But it wasn't so. The feat has long been Corliss?s most cherished ambition (see the 2010 Popular Mechanics cover story about his plans) and almost nobody else on earth possesses the requisite skill and audacity to pull it off. But Corliss was at home in southern California on Wednesday, transfixed like any other spectator as an Internet video feed showed a 42-year-old British man named Gary Connery nabbing the coveted record by plunging into a landing pad of cardboard boxes.
The achievement wasn?t quite the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk or Chuck Yeager in his X-1. But a chute-less wingsuit landing has long a been a major goal of Corliss and a handful of the world?s other top wingsuit pilots?few of whom, apparently, had even heard of Connery until a couple of months ago. When Corliss first caught of wind of Connery?s plans, he suspected it was an April Fool?s joke. When he realized that this wasn?t the case, he thought that Connery "was absolutely insane. I genuinely believed that what he was going for was impossible," Corliss tells PM.
Corliss?s own vision for the wingsuit landing project had been to build a 2000-foot long ramp, attach it to the side of a Las Vegas hotel, and touch down from his flight like a ski jumper in the Olympics?only he?d be doing 100 mph and landing on his torso rather than on his legs. It was to be a multimillion-dollar spectacle backed by corporate sponsors with warehouses of cash. But the companies Corliss approached didn?t want to fork over the funds, especially for an endeavor that might end in human pancake. Connery?s wife, Vivienne, says that he met with similar resistance from would-be sponsors and realized that he?d have to devise a cheaper, down-and-dirty approach. He needed to hack the wingsuit landing.
The inspiration came from Connery?s day job. He?s a stunt man who wrecks cars and leaps from great heights in television shows and movies such as The Beach and the Bond flick Die Another Day. With this professional background, Connery brought fresh thinking to the challenge. "Jeb has more expertise in wingsuits than Gary," Vivienne Connery says, "but what Gary was able to lend to this project was a more overall generic knowledge of how people fall."
When Gary Connery?s cinematic stunt work requires him to plunge from the top of a building, he knows that his body accelerates to around 60 mph. To hit the ground without injuring or killing himself, he builds a surprisingly rudimentary landing pad?a big pile of empty cardboard boxes. A speed of 60 mph is also about how fast Connery flies in a wingsuit, and you can guess how his thinking progressed. "Gary said, "Let?s just put a bunch of cardboard boxes in a field, and I?ll fly into them,?" says Mark Sutton, the project manager and aerial videographer for the wingsuit landing.
So, instead of investing $3 million on a landing ramp in Vegas, Connery spent only ?22,000 pounds ($35,000) to buy 18,500 cardboard boxes. On Wednesday he and his friends and family members set them up in a field by the River Thames about 40 miles west of London. There was a bottom layer of 2-by-2-by-2-foot boxes, a middle one of 3-by-3-by-3s, and a top layer of 4-by-3-by-3s. The finished landing strip measured 350 feet long, 40 feet wide, and 12 feet high?enormous, unless you?re squinting at it from more than a mile away in a helicopter.
If there was doubt in Connery?s mind before he leapt, it wasn?t about whether the boxes would sufficiently cushion his landing, it was whether he?d manage to land on the boxes at all. Connery and Sutton had been training for months, analyzing GPS tracks of Connery?s flights to determine the exact glide ratio?about 2.1 feet forward for every 1 foot down?he would need to maintain to hit the landing zone. In training flights on Tuesday, using parachutes to safely bail out at the very end, Connery and Sutton were stymied by headwinds. "We landed in the field several times, as in well short," Sutton says.
The conditions were suboptimal when Connery launched the actual record-setting flight. "There was a headwind . . . [and] I was being tossed around by the turbulence," Connery wrote on Thursday, communicating by text message from a television show set where he was doing stunt work. But he managed to hit the boxes successfully, and minutes later, totally uninjured, he was hugging his wife and treating a crush of television reporters to a shower of champagne. "Everybody doubted that Gary?s flight was possible, but as we now know, his confidence was perfectly placed," Sutton says.
Corliss, for his part, calls Connery?s flight "the greatest stunt ever performed," and says that he bears no ill will toward the man who stole his dream. "I go by the Samurai code?if you are vanquished by your enemy, you must give him respect," Corliss says. "There?s nothing I can say other than, ?Congratulations, bro.?"
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