Fancy flying head-down towards the ground at 530kph (330mph) with only your body shape to control your descent? Welcome to the extreme skydiving world of the Red Bull Air Force.
Flight sports are littered with the sort of people who like tweaking: speak to anyone from air racing to hang-gliding to aerobatics and they’ll talk endlessly about set-up. The summit of ambition is a machine that handles like it isn’t there. “Like it’s just a pair of wings strapped to my back,” is the usual refrain.
It’s an aspiration that brings the faintest smile to the face of Jon DeVore, manager of the Red Bull Air Force skydiving team: flying without an aircraft is practically his job description. Jon and his band of professional skydivers are pioneers of human flight.
“Flying, not falling,” they say, sometimes as a motto, usually as a gentle correction for the uninitiated. Either way, the phrase expresses a desire to do something more than simply leap and let gravity do its thing.
“People always describe what we do as falling out of aeroplanes,” says Jon. “That isn’t really it. Over the last couple of decades, the professional skydivers of the world have been focused on doing more than falling and building those big formations you see in all the pictures – impressive though that can be.
“We’re taking the sport to new levels. One of the disciplines we’ve become famous for is ‘free-flying’. We were kinda bored simply falling on our bellies towards Earth; so we started going vertical instead: head towards Earth; feet towards Earth – whatever worked. We would fly circles around each other and carve turns – basically demonstrating that our bodies are wings, they can fly.
“A normal belly-to-earth position will generate something between 110-120mph, and even the most flexible person arching as hard as they can won’t manage much more than 130mph. It’s nothing to what we can do vertical. The average vertical position is around 160mph. Head-down I’ve personally managed 317mph, though one team-mate, Charles Bryan, can get upwards of 330mph.
“The feeling is unbelievable. You only get a minute of pure freefall but you lose yourself in that minute. It’s a very pure form of freedom – and it’s overwhelming. Even for people with the jump numbers I have.”
Those jump numbers, in case you were wondering, passed 16,000 last year.
His repertoire also includes more than a passing interest in BASE-jumping and the middle ground of speed riding. If you haven’t heard of speed riding yet, you will soon.
It entails flying down the side of a steep mountain attached to a very small parachute and (usually) a pair of skis. Naturally, Jon’s desire is to be the most extreme of the extreme; his end goal in speed riding is to become the first to complete the seven summits – jumping onto the top of the highest mountain on each of the seven continental shelves and speed racing to the base.
“When you’re skydiving, the first couple of thousand jumps are a very steep progression. It’s hard. You learn something, get the feeling of accomplishment, and then move on to learning something else. I’m not suggesting I have nothing else to learn, but the curve really flattens.
“If you want to continue getting the big rush, then you have to challenge yourself. These days I’m getting the stimulation from pulling off hard, technical flying manoeuvres, as compared to just… skydiving.”
But there is still some mileage in ‘just skydiving’ for Jon. Together with the rest of the Red Bull Air Force, he’s a familiar figure on the North American sporting scene, and a half-time and pre-game show regular. For someone who admits to feeling no great hardship being alone with his thoughts, jumping into a stadium filled with screaming sports fans requires a definite shift of mental gears.
It is, Jon acknowledges, a peculiar adrenalin rush. “At first it was very weird. Overwhelming in fact. Our sport doesn’t get the attention that even skateboarding and stuff like that have; so for us to go from quiet, serene parachute flying to suddenly swooping in to NASCAR or a Red Bull Air Race or a big NFL football game… wow!
“For five seconds you’re the star quarterback. Everyone is cheering, you’re pumped up. We put on a show that most people haven’t seen, a lot higher speed than the traditional parachute demos, which gets the crowd that much more jacked-up. And that feels good.”
The showman in Jon has other outlets. He’s been known to fly in formation with former Red Bull Air Race World Champion Kirby Chambliss – though while Kirby pilots his Zivko Edge 540, Jon is free in the breeze, wearing a wingsuit powered by gravity.
“Compared to skydiving, the wingsuit is a whole different animal. It slows your fall-rate so drastically that you really have a lot of time to comprehend what’s going on around you. Actually, it’s only when I’ve gone out and chased Kirby around, and we fly together for a little bit, that I’ve properly realised the power the suit gives you.”
“It’s really great to make something like that work,” adds Chambliss. “We’ve done it a few times now, mike’d up so we are able to talk to each other.”
Despite being a veteran of 100-plus sky-diving jumps himself, Kirby is happy to leave the wingsuit to Jon. “I’ve never tried the suit and that’s OK – I’d probably scare myself silly,” he adds.
Jon and the rest of the Air Force had very little time for recreational flying last year. They shot Human Flight 3D, a movie due for release this summer. It takes what the team do day-to-day, and gives it the full Hollywood treatment. “We’re acting, but playing ourselves. It’s all scripted; the writer interviewed us and wrote his version of
our lives. For us it’s… interesting.”
After a season shooting sky-diving sequences in Florida, the team decamped to the Alps for the next section of principal photography. “In Switzerland, we’re mostly focusing on BASE-jumping and BASE jumping with wingsuits. We do a lot of what’s called ‘proximity flying’, where we jump off something and fly down the mountain side, rather than trying to get away from it as with a normal BASE-jump.”
After Human Flight 3D has run in regular auditoria, it will be recut for IMAX. It’s an ambitious project intended to showcase this most extreme of extreme sports. The shooting schedule has been a long one, with much of the equipment and many of the techniques involved being developed, ahem, on the fly.
“No one’s ever filmed a 3D movie in the air before, so we’re doing a lot of things for the first time,” says Jon. “We experimented to find out what works well in 3D and what doesn’t.
Obviously we all had some experience, but we’re leaving with probably the most experience of anybody in the world. We did maybe 350-400 jumps in Florida and another 100-plus in Switzerland – and frankly it’s left us all absolutely stoked!”
For now it’s back to the half-time shows and air displays. Not that Jon is anything other than enthusiastic about the day job. “It’s a great environment in the Red Bull Air Force. We’re blessed.”
For more on the movie visit www.humanflight3dmovie.com and read the full interview in this month’s Red Bulletin.
Comments
Add a comment