Plop. “Did it go through it?” In the command center they could not believe it for a while: Felix Baumgartner was the first person to be broken by the sound barrier, during a jump from a helium balloon. He wore a white space suit and had a parachute. Height: 38,969 meters, close to the atmosphere. A few minutes later he landed safely in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico.
With his leap from the stratosphere, in October 2012, Baumgartner established his name as the greatest daring of the guild of the base jumpmen and women who jump from buildings, objects and mountains. He died in the armor on Thursday, during paragliding on the Adriatic coast of Italy. According to local media He died during his flight from a heart attack, after which he crashed into the swimming pool of a campsite.
Baumgartner (Salzburg, 1969) was trained as a machine bench worker and served as a parachutist in the Austrian army, but left the armed forces because he said he had difficulty following up “stupid orders.” From the nineties he caused a furore as a professional base jumper. His sponsor was the Austrian energy drink giant Red Bull, which would grow into the pattern of Extreme Sports.
In total, Baumgartner would do more than 130 ‘object jumps’: Van Bruggen, Masts, Bergen and skyscrapers. He jumped from the Sasso Pordoi (2,950 meters high) in the Italian Dolomites, dropped from the world famous Christ statue in Rio de Janeiro (750 meters) and made jumps of iconic high buildings such as the Torre Mayor (Mexico City, 225 meters) and The Taipei 101 (Taiwan, 390 meters).
Those jumps of skyscrapers happened clandestien, since the authorities were not waiting for such dangerous straps. When Baumgartner dropped from the 88th floor of the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur (452 meters high) in 1999, a day-long preparation preceded it: he had explored the building and dressed as a businessman, his parachute was hidden in a briefcase.
‘No protocol’
Real world fame acquired ‘Fearless Felix’ with his skydive From the Tampkring. With the breaking of the sound barrier, he achieved highest speed ever reached by a person (without a vehicle): 1,357.6 kilometers per hour. And he set two more world performance in one fell swoop: the highest free fall and highest parachute jump ever. Two years later, the latter record was taken away by Google CEO Alan Eustace, who jumped from 41,419 meters, more than 2,400 meters higher.
The biggest challenge in his jump, Baumgartner said, was to prevent him from spinning around like crazy. Since he was the first person to do a “Strato jump”, Baumgartner said later, there was “no protocol.” “Nobody can tell you: Felix, you have to do this.” He managed to control gravity with clever use of his equipment and land unharmed on earth.
After his adventure in the atmosphere, Baumgartner put an end to his career as an extreme athlete, although he still participated as a car racer at the annual 24-hour race on the Nürnburgring. He went to work as a helicopter stunt pilot. A conflict with the Austrian tax authorities about a withdrawn tax discount led to a departure from his home country. Since then he lived in Switzerland.
Sympathy for radical rights
In Austria, Baumgartner has since been mainly in the news with the radical-right opinions he proclaimed in interviews and on social media. For example, he turned against parliamentary democracy and argued “a moderate dictatorship” in which “a few people from the business community” would be “really in control.”
He regularly posted provocative posts about immigration, climate change, LGBTI emancipation and the position of women in society. He supported the presidential candidate of the radical-right party FPö and announced that the authoritarian Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán should get the Nobel Prize for Peace, because he would have done “the only right” with the closing of the boundaries for refugees: “His country and his people who chose him.” After his death, the leader of the FPö called Baumgartner “a courageous pioneer” and a “patriot who has shown leadership.”
During the Coronapandemie, he was sentenced to pay five thousand euros in compensation to a journalist who had been positive about vaccination. On X, Baumgartner had called him for “outright fool” and “pharma whore.”
Last Thursday Baumgartner from his Italian holiday address in Porto Sant’elpidio a message on Instagram with the text: “Too much wind.” A few hours later he crashed dead.