Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/17/watch-a-wingsuit-flier-glide-through-a-narrow-rock-formation-known-as-the-death-star.html
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Hokey Smokes!
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Best not watch this one then:
Spoiler alert: he makes it, this time, but died in a separate wingsuit flight the following year.
While I was trying to find an English language article about a recent wing suit accident here in Norway, I came across this article. It’s a good insight into the mentality of the scene, away from the spectacular YouTube videos.
https://www.dagbladet.no/arkivert/magasinet/the-flight-of-felix/68879283
ETA: no onebox 
This looks shopped.
I can tell from some of the pixels and from seeing quite a few shops in my time.
Jokes aside, it takes some guts to go down in that loose pajama.
There are people who live and die for these things - it’s exhilarating to watch them, but I could never be in their numbers.
When I see these feats, I always think about an acquaintance of mine, a modest and kind guy, a crochet master and… a slackline/highline champion: Armin Holzer.
We briefly (~1 week) met in a hospital room, I was there with a broken tibial plateau, due to a silly skiing fall, Armin with a broken femur as his acrobatic para-glider bunched up and he fell down 30 m.
Against doctors’ recommendation he was already walking on the broken leg at the end of the week.
Six years later this.
NOPE! i bet it’s even more anxiety-inducing at actual speed. i love that the canyon is very aptly named, too.
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Yeah, the numbers are pretty stark. And it’s not just the amateurs that are getting themselves killed.
I just looked it up, and the gentleman in this “Death Star” video is Jeb Corliss, who was once arrested (and also fired from hosting a show on the Discovery Channel) for attempting to illegally BASE jump the Empire State Building. He was also quoted as saying “I know 100 percent that this sport is going to kill me. That makes me take it very seriously.” So enjoy watching his exploits while you can, I guess, because even he doesn’t expect that he’ll be around forever.
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Mostly die, in the case of wingsuits. 1 death in 21 hours is pretty fucked up, even considering that each flight is rather short.
I don’t think it’s cool to give that stuff any exposure.
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Malcolm Gladwell popularized the (admittedly pseudoscientific) idea that it takes about ten thousand hours of practice to truly master a complex task.
Going by those numbers, any given wingsuiter has a 99.998% chance of dying before they have a chance to get really great at it.
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… this is probably safer though
WW1 combat pilots had notoriously short lifespans on average, but according to this source it was still at least double the number of flight hours of a wingsuiter pilot:
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Yeah, but that was because they were being shot at.
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