![]() ![]() ![]() Then after the no parachute jump I said, well, I’ve always wanted to do this. I had to think about it a little bit, and then I had my neighbor draw a picture of two airplanes in a dive with the drogue chutes behind them and two jumpers switching planes like that. When you become a Red Bull athlete, they ask you to provide some projects that you would like to do before your career’s over. It was just a dream to be able to do something like that, and originally it was just a skydive next to a plane. And I just remember that as a kid and I always had that picture and I always wanted to do a version of that. And there was a guy in a big floppy yellow jumpsuit skydiving next to the airplane. You mentioned working on projects like this, but how did you come up with the specific idea behind Plane SwapĪikins: When I was in high school in the early ‘90s there was a picture in a parachute magazine-it was the only thing you can get that shows skydiving-there was a parachutist with a Stearman biplane engine in a dive at the ground, and there was a drogue chute, which is like a round parachute behind it, holding it up so it could go slower. I mean, everybody wants to do what their dad does as a kid, right? It wasn’t so much for me if I was gonna jump, it was when. And then they started their own club and my dad learned to jump with my aunt, Andy’s mom. So he and a buddy in the ‘60s went out to a skydiving club, and he made a jump and they fell in love with it. When he came home from the war he really wondered what it would’ve been like that day to jump out it was always in the back of his mind. ![]() He crash-landed in allied territory in his P-47. My grandpa got shot down in the war and he always wondered what it would’ve been like to open up the cockpit and jump out. When did you first decide that skydiving was something that you wanted to pursue professionally?Īikins: I’m a third-generation skydiver. ( This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.) Plane Swap will be exclusively streamed live on Hulu in the US on April 24. RED BULL SPACE DROP PROFESSIONALWhy would people do something like this? Well, for more on the upcoming Plane Swap project next month and to learn a bit about Aikin’s career as a professional skydiver, read my conversation with him and Paolo Iscold below. RED BULL SPACE DROP FREEConventional wisdom would tell you that jumping from 25,000 feet in the air sans parachute is about as crazy as it gets, but my afternoon in SLO proved that it’s possible to push those limits even further and to risk even more.įor Plane Swap, the dive is just half the battle, as once the break is in position and they are perpendicular to the ground, Aikins and Farrington will jump out of their planes and free fall alongside the aircrafts while attempting to swap planes mid air, regain control, and then land them both safely. For a guy like Aikins, he is always in search of the next thrill, or the next project to satisfy his hunger of constantly pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the world of skydiving. I got to spend an afternoon with Aikins in San Luis Obispo, CA at a Red Bull hangar where we went skydiving out of a helicopter and I got to learn about his next project, dubbed Plane Swap. That someone was Luke Aikins, a Red Bull Air Force stalwart who became famous by jumping into a net without a parachute from 25,000 feet in the air. Well, two weeks later I found myself strapped up to one of the most prolific skydivers in the entire world, someone who has jumped out of a plane or a helicopter over 20,000 times. I barely liked flying Delta from New York to Chicago, why on earth would I jump out of a perfectly good plane? Almost immediately, everyone in the group shot him down, myself very much included. On a random Tuesday afternoon, a friend of mine messaged our group chat and asked if everyone was finally ready to go skydiving. ![]()
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