by Matt Higgins
Dropping away down the slope, Jeb faded in the distance and disappeared altogether. “My heart keeps going like this,” Joby said in the aftermath, tapping his chest. “I knew he could do it. I knew he would do it. I don’t know that I’ve ever been so nervous for someone else doing something . . . I can’t wait to get down there and give him a big hug and tell him—”
“Epic shit!” Jokke interjected. “Epic stuff, man!”
Jeff called out to the crowd below, “Black Draguuuuuun!!!” The other pilots joined, and they held the note, and the crowd roared in reply. Monica the interpreter was among them, tears running down her cheeks. “I’m nervous for him,” she explained between sobs. “It was the most exciting moment for me.”
• • •
SAPPED OF ENERGY, JEB flew on, legs shaking, toes curling, his suit vibrating. He needed to get on the ground fast. Darting beneath a cable car, he dumped high, slowing everything down as he swung lazily beneath his canopy in a pendulum motion. Lining up for landing on the bridge, he hoped not to hit trees or snap his legs on the roadway. Trembling, his brain on fire, he touched down at a slight trot.
Afterward, he was whisked to a press conference. Surrounded by pots of colorful flowers and women in traditional Han dress standing at attention, members of the media and dignitaries mingled, and bouquet in hand, a laurel around his neck, a smile on his face, Jeb’s bare head still sticky with sweat, he smiled contentedly, the very picture of poise. “I really enjoy wingsuit flying, because it’s the closest thing I’ve ever come to feeling like a bird and actually flying,” he told a Chinese reporter. “It gives me the ability to fly great distances very close to trees, people, everything. And the wingsuit made this jump possible. Without a wingsuit, you would not be able to jump out of a helicopter, fly through a mountain, fly down the mountain, and open a parachute. It makes impossible things possible. And that’s what I like to do—I like to try to do things that are impossible, and the wingsuit is making me capable of doing things that weren’t possible ten years ago.”
What’s your next goal? the reporter asked.
“The next real project I want to do is to land a wingsuit without deploying a parachute. That’s a goal that I’ve been working on for six years. And I will do it.” It would take time, he explained, adding, “It’s expensive.”
Pausing, Jeb stared into the distance as if turning some thought over in his mind. The reporter waited expectantly. But no words came, just the most beatific expression, and Jeb just laughed, a pure laugh.
Chapter 18
A MEETING OF THE MINDS
Four days after Tianmen Shan, on a flight from Zhangjiajie back to Beijing, Matt, the Disgruntled Dragon, read a novel while the other pilots peered at POV footage from the mountains that week, playing on their laptop screens. Equipoise between a thoughtful, restrained quality and sharp candor makes Matt unique among his fellow pilots. When he put down his book to weigh in over the jet’s roar on the subject of landing a wingsuit without a parachute, he spoke of Jeb’s connections in entertainment and his single-minded pursuit in pulling off such a large production in a fringe sport. If anyone could figure out how to land a wingsuit, Matt said, it would be Jeb.
Matt had ideas for how it could be done. He suggested pulling on a motorcycle helmet and a neck brace and landing in deep powder snow in, say, Grand Targhee Resort, in Wyoming’s Teton Range. It would require a forecast calling for a nice isothermal band, with powder snow piling up ten feet or so. And it would require selecting the right slope, with the proper pitch, and friends to dig him out afterwards. But it was doable.
“Every single wingsuiter here has their vertical descent rate and forward speed down to a survivable number,” he said about a landing attempt. “Deep snow, for sure. Everyone here can get their vertical descent in the twenties and forward speed under sixty or eighty miles an hour. It’s not that fast.”
Still, there were good reasons for caution. “I would never want to risk my neck,” he said. “There’s no amount of money that would convince me to risk paralysis. It’s survivable. If you did it once, you may not want to do it again.”
Back on the ground in Beijing, Barry picked up the subject, essentially arriving at the same conclusion. Seated in the back of a taxicab crawling the superhighways and eight-lane byways of smog-bound Beijing, returning to the Radisson hotel where the pilots were put up, he said, “Each year the pilots get better, and the technology last year really stepped up.” And yet, he believed, any landing would require a next-generation suit—not to mention a set of steel balls. “The commitment that it’s going to take as a pilot to go past that point of no return—that’s the biggest question. The speeds are there. The downward speed is there. Getting rid of some of the forward speed: that’s the issue. In order to produce that slow descent rate, the forward speed is quite high. Some of what the technology in the wingsuit is giving us . . .” He paused for the right words. “If someone winds up in a bad situation, we’re getting into the realms of what’s survivable.”
After the cabdriver was paid, Barry stood on a sidewalk outside the hotel, the Chinese capital covered in smog, skyscrapers vanishing in the clouds like Jack’s beanstalk. Barry got down to the nub of the matter. “Repeatedly landing a suit with current technology?” he asked. “No.” Then, characterizing the idea of touching down on a slope, any slope, as something less than a true landing, he said: “If you say land a wingsuit, what I would think is level ground, and they’re going to fly in and they’re going to land.”
• • •
Seven time zones and half a world away in Henley, Gary Connery had something similar in mind.
Jeb’s flight through Tianmen Shan was viewed, they said, by tens of millions on Chinese TV. The stunt certainly made news around the world. Jeb would sit for interviews on Today and Good Morning America. Newspapers picked up the story, word spreading further through social media and on BASE and skydiving message boards.
When Gary heard, he knew one thing for certain: soon enough someone would fork over the money Jeb needed to build his landing apparatus, and then it would be game over, Gary. Grabbing his X-bird, Gary headed straight for Devon, in the West Country, and jumped out on load after load at a drop zone at Dunkeswell, his mind turning the whole time. When he returned, Gary knew what he had to do. He made a vow to clear his schedule of all work commitments so that he could dedicate all of his time to preparing for a landing. He’d had several false starts, but this was a promise to himself he intended to finally keep.
Gary would be judicious about taking on additional jobs. With several commitments to fulfill, he spent October working, socking away his earnings for what would be a lean several months when his and Vivienne’s savings would be required to float them, when they might need to dip into debt for added expenses related to all the travel and training necessary for landing.
Come November, having tied up loose ends with stunt work, Gary boarded a flight for Florida, joining Mark Sutton in Zephyrhills, where the Apache that Gary had commissioned from Tony was finally finished, and ready for testing. Over several days, Gary made five jumps in the Apache, flying over the flat Florida landscape.
“As soon as I went out in the aircraft, the difference from the X-bird I had been flying to the Apache, it was incredible,” he recalls about the increased control at a range of speeds. “I thought right then and there, This is the one.”
Tony, though, would continue research and development, producing new iterations of each suit, making small alterations and tweaks to improve performance. Gary’s suit was merely another prototype, something to build on, merely a suggestion to Tony’s restless mind.
Tony had not been working with the idea in mind of building an Apache suited for landing. He still did not know Gary’s intentions. Gary had tried to tell him over the summer, but Tony, in his distracted way, did not pick up on the bread crumbs Gary laid. And Gary did not push the matter further. He did not know Tony well enough to be certain how he would react. At an
y rate, Tony could not be seen encouraging customers to attempt landing with his wingsuits or he would risk losing everything in a wrongful death suit.
When Gary finally returned home to family and work, Mark and Tony remained, hunched over sewing machines in Tony’s workshop, spools of colored thread lining the shelves, Beatles harmonies in the background. Altered suits in hand, they would head off down Sky Dive Lane to the drop zone and scramble aboard a plane rumbling along the runway into the air for another round of testing, flinging themselves over the miniature world below. Returning to the factory, flight data fresh in their minds, they tweaked their suits in the shop, fashioning new prototypes, which they took turns inflating in Tony’s office using a leaf blower he kept on hand for just such a purpose. With air blasting into the vents, their wings would inflate, causing their arms to rise forty-five degrees at their sides. Standing there in cruciform, they took the measure of the latest flying creations they had made.
• • •
In Henley, Gary seldom told anyone of his plans, except for a few confidants. He hardly knew anyone in town. But at the café, Vivienne got acquainted with the locals, meeting new people daily, making friends and connections. One of those who stopped in for coffee and a bite to eat was Chris Wright, a Henley resident whose friends, two brothers named Nick and Giles English, had recently founded Bremont, a British luxury watch company with headquarters in a modern building outside town. Aware that Gary sought sponsorship to help pay for his landing plans, Wright phoned up Nick English.
“‘You’ve got to meet this chap,’” Nick remembers Wright telling him. “‘He’s going to do this wingsuity thing.’” Nick did not know much about wingsuits, but Wright deflected any questions. “I can’t tell you more,” he said. “It’s worth meeting up for a cup of coffee.”
Nick and Giles had a background in aviation, having learned to fly from their father, Euan, an aeronautical engineer and RAF pilot. Nick was flying with his father in a World War Two–era Harvard on March 4, 1995, when they crashed. Euan was killed, and Nick broke more than thirty bones. Nick returned to the cockpit as soon as he healed, and the tragedy was a catalyst for the English brothers to alter their lives. They left careers working in finance in the City to start their own business with Bremont.
The company’s founding philosophy encouraged adventure, and they sponsored mountain climbers and pilots. Curious about Gary, they agreed to an assignation at the café on a cold winter day to meet.
Gary made quite an impression, wearing his customary bright clothing, earring sparkling in his left lobe like the twinkle in his eye. Nick noticed right away a vital energy barely held in leash. “When you first meet Gary, you think he could be a crazy person, with his wired-up energy,” Nick says.
But it was Gary’s confidence and the way he told of his experience as a stuntman that made a crucial difference and put the English brothers at ease.
Gary explained how he had jumped from heights into boxes while working for TV and major films. He had been knocked down by cars without getting hurt, rumbling over hoods and roofs. He had performed dozens of high falls from several stories up, leaping from buildings into prepared cardboard boxes. A wingsuit landing would mean hitting the boxes at sixty to seventy miles an hour, speeds he had achieved leaping from a nine-story building and walking away unhurt. Gary explained how, if not on target, he would simply deploy a parachute at two to three hundred feet above the ground, a critical provision for Nick and Giles. “It would have been a different thing for us if he said ‘I want to do this without a parachute strapped to my back just in case,’” Nick says. “That would have been a suicide bit.”
Mark created a video presentation on his laptop showing what he and Gary had done so far with their suits, describing the dynamics and displaying their GPS records. He explained the physics of a flight and landing in as convincing a fashion as possible. “It just takes a big mental leap,” Mark would say later. “They are pilots, and they get the dynamics and the physics.”
Vivienne listened to all of the talk. For years, she and Gary had attempted to secure support from the likes of Red Bull, Coca-Cola, and Virgin. But the big players could be forgiven for fearing that if things went wrong, their brand would be stained by failure. Bremont, though, was small. Nick and Giles were aviators. They were from Henley. Finally, they turned to Vivienne and asked if she had confidence in Gary’s ability to pull off the stunt. Without a hint of doubt, Vivienne told them that Gary could land a wingsuit every day of the week. “That gave us a huge load of confidence,” Nick says.
“It was more a meeting of minds,” Mark would recall. “They’re really great guys.” Everyone was about the same age, standing on either side of forty. They all had a background in aviation somehow. “It was just a chat,” Mark said.
Exiting the café with his brother, Nick was certain Gary would attempt a landing with or without the support of Bremont. But he and Giles wanted to support him.
It did not happen right away, but in the end a deal was brokered in which Gary would act as an ambassador for Bremont. The watchmaker, in turn, would kick in £5,000 (about $8,000) toward the cost of boxes. Estimates for all expenses, from porta-loos to paying to rent the land where he would build his box rig to helicopter rental and catering for the production team, were expected to reach £30,000, or $48,000, money Gary and Vivienne would pay from their own pocket. Bremont sweetened the deal by making available its marketing and PR staff, which began gearing up a promotional apparatus for an April landing.
Financing in place, Gary could focus on flying and landing. He ramped up his training for an attempt that was only three months away.
Chapter 19
TOUCH-AND-GO
Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast that however high we reach, we are never satisfied.
—Niccolò Machiavelli
CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA, JANUARY 16, 2012
Jeb Corliss had spent Christmas in California and New Year’s Eve in Singapore, where he launched from the observation platform at the Marina Bay Sands hotel as part of a BASE-jumping exhibition. It had been a long time since he performed acrobatics, but he pulled an elegant gainer as guests gaped from the infinity pool on the roof.
The future, though, would be in wingsuits. They were beginning to appear in TV commercials, conveying the coveted traits of speed and innovation so crucial to selling cars and high-speed Internet service. In this emerging realm, Jeb Corliss, star of “Grinding the Crack” and his cave flight in China, was the biggest name of them all.
From Singapore he went straight to South Africa to train for his most advanced wingsuit stunt yet, which would bring him one step closer to landing: In the spring, Jeb planned to brush briefly against a snowy slope while in full flight, an act he was calling the “Touch-and-Go.”
He would practice in South Africa. Two producers, Tim Walker and Spencer Wilking, and reporter Jon Frankel from HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel had agreed to meet Jeb in Cape Town to film his training at Table Mountain, a place where Jeb had been afraid to fly following a mishap ten years earlier in which he had nearly gone in, narrowly missing boulders the size of minibuses during a hard landing. That episode had led Jeb to swear off wingsuits for a spell. But with a modern suit and more advanced skills, Jeb prepared to test himself and the mountain again.
He had begun planning during the summer, after witnessing video of pilots soaring down Table Mountain. Julian Boulle vouched that suits and skills had advanced sufficiently that Jeb could jump there again safely. Jeb had high hopes for his return to Cape Town. “If it turns out to be a good wingsuit flight,” he announced, “it’s going to become my wintertime training zone.”
Jeb and Joby had rented a two-bedroom apartment in St. James, a seaside colonial enclave with a view of a turbulent False Bay and the long, gray finger of the Cape of Good Hope pointing toward Antarctica. Iiro had come down, too, and was assisting Moose with editing documentary footage of the flight through Tianmen Shan.
Kristian, the fashion and wildlife photographer, had rented a compound for the season above Camps Bay, Cape Town’s answer to the Riviera, and the scene there called to mind Jay Gatsby’s West Egg manse. Fashion models, playboys, photographers, trust funders, and athletes drifted through the big rooms and out back by the pool, biding time till the next shoot or party. Jeff Nebelkopf and Frank Yang would arrive, too, and nearly make the reunion from China complete.
The scene at Moose’s provided a counterpoint. He lived in Scarborough, on a hill above the Atlantic with his charming wife and their beautiful children, a place where seals surfaced in kelp beds offshore and a wild baboon territory spread in the hills along the Cape of Good Hope. Under a night sky smeared with stars, the steady crash of surf mixed with conversation, music, and the ice clink of cocktails on the veranda one night when Julian Boulle turned up. He was living out of a van in some remote territory, still recovering from the leg he’d broken in Lauterbrunnen six months earlier. His signature dreadlocks were shorn, but his laconic humor remained. “I heave friends who’ve linded wingsuits,” he said in a thick Afrikaans drawl, adding: “They’re ool dead.”
That night Jeb crashed on the couch not long after Moose’s kids went to bed. Curling up, shoes placed neatly on the floor nearby, he fell fast asleep during the dinner party.
Maybe he dreamed of the mountain, a 300-million-year-old block of granite and sandstone, the defining feature of Cape Town, responsible for much of the city’s weather, including a curious phenomenon the locals call the “Tablecloth” when thermal columns from the Cape Flats create clouds that shroud the peak, and a scouring wind rushes through the city and out to sea.