Falling away

Hero of the day: Joe Kittinger
Tom forwarded me some info on this pilot in the US air-force and I just had to repost. His most impressive feats were to make three record setting parachute jumps in 1959-60. The highest jump was was of 102,800 feet (31km!). He claims to have exceeded the speed of sound during free-fall which would have made him the first man to survive it (before Chuck Yeager broke the sound-barrier) but was recorded as only hitting mach 0.9 (618kph). He also flew 483 missions in Vietnam and spent time as a POW there. This guy is nuts. Checkout the Boards of Canada video "Dayvan Cowboy" which begins with footage from one of his jumps and has some surf videography later.

This interesting reading lead to an expedition to video.google.com to try and find the skydiving film "Sputnik". I didn't see it but found this cool video with tons of awesome BASE jumps. I want to try it someday. If you know where to find Sputnik let me know. I'm especially interested in finding a clip from it of the wingsuit jump from the Matterhorn in Switzerland. Checkout the end of that article for some cool videos.