had a background in design and illustration but had never sewed, proposed that they partner up. “Jeff was the wingsuiter,” Tony says. “I wasn’t. He helped me out starting off.”
The man in the field, Jeff traveled to drop zones, offering wingsuit flying lessons to skydivers, taking orders for new suits. Orders rolled in, and soon Tony turned to wingsuits full time, igniting a passion for flying his suits around fat clouds over Florida.
Tony’s approach was to build a suit, then run a few hundred feet down the road to Skydive City, one of the busier drops zones in the state, where he would hop on a load for a test. Flight characteristics fresh in his mind, he would hightail it back to the shop for more modifications. “I’m a trial-and-error dude, not a mathematician,” he admits. “I just make prototypes. Sometimes, before I’ve even finished that one, I’ve got another idea that I should try . . . I think that’s why I’m successful: because I make a lot of prototypes. After it’s been released, I may change it along the way. I’m famous for changing after it’s been released.”
It was hard to argue with his results. He would win wingsuit BASE competitions for flight distance and speed against men half his age. “This old man!” he would say, in mock outrage, echoing his competitors. “This fat old man?!”
By 2010, Tony was on to a design breakthrough for a suit that featured more surface area than its predecessors, and resulted in superior glide. To some minds, the larger suits left a lot to be desired in terms of aesthetics. European manufacturers and pilots compared the relatively square silhouette and thick profile of his suits to inflatable mattresses or a dog’s bed.
Still, resistance to Tony’s suits began to break down when it became clear how well they flew. Soon, pilots sought out Tony, eager to get their hands on one of his creations.
• • •
Mark Sutton was a former officer in the British Army who served with the Gurkha Rifles, fierce Nepalese soldiers whose motto is “Better to die than live a coward.” He had begun skydiving, not with the military, but at a civilian drop zone while stationed in Hong Kong. In 2005, he graduated to a BASE-jumping course at Kjerag, in Norway, and went on to take a wingsuit training course with Loïc’s Fly Your Body organization, in Gap, where the prevailing ethic placed a premium on the skills of the pilot above the characteristics of the suit, a philosophy in antipathy to the inflatable mattresses Tony would turn out.
In the summer of 2010, Mark arrived in Lauterbrunnen with two American wingsuit pilots, Andy West and Barry Holubeck. They had come to jump from the Eiger, which West had famously done with Dean Potter eleven months earlier, opening the highest exit on the mountain, for which they created the portmanteau “Heiger.” That summer, when Mark arrived, Tony happened to be pa
ssing through the valley, and he and Mark happened to meet at the Horner, the pub where BASE jumpers tend to congregate. At the time, Mark owned a small, safe beginner’s suit, and Tony explained that if he was serious about flying he would need to acquire an X-bird, Tony’s latest creation and already rumored to be the most advanced model on the market. “It was a big step up for me at the time,” Mark would recall. “So I said, ‘I have to go and see this thing.’ I ended up placing an order and flying over to Zephyrhills to pick this suit up.”
Mark worked in finance for some of the world’s largest banks, as an interest-rates derivatives trader. He possessed an analytical mind and wanted to know how the suit worked. What was it that made it better? Arriving in Florida in November to take possession of his custom X-bird, he learned that Tony had developed yet another prototype, which provided superior stability. “It’s hard to explain, but when you jump it, you know this is the one you want to be in,” Mark remembered. “Suddenly you’ve been turned into this natural pilot, as opposed to the other ones, which you really have to fly. So even though I’ve just spent a fortune on this new suit, we started playing about with this prototype, which is called Old Navy.”
With Jeff Nebelkopf and Tony, Mark jumped Old Navy at the drop zone down the road from Tony’s factory. “This suit was blowing everybody out of the sky,” he says. “Out of enthusiasm I said, ‘Build me this suit!’”
Every few months, Mark returned to Zephyrhills. And every few months he encountered a slightly altered, improved design. Learning to sew, he took the suit apart, made alterations, and pieced it together again. “Knowing how to sew is one of those skills that might be embarrassing in the pub,” he would say, “but if it gets me a suit I’m impressed with, I’m okay with it.” Meanwhile, Tony, in typical fashion, modified Old Navy until it was no longer recognizable, thus creating a new model he called Apache X.
Despite claims to the contrary, Tony actually knew something about science, specifically Bernoulli’s principle—Bernoulli being Swiss scientist Daniel Bernoulli, who in the eighteenth century published groundbreaking findings on fluid dynamics. “Speed gives you lift,” Tony would say, explaining that an airfoil, or wing, is flat on the bottom but curved on top, and when air hits the airfoil’s leading edge, some of the air travels over the curved top of the wing. This air, moving faster, creates low pressure, which in turn leads to lift, and voilà: Bernoulli’s principle in action.
Other wingsuit manufacturers knew about these principles and likewise created their own supersize high-speed models. These high-performance suits were not meant for greenhorns, which Jeff likened to putting the keys to a Ferrari in the hands of a teenager. “When you put a beginner in a big suit, they’re going to give it everything it has, and the suit is going to take them for a ride,” he says. “Hopefully they can deploy their parachute in time.”
Even experienced pilots found that high-performance suits were more than they bargained for at first. Jeb ordered an Apache, which was rumored to deliver a staggering 3:1 glide ratio.
The new suit from Tony arrived in the mail one day at Perris Valley. Jeb pulled the big black Apache from its packaging and slipped his long limbs inside. He would recall what happened on his first test flight: “I jumped out of the airplane and, dude, I was out of control,” he says. “I couldn’t control the suit at all. All of a sudden I would be going left and all of a sudden I would be going right. All of a sudden the suit would do a 360 . . . I’m like, Uh-oh.”
Each subsequent jump resulted in another wild ride. Yet GPS data revealed glide ratios of 2.8:1, 3:1, sometimes 3.2:1. They were fleeting, but still the possibilities were tantalizing. Finally, on his fourth jump, Jeb pitched in full flight and swung into severe line twists, requiring a nasty cutaway to his reserve. “The suit was terrifying,” he says. “It was the scariest wingsuit I’ve ever flown in my entire life. It’s getting the glide ratio I need, but I can’t control the damn thing.”
He believed the suit was two inches too long. He couldn’t point his toe and alter his control surfaces. Tony insisted the suit was the right size, but finally relented under Jeb’s unwavering argument. When Tony returned the suit, two inches duly trimmed, everything clicked. “It’s perfectly stable,” Jeb recalls, with typical understatement, “perfectly solid. Dude, I sustained like a 3.4-to-1 glide ratio. My flight was like a four-minute skydive. It was the craziest wingsuit flight I’ve ever flown in my entire life.”
He tested the Apache on the big walls of Europe. In the Lauterbrunnen Valley, he flirted with 3:1 glide angles, nearly matching those of his parachute. He dipped a wing midflight into the cascade of Spissbach waterfall. On Hinderrugg, above Walenstadt, he buzzed deep into the Crack. “Once I finally got the hang of that suit, holy, man! I was doing things I could never have imagined doing,” he says. “The precision—I was coming so close to the ground and still had a margin to pull up and fly away.”
This was significant. Although Jeb hadn’t yet found funding to organize a wingsuit-landing attempt, he had lined up major sponsorship for a multi-million-dollar spectacle in China, which would amount to a monumental first for wingsuits if he pulled it off. In the autumn of 2011, Jeb would attempt to fly an Apache through a hole in the side of a mountain.
Chapter 16
BOXES AND BOXES
HENLEY-ON-THAMES, ENGLAND
When Vivienne returned, ending a six-month separation, she and Gary moved out of Windsor, where they had been living, about fifteen miles west to Henley, a town on the upper Thames in Oxfordshire and host to the famous Henley Royal Regatta every July. They leased a storefront on Thameside, across from where antique wooden cruisers tied up at moorings, and Vivienne opened a Chocolate Theatre Café, named after a place operated by a friend in Windsor. The Henley location was well chosen for a café, with plenty of local and tourist traffic, and inside, it was a lively spot punctuated by the steam-shriek of espresso. Customers ordered from big glass cases containing sweet confections, and a menu of soup and sandwiches. Plate-glass windows overlooked a serene stretch of the Thames upriver from the stone arches of Henley Bridge, where oars push sculls against a current patrolled by white swans.
Wending over the bridge on his Honda sport bike, on his forty-minute ride to work in London, Gary would fantasize about landing a wingsuit. He hoped the notoriety would free him from a life as a wage earner, working as a stunt coordinator at TV studios.
Vivienne was busy running a restaurant and could not spare time to help much with managing Gary’s wingsuit ambitions. It was on him to seek sponsorship and manage training, which he did by going abroad in order to improve his limited wingsuit skills.
• • •
BY 2011 GARY HAD made perhaps forty wingsuit jumps, a fraction of the number held by many of the leading pilots, some of whom had exceeded ten thousand. Seeking more experience, Gary traveled to Italy that spring.
Mark Sutton was in Italy that season, too, for the same reason. Closing in on one hundred wingsuit flights, he suddenly had the leisure to dedicate to flying. The meltdown of world financial markets in 2008 had led Mark to a series of positions with various banks where he assisted with setting up emerging-market derivatives-trading operations. Burned out by long hours and stress, and having savings banked to support himself for a while, he took time off to travel, arriving in Arco with his girlfriend for what he said would be a romantic holiday. The fact he just happened to have his wingsuit along in his luggage and there was a large cliff at Brento were bonuses. Each morning, when the weather is right, jumpers gather at a parking lot outside a café renowned for its coffee. Mark was waiting to arrange rides to the trailhead when he spotted Gary. “He’s quite a striking character, so you tend to see him straightaway,” Mark would recall. “He was in boardshorts, and he has his earring. He’s a colorful character. My girlfriend recognized him first.”
Gary and Mark hit it off immediately. They are both British, and Gary was a stuntman, which Mark hoped to be someday. Plus they had a similar assess
ment of acceptable risk.
“We sort of clicked, really,” Mark would recall. “BASE jumpers are a hinky group. I won’t jump with people I don’t feel comfortable with. They have to have the same approach, the same approach to safety. They have to be competent. There are people who want to push it a bit further, which is totally cool. I stay away from those people to keep it safe. Gary had a method to his approach, though he learned how to wingsuit quite recently.”
At the end of their time together in Italy, they agreed to meet in June in Voss, a small city in western Norway, about a hundred miles north of Stavanger. Every year, the city hosts Extremsportveko (Extreme Sports Week), featuring, among other sports, skydiving, BASE jumping, skateboarding, kayaking, and a wingsuit distance competition. While there, Gary made an introduction that would alter his life. “Come meet Tony,” Mark said one day.
“I didn’t know that Tony was Tony Uragallo of TonySuits at the time,” Gary recalls. “It was only during discussion that I realized this is Tony of TonySuits. I was flying an X-bird at the time.”
Mark was already flying an Apache, which he had assisted with developing at Tony’s Zephyrhills shop. “You need one of these,” Mark told Gary. “You need to have an Apache suit.”
Gary placed an order with Tony, who continued traveling through Europe that summer to Switzerland.
In August Mark and Gary met Tony at a drop zone in Cornwall. Tony had just returned from the Crack.
It was the end of the summer of 2011, a time when Jeb Corliss was beginning to get recognized back on the streets of Venice, California. The tall man with the bare scalp and baleful wardrobe had always drawn long stares from citizens, but now many knew who he was, and they rushed forward to request autographs and to have their photos taken with the star of “Grinding the Crack,” a three-and-a-half-minute video created by Gian Autenrieth that Jeb had uploaded to his YouTube channel that August. Set to the song “Sail,” by AWOLNATION—“Maybe I’m a different breed, maybe I’m not listening, so blame it on my ADD, baby”—the video, showing Jeb nearly decapitating Christian Gubser as he dove out of the way, balloons scattering, went viral, with more than a million views by the end of the month, on its way to more than twenty-five million. At the end of the sequence, Jeb removed his helmet and beamed while speaking directly into the camera. “Well, I came extremely close on that one,” he said with a laugh. “Yes, I did.” The song, the editing, the sequence showing a heart-stopping brush with disaster, Jeb’s pure joy . . . everything combined to create unforgettable footage. Yes, viral video in the age of Gangnam Style!