Skydiving
CALL OF THE WILD
Amber Forte always wanted to live a life less ordinary, and when she found wingsuit flying she knew how
The only sound at the top of the mountain is the rush of the wind. A single line of footprints in the spring snow leads to the edge, a one-way track to where Amber Forte is standing on a small ledge of rock, arms outstretched. In the valley more than 3,000ft (900m) below, the sun glints off a fjord and the village of Loen looks like a toy town.
“Three, two, one…” Forte shouts. Then she leaps. She disappears for a second as she drops, then soars out, following the curve of the landscape, gliding gracefully on the stiff breeze that buffets the landbound. Were you to glance up from the ground, you might mistake Forte in her wingsuit for one of the sea eagles that visit this part of north-western Norway, silhouetted against the sky.
A short while later, wingsuit rolled down off her upper torso, Forte is sharing a lift back to the top of Mt Hoven with tourists and walkers. Her husband, Espen Fadnes, hugs her as she exits.
“I was a little…” he begins, then pauses. The wingsuit Forte is wearing is new and untested, and the handle to open the parachute is in a slightly different place. “I could see the time it took,” he says. “Three- or four-tenths of a second longer.” It wasn’t a problem, Forte says: “I pulled hard. But the parachute is bigger than I’m used to.”
Fadnes and Forte are a team, a wingsuited power couple. They live in Loen, a village in Norway’s beautiful Nordfjord region, where they can train all year round. “It means I can stay current and allows me to test and try out new techniques and equipment,” says Forte, aged 32 and originally from Devon. “The area is stunning; there are so many valleys and mountains to explore with my wingsuit.”
Amber Forte's wingsuit in all its glory
© Espen Fadnes/ Marius Beck Dahle
She tries to jump every day, though it’s not always possible with the weather – she must also factor in rest days – but her life revolves around the sport. Fadnes is the same. “We work together, train together, execute projects together,” Forte says.
The two of them first met in 2016, when Forte moved to Voss in western Norway and started working at an indoor wind tunnel where Fadnes sometimes taught. “She was unusually vibrant,” he recalls. He was struck by the way she moved her body in the air: “Like a ballet dancer in the sky. I’m more like a stiff runner.” But Fadnes was experienced in the wingsuiting that Forte wanted to learn and had grown up climbing in the Norwegian mountains with his father. “I had skills she didn’t have, and she had skills I wish I had. We took off, like a little team.”
At the beginning, he says, while Forte learnt wingsuiting – to get started in the sport, you need to have done around 200 to 300 skydives – their relationship was imbalanced. “I had 15 years in this sport, and a position that got me jobs and opportunities,” says Fadnes, who’s 12 years senior to Forte and is a pioneer in air sports and wingsuiting – a former FAI world champion, he has been Emmy-nominated for his airborne camerawork and features in numerous documentaries including Netflix’s Wingmen. “I think she felt she had to work hard to reach further.”
Forte rose to the challenge. In a relatively short time, she has become the world’s fastest female wingsuiter – her 2017 record of 283.7kph still stands – was the first woman to make the top 10 at an FAI performance wingflying competition, and has featured in commercials and documentaries. Her next challenge could become reality in a matter of months and is something her husband, though heavily involved as ever, says he has no intention of completing: Forte plans to wingsuit across the English Channel.
Forte launches herself from Mt Hoven, more than 900m above Loen
© Espen Fadnes / Marius Beck Dahle
It has never been done, and there’s probably a reason for that. It will require Forte to jump from 35,000ft (almost 11,000m – her highest so far is 22,000ft, or 6,700m), a height that will require a mask and oxygen tank, which will affect her weight and speed. Her skin will need to be protected from the -50°C cold, which will mean wearing a full fighter-jet-pilot-style helmet, and her body kept warm enough to do what it needs to do. And it needs to do a lot.
Forte will glide for around 10 minutes, crossing 34km, holding a precisely calculated plank position all the way – a feat that requires serious gym and endurance training. She will have to navigate precisely, too, as even the slightest degree off-course could add up to a distance she won’t be able to cover. The aim is to land next to the lighthouse on the Dover cliffs. But she will have to practise for the chance she’ll land in water, quickly jettisoning her parachute and oxygen tank before it drags her down, and learn how to stay afloat in the middle of the sea. This will be as much a mental battle as a physical one. “I’m actually really scared of water,” she says.
A wetsuit would help, but that comes with its own problems – at 35,000ft, the tiny air bubbles in the neoprene would expand and strangle her. She’s learning so much, she says. “I need new skills, technology and a team I trust, so it’s a lot of things to feel comfortable with,” says Forte. And a lot of training. Forte is about to return to Spain where she’s training with a plane. There will be numerous wind-tunnel sessions and BASE jumps as she puts all the necessary pieces into place. Fadnes describes Forte as a determined athlete: “She doesn’t give up; she is willing to go very far. She’s full of warmth to others but tends to be tough on herself, with high expectations.”
Former FAI world champion Espen Fadnes and Amber Forte
© Espen Fadnes / Marius Beck Dahle
Amber’s full of warmth, but she can be tough on herself
It also comes just five years after Forte had a skydiving accident that threatened to end her career. She spent months recovering from a broken back and femur, learning to walk again, and this challenge is partly about putting this firmly in the past. “I do respect [the accident] is a part of me. But I don’t want to be known as that injured person for ever.”
This project, she says, is about the future: “A huge part of my motivation is to do something new and ground- breaking, to set my mark.”
Forte always knew she wanted to do something different with her life, though flying wasn’t a childhood dream; at one point she considered joining a circus. She grew up in the town of Kingsteignton, Devon, as the youngest of four, with three BMX-mad elder brothers. Her father was, she says, completely in love with motocross and BMX, and he coached all four children. Forte looked up to all her brothers, including the eldest, Kye, a pro BMX and mountain-bike rider: “I admired him for his ability to do what he loved for work, and I wanted to be like that.” Their mother, she adds with a laugh, isn’t particularly adventurous but has been “taken on that journey. She’s happy for me and supports me, but she’s not fond of talking about what I do. If she could, she would tell me to not do this”.
Her mother’s apprehension is understandable. Although wingsuit flying, or wingsuiting, has come a long way since its origins at the beginning of last century, it still carries huge risks. The first recorded wingsuit flight was in Paris in 1912, when Franz Reichelt jumped from the Eiffel Tower wearing a parachute-like suit he’d designed, but fell to his death. Wingsuit design developed throughout subsequent decades, but it wasn’t until the ’90s that they became more dependable and available. A new sport was born. Wingsuit flyers either jump from the air like skydivers or do a BASE jump, soar through the air (record speed: 400kph), then open a parachute contained in their backpack to safely land.
Forte discovered the sport after leaving the UK – one week after her 18th birthday – on a one-way ticket to Australia, with a list already written of things she intended to try, including scuba diving and skydiving. She did her first skydive in New Zealand, but it wasn’t love at first flight. “I was in shock,” she says with a laugh. She did a few more jumps but then ran out of money, so she got a job at a skydiving centre, packing parachutes. “I could see how much everybody liked it,” Forte says, “and I remember feeling jealous of that.”
Amber Forte smiles after a successful landing
© Espen Fadnes / Marius Beck Dahle
She decided she’d commit to skydiving: “I remember telling myself that even if I don’t like it, I’m going to make myself like it. I just wanted to be really good at something.” Then, as her skill developed, so did her passion. “I’ve always enjoyed movement, like dancing,” Forte says. “I think what fascinated me in the beginning was that I could do those types of movements, like yoga and gymnastics, in a place where there’s nothing hard, no limits, it’s just freedom.”
By now back in Australia, she was working for another skydive centre. “But I wanted to pursue a career that wasn’t connected to commercial skydiving – I wanted to be so good at flying that I could teach people, or be hired to do projects, to be more creative. The first step was to take my pretty good flying skills and figure out how to be one of the best. There weren’t a lot of women doing that in Australia.”
In Norway, conditions seemed more equal. She booked another one-way ticket and settled in Voss with enough money to survive for a few months, then hassled the wind-tunnel centre for a job. There she met Fadnes and asked him about wingsuiting. “He said it feels like the most amazing rollercoaster, and the possibilities are endless. It sounded adventurous and exciting.” She paid him for a day of coaching. Did she love it instantly? Not really, she says. She loved the feeling of free flying from a plane, and the wingsuit felt a little more restrictive at first. “Wingsuiting really became a fascination when I started jumping from mountains. I was definitely motivated by Espen because he was so passionate and had so much knowledge, so I was able to learn quickly.”
It’s not about the risk or the adrenaline – I just love the feeling of flying
Forte was still skydiving regularly, and in 2019 she was part of the Norwegian skydiving team. She had done around 500 jumps that year and was preparing for the upcoming world championships. “It was very exciting but a lot of pressure,” she says. She was taking part in a demonstration jump and was supposed to land on a beach. Everything was telling her not to do it – Forte was tired, hadn’t eaten, the briefing was in Norwegian, and she wasn’t yet fluent – but she didn’t listen. “It stands as a reminder of how important it is not to be complacent.”
She took a low turn as she made her descent, hit the top of a tree, then struck the ground hard. Fadnes watched it happen. “This slow-motion nightmare [was] unfolding in front of my eyes,” he says. “I ran towards her. When someone has a high-energy impact, they may have internal bleeding, so it’s very hard to know if this is their last 20 minutes or not, and you can’t do anything about it.”
Miraculously, Forte didn’t have internal bleeding, but she’d broken and dislocated her back and broken her femur. “I was just devastated,” she says. “I didn’t understand how I was going to deal with it.” She spent a month in hospital, and early on she promised herself she would get back to her sport. Forte also started filming her recovery and sharing it on social media, hoping it would help others. “I’ve been in contact with so many people with similar experiences and it’s brought a lot of meaning to my life.”
Back at home, Fadnes did everything for her, including personal care. “In a weird way, it becomes intimate,” she says. “I never felt like he didn’t want to be there.” Forte was determined to do as much as she could, however hard – just getting from her bed to the kitchen and back to fill up her water bottle could leave her vomiting from the effort or having to sleep for several hours. She worried it would affect their relationship. “We weren’t able to do the activity that was the very reason we bonded in the first place. The questions start: are we going to make it? What if I can’t keep jumping?”
After spending six weeks at a clinic in Oslo for people with high-impact injuries, six months after the injury, she was able to walk without crutches. A year later, Forte did her first skydive. Then, shortly afterwards, she did a BASE jump – Fadnes was away, and Forte hiked a mountain alone.
When she’s standing at the edge and she’s started her countdown, not much stops Forte taking that leap. But that day her phone rang at that moment and she did decide to answer it – it was her surgeon telling her the latest scan results were fine and she could get back to normal life. She told him she was about to jump off a mountain.
Watching Forte jump, it seems both extremely technical and a little bit DIY. Her suit costs thousands, conditions are strictly monitored and, when planning new exit points, she and Fadnes use complicated GPS modelling. But as hers is such a niche activity, the landing strip is merely a piece of blue tarpaulin held down by rocks, and she’s now in the boiler room beneath the restaurant on top of the mountain, warming her hands on the pipes ahead of her next jump. She needs warm hands: “That’s the only way I can open my parachute, and if I can’t feel it…” Forte is typically about 15 seconds away from hitting the ground when she pulls that handle. Outside, getting ready, she swings her arms back and forth, sending blood to her hands. “It gets to the point where you just want to do it.”
Amber Forte flies above the Spanish coastline during a training session
© Espen Fadnes/ Marius Beck Dahle
Since the accident, things have changed a little, Forte admits. “I don’t want to stop what I’m doing, but it’s a battle when you take so much risk. Your mind tells you to be careful.” She smiles. “That doesn’t really include jumping off a mountain.”
The fear, she says, creeps in during the lead-up to the jump. “If we’re hiking a new mountain – for example, we were in Pakistan, opening new exit points – it’s scary because you know that if something happens, there’s no helicopter rescue; you’re in the middle of nowhere. On those type of jumps, I feel a lot of fear. And it’s rational, because you’re putting yourself in a high-risk situation.” She has learnt to disregard gut feelings – “Our gut is always going to tell us not to jump off the mountain” – and focus on how to decrease risk as much as possible.
Both she and Fadnes have lost friends and, she says, being with someone also involved in such a high-risk activity is difficult. When Fadnes is jumping without Forte and he doesn’t answer his phone, she says her heart drops. “I just have to push it away and enjoy what we have, because it’s amazing, the life we have together.”
While mastering fear feels like an accomplishment, Forte is no adrenaline seeker. Sitting at home and knitting in front of the TV is also enjoyable, she says (in an alternative life, she’d be an interior designer). “I don’t need to be risking my life to feel like I’m living. The fascination is not in the risk or the adrenaline – I just love the feeling of flying. Often, I find myself wishing it wasn’t so dangerous, because sometimes when I stand on top of the mountain I feel sick. The passion for flying has to override fear, because the fear never goes away, and it shouldn’t. If it does, there’s probably something wrong with you.”
It’s possible to fly upwards for a short period if enough energy has been generated to transform vertical speed into horizontal lift, but she has a lot of control over other directions. “Like, down to the centimetre, left and right. You can fly up and down relative to somebody easily. If me and Espen are flying next to each other, we can hold hands, change sides, navigate between trees. People look at wingsuiting and think, ‘Why do you throw yourself off the mountain and hope you’re going to make it?’” But when someone is following the plane of a mountain, or going between crevasses, they’re not just at the mercy of gravity, she says: “You’re actively choosing to go there.”
It’s a lesson in living in the moment and letting go, she says. “It’s very rare that I’m flying and I think, ‘Oh, I need to send that email.’” Tense your body and the air feels hard and stiff. “But if you glide through it, then it becomes quite soft, you really feel like you’re in touch with what you’re doing.” Even when it’s cold and raindrops feel like daggers at speed, she feels powerful. “It makes me feel like I have belonging and purpose. It’s a feeling of freedom. Obviously, there are safety guidelines, but the only thing that really limits you is your creativity.”
After that first wingsuit flight since her accident, “I felt like crying on the landing,” Forte says. “After everything I’d been through, to stand in the landing area alone, taking that in, was powerful. It was like, ‘I did it.’”
When she lands in Dover, the first person to fly the Channel in a wingsuit, it might be a similar experience: a homecoming, and the start of a new stage in her career, but also a serious achievement, the pinnacle of her childhood dream to live life differently.
Forte and Fadnes are about to do the last jump of the day. They’re jumping together so he can get footage of her in the air, and also because it’s just what they do together. Earlier, Forte said she chose wingsuit flying over skydiving because of its proximity to nature and the opportunity to bring elegance to her flights. It seems some of her dancer-like grace may have rubbed off on Fadnes as they both launch themselves into the sky, swooping and wheeling, playing in the air. They look as natural as two birds in flight.
amberforte.com