How this man will jump from 25K feet without a parachute and live

If Luke Aikins is successful, in one week, the old adage “like jumping without a parachute” will no longer apply.

“I’m going to jump at 25,000 feet without a parachute, without a wingsuit, without anything. And I’m going to land and walk away at the end,” Aikins told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson.

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Aikins grew up in Graham, Wash. He now lives and works in Shelton as a precision skydiver.

He will be the star of a feature on FOX TV, “Stride Gum Presents Heaven Sent.” The hour-long special will showcase Aikins’ stunt. He couldn’t say exactly how the stunt will be pulled off — that information is being held until the show.

But he would say that he, along with a team, invented a device that will catch him. The target will be 100 x 100 feet, flat and horizontal. It will be suspended about 200 feet above the ground. The device will start to descend before it catches his body. When he is caught, Aikins will go from traveling 120 miles an hour to zero in about 1.7 seconds.

“At 25,000 feet we need supplemental oxygen to breath and be coherent … I’ll jump out with oxygen,” Aikins said. “I have three people jumping out with me and about halfway down I’ll hand off my oxygen bottle to one of my teammates. Then those guys will start opening up their parachutes at roughly 5,ooo feet, and I’ll keep going.”

“This whole time I’m steering my body and aiming at a 100 x 100 foot target,” he said. “I’m fighting the wind all the way down … my target is 200 feet in the air, so roughly 400 feet above the ground I will do a quick flip to my back, and about one second later I’m going to land in this big soft contraption we built to absorb my impact.”

Aikins likened the stunt to science experiments that protect a raw egg from the impact of falling.

“I’ve treated this like a science project,” he said. “I feel like I’m in an 8^th grade science project and I surrounded myself with the best people in the industry.”

Aikins himself has been a part of similar teams. He is no stranger to high-flying stunts. When Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner jumped to Earth from the stratosphere, breaking the sound barrier, Aikins was on the team.

And it’s such careful planning that Aikins says it makes his stunts more of a calculated event. He and his wife — they have a child — have a checklist of safety concerns. If the project doesn’t pass that list, he doesn’t jump.

“I think there are some people that are driven by that scared-factor,” Aikins said. “They love that feeling of not knowing things are going to be OK. I personally like the feeling of doing my homework, and all my training, and proving the thing all out, and then proving to the world what I can do.”

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