by Matt Higgins
Nick English was moved by the spirit of fellowship in the field. “It was very Henley,” he says, “and not Vegas, put it that way. It was done in a typical British understated way. ‘Okay, let’s go for it.’ One of the situations from the CAA, I believe, is that you couldn’t have spectators, so we had to keep it fairly quiet. But there were helpers there, a couple hundred people, but we couldn’t invite everyone we wanted, which is a shame in a way that we couldn’t make it more of a spectacle. But that’s what made it special in a way, this village-type atmosphere. Something pretty incredible is happening in an understated, quite laid-back manner.”
Andrew Harvey wondered if perhaps some weren’t drawn by morbid curiosity. “It sounds wrong, but it’s a British way of dealing with death, making it humorous and funny,” he says. “It’s a macabre British thing to want to go and watch him kill himself.” But, he adds, “they don’t want him to be killed.”
The Civil Aviation Authority and its representative also did not want Gary killed or injured. Gary still needed to demonstrate that he could jump safely, or he risked being shut down.
Harvey considered their biggest obstacle a headwind from the north. The Hughes weighed only sixteen hundred pounds, and with three hundred pounds of humanity perched on the right skid before exit, she tended to slide around in the sky. With the headwind, Gary would need to fly a steep angle, which would translate into increased speed, requiring a hard flare to bleed off momentum for the final approach. He had not practiced any of this during BASE training and could not predict how far he would glide in the headwind.
Following their practice jumps that morning, Mark attempted to huddle with Gary to dial in their exit position and flight. But on the ground, Gary was in a melee, questions coming from friends, Vivienne, and especially the media, who wanted interviews and updates.
“After you do a jump, you want to come down and go, ‘Okay, where did we go wrong? How can we improve this spot where the helicopter goes? Is the wind picking up? How can we monitor that?’ Instead of focusing on that side of it, he’s getting dragged away to ‘So, how are you feeling?’ type of conversations for live TV.”
Gary reveled in the distractions, soaking in the attention, schmoozing like a campaigning politician, thanking volunteers for their support. He wanted viewers watching on TV to think, Oh, he’s a nice bloke.
Reporters beseeched Gary to give them a firm time for landing. But he refused. He didn’t know when the box rig would be completed or when his training would be done. He would not bow to a TV timetable.
In the meantime, the rig and the temperature continued to rise on the field. It would be an unseasonable high of eighty-two degrees. Vivienne handed out bottled water to volunteers. A friend, Jamie Flynn, crouched in the field, repacking Gary’s rigs between jumps.
Back in the air, on his fourth practice jump, Gary dove, taking a steep angle, putting him in an uncomfortable position. But he found his line and landed on target under canopy, right next to the box rig, which after six hours was nearing completion. It was 2 p.m.
• • •
AN HOUR EARLIER, GARY had gathered the volunteers and put the matter to a vote: They could break for lunch right then or they could finish the rig, eat lunch, and settle in to watch his attempt to land. Everyone agreed on the latter—forging ahead and finishing. Now they lined up for lunch, and Gary, Vivienne, Sutton, Dave Emerson, and Andrew Harvey huddled to discuss the landing schedule. The weather forecast had called for increasing wind beginning at 1, and they could feel it building. Gary settled on 3:30, relaying the time to Sky News, which had been feeding updates from Mill End Farm back to the studio all day long.
Fixing a plate, Gary sat under a catering tent to eat, but his churning stomach would not allow him to swallow. A vegetarian, he asked the catering crew to set aside some of the roasted-tomato-and-basil pasta and salad so that he would have something for later.
The box rig had been smothered in netting to prevent the boxes from shifting or blowing around in the wind. As a result, the representative from the CAA required Gary to remove his cameras, out of a concern they would snag on the net and cause injury. Mark, too, had been barred from jumping with cameras, over worries of “object fixation,” a phenomenon in which a cameraman focuses so intensely on his subject that he loses altitude awareness and forgets to pull. The result: there would be no cameras in the air during the landing attempt, except those mounted in Harvey’s chopper.
Throughout training, Mark had done everything by the book, opening at 390 feet and landing practically at the CAA representative’s feet to casually stroll up for a chat. This was designed to assure CAA that everything was professional and under control. Hoping his act had made an impression, after lunch Mark approached jumpmaster Dave Emerson about having a word with the CAA man. Emerson came back with word that Mark could use cameras after all. Mark mounted three—a still camera activated by a mouthpiece and two video cams—one with a narrow focus and one with a wide-angle lens. With the wind kicking up a few knots and the clock reading 3:25, it was time to head to the chopper, which sat in the south field, fifty yards from a shade tree. The plan called for Mark and Gary to exit closer to the box rig than they previously had, to compensate for the headwind. During their final briefing, Harvey noted that Gary was “cooler than a cucumber. That may be a bit of bravado. He was laughing and joking.”
“If it’s all right, we’ll go for it,” Gary said.
“Sounds good to us,” Harvey replied.
The pilots ran through a final check of zippers, clips, cameras, rigs, and pilot-chute handles. Gary checked everything twice, and Mark extracted a promise from his friend. Mark asked that, before reaching a fence line separating the field from the A4155, if Gary wasn’t lined up properly, he make a decision to abort and pull.
“This was the first time we had been low, to the envelope, where you have to fly into the boxes or not,” Mark would recall. “The canopies we were using were good enough. I was opening at about 275 feet or so. They were working really low. Everything was focusing on ‘This had to be one hundred percent perfect.’ He had to hit the right spot and walk away uninjured. He couldn’t just force a bad situation, like a car crash where he had to be two feet to the left but it sort of worked. He had to be spot-on. So that was one of my major concerns.”
Gary promised he would pull if things didn’t line up properly.
“This is just an attempt,” Mark reminded. “Don’t be forced into it. We can come back and do it again.”
Mark climbed in the back of the helicopter to go over signals with Harvey. Out the window, he watched Vivienne approach Gary. “Gary and Viv had this really lovely moment,” he said. “Viv was very emotional but holding it together. Gary was very emotional but not showing it.”
When Vivienne turned and walked across the field toward the box rig, Gary watched her go for a long time. She did not look back. That’s when Gary told himself: Snap out of it! Get yourself together, Gary! Time to go to work! Get your game on!
Hopping into the chopper in the seat next to Harvey, he closed the door. “Let’s go,” he said.
Harvey would recall that Gary then gave him a “knowing look.” Harvey sensed that Gary was going for it, no matter what. “I knew he was going to do it at that time,” he says. “I don’t know why. I can’t tell you. It was just something in his eye I picked up.”
• • •
AS HARVEY LIFTED THE Hughes into the sky, Gary waved down to Dave Emerson, the jumpmaster. From up close, the box rig looked like something built from LEGOS. But from the air, the rig grew smaller, resembling a postal parcel wrapped in brown paper and awaiting an address. Friends and family assembled a distance to the left of the boxes, near the shadow of a tree line.
In the chopper, Gary focused on breathing, controlling his heart rate and emotions. His mind relaxed. And Harvey continued to have premonitions. Three-quarters of a mile from the rig, he brought the Hughes into a hover. They were 2,400 feet up, and he would
later say that it was as if some force above knew. The chopper had been bucking in swirling wind all day. But then “she just sits as smooth as a baby’s bottom,” he says. “She didn’t even twitch . . . it flew itself absolutely perfectly. And I know helicopters are inanimate objects, but she knew that was the time, because she was as good as gold. I can’t explain. I wasn’t flying any differently. I’ve flown the bloody thing for six thousand hours—for twenty-five years—these types of machines, and it just poof! It was really quite strange.”
Gary, though, was counting on training, not divine forces, to carry him through. This is it, Gary! You are known as One-Take Gary in the TV-and-film world. And yes, for sure, if it’s not right, pull out. But in his heart, he knew he would not bail.
Emerson cleared Harvey to release the pilots, and Harvey gave them thumbs-up. They had fifteen seconds to get it together and go. Shoulder to shoulder on the skid, they shouted over the machine clatter.
“You ready, Mark?!”
“Yeah!”
“Set! Okay, here we go! Three, two, one . . .” And just as they had practiced in training, the pilots left the chopper in tandem, Sutton tight to Gary, disappearing out of Harvey’s sight.
Eager to witness firsthand what would be a historic feat, he rotated the chopper 180 degrees, looking left, careful not to catch the pilots in his rotors as he descended fifteen hundred feet per minute. The pilots moved faster still, bleeding off altitude.
Vivienne had scarcely made her way across the field to the box rig when she was alerted to turn to watch Gary exit the chopper. Right away she could see Gary veer back and forth as if caught in terrible turbulence.
Harvey could see, too, through his windshield that Gary was obviously unstable. It looked like he was in trouble.
FlySight readings later revealed that Gary averaged a glide angle of 2:1 most of the flight, even as he attempted to compensate for the twisting motion by flopping hard in the opposite direction. He looked as though he might flip at any second.
Mark thought Gary must be mentally overloaded, and he expected his friend to deploy his chute at any moment as they had discussed. But Gary never reached for his pilot chute as he approached five hundred feet of altitude. And crossing the fence line they had discussed earlier as the point of no return, something unexpected happened: he came out of the dive and suddenly stabilized.
Spectators on the ground recognized that Gary had crossed the point below which he could no longer abort. Nick English stood near the box rig, thinking, It seems so natural, this chap falling through the sky . . .
Gary heard a roar from the crowd, and a smile crept across his face. There was no ground rush, only an awareness of diminishing altitude as he homed in on the boxes. In the field approaching the rig, extra boxes had been arranged so that, viewed from above, they resembled an arrow pointing the way and the words GO GARY.
From the helicopter, Gary appeared to be moving too fast as he closed in on the boxes. With a hard flare, the FlySight would reveal, he reached an almost 8:1 glide angle, traveling at 69.7 miles an hour forward and less than 10 vertically. Watching Gary race over the boxes, Harvey had his doubts. “He might get this wrong,” he recalls thinking. Mark had a similar thought. Gary appeared to be moving too fast, with too much glide. “He’s going to fly straight off the end of the boxes and he’s now too late to deploy,” Mark remembered. That was when Mark noticed Gary’s shadow on the boxes. His shadow directly below meant Gary was close to making contact.
For Gary, time seemed to expand, and he noticed details. He remembered not to tuck into a protective ball too early, which would cause him to drop out of the sky. He noted the way every eight feet, a two-foot gap between boxes would allow them to move on impact and soften his landing. The gaps created a grid. One second closer, though, and all he could see was brown. Tensing reflexively, the result of seventeen years of working on the Stunt Register, Gary dropped his left shoulder and pressed his chin to his chest.
The FlySight would reveal that he hit the boxes at seventy miles an hour, plowing through the cardboard for fifty feet, at a 6:1 angle, penetrating eight feet down into semidarkness.
Seeing Gary skid into the boxes near dead center, Mark savored the moment, before suddenly snapping out of his reverie, and pulling at 285 feet. Drifting slowly under canopy, he scanned the boxes for some sign of Gary. But Mark had no radio, and no way of knowing whether his friend was injured—or alive.
Swirling above in the chopper, Harvey scanned for some sign of movement, thinking that the landing appeared “bloody fast!”
Thirty seconds ticked by before Vivienne’s walkie-talkie crackled. It was Gary. “I’m absolutely, one hundred percent okay,” he said.
Vivienne raised her hands and screamed and yelled to the crowd that Gary was okay, and everyone screamed and yelled back.
Buried and balancing precariously four feet up on shifting cardboard, Gary had struggled to reach the radio in his pocket. He wanted to soak in the sensation and savor his achievement alone for a moment. It would not happen.
A cluster of men charged into the boxes, picking their way to Gary, who several minutes later, emerged from among the boxes, suit unzipped, a big grin on his face and not a stitch out of place. Vivienne was waiting to throw herself into his arms.
• • •
WEARING BOARDSHORTS, A PURPLE Chocolate Theatre Café T-shirt, and a black baseball cap, Gary carried a magnum of champagne by the neck, half trotted across the field to where TV cameras and reporters waited. Someone called out, “How do you feel, Gary?”
“I’m in a strange space, if I’m totally honest.”
Tearing down the boxes would take four hours and by 7:30 a celebration was under way at the Chocolate Theatre Café, where Gary and Mark fielded endless phone calls from reporters and news agencies seeking comment, photos, and video. New York Times reporter Mary Pilon called Tony in Zephyrhills, catching him at the store, where he was buying champagne to toast at his shop with his workers. “I’m as high as a kite,” he said.
Jeb Corliss had watched Gary’s landing online, his dream of building a multimillion-dollar runway now dead. He was back in Venice, bones mended but fighting an infected skin graft on his right shin that required forty-two hours in a hyperbaric chamber to aid healing. He was weeks away from jumping again.
“We had never heard of this guy,” Jeb told the Times about Gary, speaking for his fellow pilots. “We thought it was crazy.”
“It’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen in my life,” he added. “Because of movies, people don’t really understand what they witnessed. It’s monumental for a human to land at those speeds. It took an enormous amount of courage.”
Interviewed by Popular Mechanics in the coming days, Jeb would call the landing “the greatest stunt ever performed” and say that he bore no grudge against Gary. Sho-gun still fresh in his mind, he invoked Bushido. “I go by the Samurai code—if you are vanquished by your enemy, you must give him respect,” he said. “There’s nothing I can say other than ‘Congratulations, bro.’”
• • •
GARY WOULD LEAVE THE party at the café by 10 p.m. and collapse into bed, but for another night, sleep did not come. He savored the feeling of having stuck it to those who had dismissed him as a wobbler. What’s this idiot doing? they’d thought. He’s going to kill himself!
On his feet again before dawn, Gary drove the M25 ring road to Stansted Airport, northeast of London, to drop off Kali for a return flight to Austria. He was on set by seven, working to recoup some of the $50,000 he had shelled out for the landing. The crew offered congratulations but it would be a long day of filling out paperwork and coordinating a rape scene on a moving train for actors dressed in Edwardian garb. Calls and messages poured in from media outlets hungry to line him up for interviews or appearances on their shows.
When Mark got a look at Gary that night after work, his friend “appeared shot to pieces” from exhaustion and excitement.
“
No, forget it,” Mark urged Gary about consenting to another live interview. “Go and eat, go back to sleep. Go to work tomorrow. You’re on BBC tomorrow night. You’ve got to start looking after yourself.”
But Gary did not sleep, and on Friday he was back on set. Over the weekend he sat for television newsmagazine programs. He had been in all the papers. Robert Pecnik sent congratulations as did a good many other members of the wingsuit and BASE fraternities.
By Monday, once the news cycle had mostly run its course, Gary was barely on his feet, sleepwalking through work. He had slept perhaps twelve hours since landing five days earlier and felt on the verge of a breakdown.
That night he swallowed a sleep aid. When the pills took hold, the spell was broken, and Gary fell into the profound and peaceful slumber of the dead. When he awoke the next day, Gary understood that he had landed, but he could not recall whether or not he had dreamed.
EPILOGUE
It would turn out to be a big year for skydiving and parachute sports. The following month, on June 16, as part of a live special broadcast on ABC surrounding daredevil Nik Wallenda’s wire walk over Niagara Falls, Jeb’s flight through the cave at Tianmen Shan was designated the “No. 1 Megastunt” in history. One month later, on July 27, Gary and Mark took part in the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, which were directed by Danny Boyle, Gary’s old friend from the movie The Beach, for whom Gary had done stunt work.
At the Games, Gary stood in as a stunt double for the queen, wearing a gray wig and a salmon gown, and Mark dressed in a tuxedo to play James Bond. They parachuted from a chopper eight hundred feet over Olympic Stadium, opening parachutes emblazoned with the Union Jack, and landed on a nearby bridge. The notoriety put them back on television and in the papers for a while.