(Image: Stride Gum)
UPDATE: He did it! And Aikins survived! You can watch the amazing video here.
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Master skydiver Luke Aikins has had some close calls during his 18,000 jumps. But now he's taking new risks because for this jump, he won't have a parachute. Or a wingsuit. He's just going to jump out of a plane and, hopefully, land in a net on the ground.
Hollywood producers first pitched this insane idea to Aikins a couple years ago. He dismissed it immediately, but has contemplating it ever since. Aikins talked to France 24 news:
He said as much to his wife after a couple Hollywood guys looking to create the all-time-greatest reality TV stunt floated the idea by him a couple years ago.
"I said, 'You won't believe these guys,'" the affable skydiver recalls with a robust laugh. "'They want me to jump out without a parachute.' She said, 'Oh, with a wingsuit.' I said, 'No, they want me to do it with nothing.' We both had a good laugh about that."
But in the weeks that followed he couldn't shake one persistent thought: Could anybody actually do this and live to tell the tale?
Because if anyone could, Aikins wanted to be that guy.
The net, which is still under construction, will be a third of the size of a football field and held aloft 20 stories high by cranes. The design needs a bit of refinement:
The landing target, which has been described as similar to a fishing trawler net, has been tested repeatedly using dummies.
One of those 200-pound (91-kilogram) dummies didn't bounce out. It crashed right through.
-via Dave Barry