Offroad
UTV meets airplane: Mia Chapman rockets down a canyon for an epic stunt
Teamed up with two expert Red Bull Air Force Sky Divers, off-road champion Mia Chapman drives her racing UTV toward a hovering airplane to complete a breathtaking stunt.
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Aviation and racing share two important qualities: performance and precision. For Mia Chapman, the first Red Bull female athlete on four wheels in the U.S.A., those attributes converged in one epic stunt that harnessed her skills as an off-road champion. The stunt had to be worthy of Hollywood action films, melding aviation, horsepower, and skydiving, culminating in a clip that leaves its audience breathless.
Teamed up with Red Bull Air Force Sky Divers Amy Chmelecki and Luke Aikins, Chapman was tasked with driving her 2018 Can-Am Maverick X3 to complete the stunt. The idea: prepped with a parachute, Chmelecki would ride next to her in the UTV while Aikins flew a Cessna 180 overhead. While the UTV was in motion, Aikins would zoom ahead and fly even with the Can-Am, then drop a ladder down to Chmelecki in the passenger seat. Keeping a steady, matched pace, Aikins and Chapman would freeze time while Chmelecki latched onto the ladder. Then Aikins would pull the nose of the plant up while Chmelecki's suspended in air for about 45 seconds over the canyon before the veteran sky diver would let go for a freefall then parachute to the ground.
Mia Chapman, the first Red Bull female athlete on four wheels in the U.S.A.
© Garth Milan
It’s kind of crazy to take someone driving a racecar and someone flying a plane and combine those two in a way that hasn’t been done before.
Meanwhile, Chapman would race to meet her at the bottom of the canyon, navigating hairpin turns and cliff-edge dirt roads to get there at high speed. That was the easy part, for Chapman: now 23, she was just 8 years old when she won her first Trophy Kart championship and has racked up 8 Off Road Racing Championships so far. Still, this was a first for her.
Melding expert aviation skills with top-tier off-roading skills
If you’ve ever observed an airline crew turn over a plane for the next flight, you might be reminded of a motorsports pit crew. While the pit crew is condensed into one small space at high speed, an airline crew fans out across the plane as passengers disembark, and the ground crew checks the equipment to ensure it’s ready to take flight once again with precision and order.
As a professional sky diver and Hollywood stuntman in movies like Iron Man 3, Aikins has vast experience coordinated various people and machines for ideal outcomes.
Red Bull Air Force Sky Diver Amy Chmelecki reaching out of the UTV
© Bella Kimbel
“I take all the things I’ve learned and meld it all together, using the safety protocols to make a project like this happen,” he says.
Aikins understood the assignment for this stunt and communicated with Chapman and Chmelecki to lock down the physics and math. With very little room for error, Luke was required to hover between 21 and 23 feet above Chapman's UTV and maintain a speed of 60 miles per hour. At the same time, Chapman had to time her acceleration to match the plane, allowing Chmelecki to grab the dangling ladder safely.
“The coordination between Luke and me was definitely crucial,” Chapman says. “He’s up in an airplane and I’m on the ground in my racecar, so there’s a lot of room for things to go wrong with someone not being there right next to you. But we did have comms devices, which helped tie things together and let us know where we’re at and if everything is looking and feeling good. That was key to making sure everything went well.”
Getting ready to hurtle down the canyon
Lining up all the vectors, Chapman, Aikins, and Chmelecki–along with a top-notch crew–practiced the stunt many times at Dead Cow Lakebed in Nevada. They denoted spots on the ground where Mia had to hit her marks, and she ran it over and over with a 90-pound punching bag standing in for Chmelecki before adding the skydiver to the mix.
Luke Aikins hovering over Mia’s Chapman's UTV with Amy Chmelecki hanging on
© Chris Tedesco
Mia Chapman ripping down canyon straights with Amy Chmelecki skydiving near
© Garth Milan
“I think the scary thing for me is that I was basically in charge of Chmelecki's life, since she was in the passenger seat in my car with no seat belt on and nothing to hold her in if something went wrong; that was definitely nerve wracking,” Chapman says. “But Aikins was amazing to work with. He put together the plan to make it safe, and we moved in small steps. If those small steps didn’t how we wanted them to, we didn't move on. That whole process made me feel a lot better. I was honored to work around him to see what it takes to put a true Hollywood stunt into place.”
When it was time for the real show in Mineral Bottom, Utah, Chapman was ready. Decked out in Red Bull gear, she knew her timing, she knew her comms devices were working, and her muscle memory was primed. And, most importantly, her teammates trusted her to do her part to pull it off.
“When I think of Red Bull I think the best of the best, extreme, crazy, out-of-this-world things that have never been done before,” Chapman says. “I think this stunt was very fitting for Red Bull and catered to each and every one of us: Luke up in the plane, Amy doing more extreme things, and me in my racecar.”
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