SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — He’s made 18,000 parachute jumps, helped train some of the world’s most elite skydivers, done some of the stunts for “Ironman 3.” But the plunge Luke Aikins knows he’ll be remembered for is the one he’s making without a parachute. Or a wingsuit.
Or anything, really, other than the clothes he’ll be wearing when he jumps out of an airplane at 25,000 feet today, attempting to become the first person to land safely on the ground in a net.
And, no, you don’t have to tell Aikins it sounds crazy. He knows that.
“If I wasn’t nervous I would be stupid,” the compact, muscular athlete says with a grin as he sits under a canopy near Saturday’s drop zone.
“We’re talking about jumping without a parachute, and I take that very seriously. It’s not a joke,” he adds.
Nearby, a pair of huge cranes defines the boundaries where the net in which Aikins expects to land is being erected. It will be about one-third the size of a football field and 20 stories high, providing enough space to cushion his fall, he says, without allowing him to bounce out of it. 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 dummies didn’t bounce out. It crashed right through.
“That was not a good thing to see,” recalled Jimmy Smith, the veteran Hollywood public relations man who, with his partner Bobby Ware, came up with the idea of having someone skydive without a parachute.
Chris Talley, who had worked with Aikins on other projects and helped train him for this one, recommended the skydiver to the two Amusement Park Entertainment executives. He told them Aikins was arguably the only guy not only good enough but also smart enough and careful enough to survive this.