Bird Dream Read online

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  Bird cults have preoccupied cultures throughout history, from Siberia, where shaman priestesses believed to be the very descendants of birds dressed in bird suits, to Central Africa, where Nyanga tribesmen donned bird masks to identify their bush soul, to Lascaux, France, where Paleolithic cave paintings showed, according to the scholar of mythology Joseph Campbell, “a shaman . . . lying in a trance, wearing a bird mask with a figure of a bird perched on a staff beside him.” Carl Jung had called birds “symbols of transcendence” and said the birdman shaman was on a quest to the realm of the unconscious by which he may achieve the ultimate goal—full knowledge of the potential of his individual Self.

  Thus, flight as the highest expression of man.

  Most discussions of wingsuits, though, begin at Icarus and Daedalus and wend through hundreds of years of records attesting to early winged men in China, England, Greece, Spain, Turkey, and Italy, where Leonardo sketched plans for a glider, and continue into the modern era, beyond the Wright brothers and into the wild wake of 1927, when Lindbergh piloted the Spirit of St. Louis from Long Island to Le Bourget Field, in Paris, demonstrating the range and potential of new flying machines to carry passengers around the world.

  It is worth pausing there, though, at the dawn of a new age in aviation, to get acquainted with Clem Sohn, a skydiver from Lansing, Michigan, a performer at the barnstorming air shows during the Great Depression, billed as “the Michigan Icarus” and “the Batman.”

  The most popular acts during this era were low-pull contests, games of chicken with the ground among two or more skydivers who exited an aircraft at the same time. Whoever had the balls to delay pulling his rip cord the longest was the winner. The winner, of course, sometimes had death as his prize, a morbid prospect that was a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. Sohn had success as a low-pull specialist, but he soon devised a plan to guarantee he would be the shows’ undisputed feature attraction.

  Looking to the anatomy of flying squirrels and bats for principles to guide design, he built wings using airplane fabric and metal tubing, fastening them between his arms and the side of his jumpsuit. He sewed a tail fin between his legs. The result, weighing eight pounds, was a suit that on sight alone was enough to draw attention. Whether it would fly was another matter.

  With a flair for showmanship, Sohn opened testing to the public on a winter day in 1935, in Daytona Beach, Florida. Stepping from a plane more than two miles above the palm-fringed coast, he dropped, according to eyewitnesses reports, two thousand feet in free fall and, gathering speed, spread his arms and legs.

  As his wings deflected air, Sohn’s downward speed slowed and he slanted across the sky. A report in Time noted how he bent his knees and somersaulted, banked left and right, leveled off, dove, and pulled up again. At six thousand feet he closed his wings and pulled his rip cord. Under parachute, he landed three miles from his starting point. According to Time, his flight had lasted seventy-five seconds, screaming through the sky at 130 miles per hour. Sohn and his wingsuit landed on the front page of newspapers across the country. Newsreel pictures of his flight sold for $300, a nice sum during the Depression. Suddenly in demand, Sohn earned what Time termed “a tidy living.” Chevrolet sponsored him, its name stenciled on the underside of his wings. Newspaper reporters tailed him, chronicling his stunts. Sohn explained to them that he had grander ambitions: he envisioned a time when anyone would be able to don a wingsuit and take flight; when the military would use wings to drop paratroopers behind enemy lines; and finally a day when he would stall and land his wings without a parachute.

  Imitators cropped up in Sohn’s wake wherever he went. Without design standards or adequate training, many of these copycat wingmen wound up dead. Sohn suffered close calls, too. At a demonstration during the opening of London’s Gatwick Airport in 1936, he spun out of control, and although he activated his reserve a couple hundred feet off the deck, Sohn struck a taxi on landing, breaking his arm and injuring his shoulder.

  A year later, healed and at the height of his popularity, he arrived at the Paris Air Show, at an airfield in Vincennes, a Paris suburb northeast of the 12th arrondissement. The day was April 25, 1937, and the newsreels said two hundred thousand spectators had gathered under clear skies. Sohn was twenty-six. With his sandy hair, white jumpsuit, and leather helmet and goggles, he cut the figure of the dashing aviator as he slipped coolly into the open cockpit of a single-engine Farman. Before doing so, it was reported that he remarked, “I feel as safe as you would in your grandmother’s kitchen.” The crowd roared its approval as the plane sprinted along the airstrip and into the sky.

  Sohn stepped from the cockpit at ten thousand feet and pirouetted into the air. A canister of chemicals attached to his leg emitted smoke, allowing those on the ground to trace his movements. He banked, somersaulted, and dove, gliding through the sky like a swallow feeding on flies, the newspapers said. They reported that his flight lasted nearly two minutes. At one thousand feet, Sohn drew in his wings and pulled his parachute’s rip cord, but there was a problem and it did not deploy. Cutting away, Sohn reached for his reserve and pulled the cord. This time the chute and lines emerged but got snared in his wings. As his parachute flapped limply above, moans went up from the crowd and people turned away, the papers said, as Sohn thudded into a field. The crowd sprinted toward his broken body. Later, a witness told a reporter: “When I realized Clem Sohn was doomed, I felt worse than ever during the World War . . . The hush coming over the crowd was the most impressive thing I have ever seen . . . And when Clem Sohn hit the ground, it sounded like an explosion.”

  Sohn’s death made newspapers around the world. Footage of his fatal plunge featured in newsreels. Yet grimmer developments soon seized headlines. The day after Sohn’s death, the Luftwaffe terrorized civilians in Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. Before the decade’s end, the Nazis would invade Poland, pounding cities and towns from the air with superior bombers. The war altered aviation irrevocably. The world’s top aviators—including air-show stuntmen—were drawn into the conflict as instructors, pilots, engineers, and advisers. When the fighting ended, some resumed working in air shows, but it was soon obvious that their heyday had passed. The culture surrounding flight changed from a hell-for-leather approach to a precision pursuit. The new icons were jet pilots and astronauts, men selected for their superior abilities from among the most elite ranks of aviation. In this environment, amateur wingsuit pilots, with their crude contraptions, were relics, their main appeal the lurid spectacle of a potential fatality, a fact emphasized by those performing under names like Death Dodgers and Death’s Angels.

  In this climate, the USPA, the governing body for skydiving, first organized in the immediate postwar years as the National Parachute-Riggers, Inc., took a dim view of wingsuits, banning them outright at member drop zones, except with written permission. The danger and body counts resulting from wingsuits lent a bad name to a new sport striving for respectability. Wingmen would persist, using canvas, whalebone, wood, even fiberglass, but these materials did little to improve glide. Or they fouled parachutes. Some simply failed to catch on. It would require innovation in parachute design, and the passage of several decades, before a man with the right proportions of vision and courage provided the crucial link for wingsuits to move forward.

  • • •

  Early parachutes were round, dome-shaped designs, which are still in use today for military paratroopers and cargo drops. Round parachutes open easily and reliably. Yet they rely on drag (the slowing force of air resistance) and leave a parachutist drifting with little maneuverability, forcing a landing where the wind dictates.

  A kite and balloon designer working on scientific projects for the U.S. military would change all that in the 1960s. His name was Domina Jalbert, and he patented the modern ram-air parafoil, a rectangular parachute with a profile inspired by an airplane wing. Air literally rams into vents on the chute, inflating individual cells, which gives the canopy a wing shape
and provides lift. This allows a parachutist to not only control the rate of descent but glide much farther than with a round design. Handheld toggles connected to risers—lines that attach to the canopy—allow a parachutist to alter the way air enters a ram-air chute’s leading edge, increasing control and maneuverability. Compared with a round canopy, a ram-air chute is so superior that skilled parachutists can land on a Frisbee-size target.

  Patrick de Gayardon was one such skilled parachutist. Known as Deug (pronounced doog) to his friends, he was, by the 1990s, the most famous skydiver in the world. He starred at the early X Games in skysurfing, a discipline using a snowboard-like apparatus to ride air currents and perform freestyle maneuvers in free fall. Everything about him, from his attitude to his feats to his dark, brooding good looks, made him an ideal ambassador for his sport, and for consumer brands attempting to cash in on the cachet of skydiving to push their products. Reebok featured Deug in a TV commercial. “He was rippin’ out moves left and right to ‘Suicide Blonde’ by INXS,” reflected Troy Hartman, who was inspired to take up skydiving and later won a gold medal in skysurfing at the 1997 X Games. “It was insane!”

  An Italian watch company called Sector underwrote many of Deug’s projects as he jumped from the Eiffel Tower and skysurfed over the North Pole. He rode a snowboard off a cliff in Norway and parachuted to the ground. He plunged from a helicopter into Mexico’s Sótano de las Golondrinas, or Cave of Swallows, and made a BASE jump adjacent to Angel Falls, in Venezuela, the world’s highest waterfall. In 1995 he set a world record for the highest parachute jump without oxygen, plummeting from an Ilyushin Il-76, a massive Russian transport plane, 41,910 feet above Moscow, an altitude at which air temperatures were 67 degrees Fahrenheit below zero.

  Deug laughed at danger and scoffed at skydiving taboos, chanting “Blue sky, black death!” Although he was number one, it was lonely at the top. “In half his mind, he was always in the sky,” friend and camera flier Andi Duff recalled, “and that made it difficult for people to have a conversation with him—as soon as the conversation went away from skydiving, they lost him.”

  An inveterate tinkerer, Deug traveled the world lugging cases filled with contraptions for testing at the various drop zones he visited. By the mid-1990s the contents of his luggage included a wingsuit. Drawing on ram-air principles, he sewed two layers of tightly woven nylon—the kind used in parachutes—between the arms and torso, and between the legs, of a normal jumpsuit. When put in action, air rammed between the layers and formed the shape of small wings, providing lift and doubling time in free fall. Deug wasn’t necessarily flying; he was more falling along a glide slope with a ratio of 1:1. Thus, if falling at fifty miles per hour, he moved forward at fifty miles per hour. A skydiver in free fall generally has a 0:1 glide slope, and parachutes achieve a 3:1 slope—moving three feet forward for every foot of descent. With some modifications to his suit, Deug eventually gained a glide slope of 2.5:1, slowing vertical speed to about thirty miles per hour while moving forward at seventy-five miles per hour. It was an incredible achievement that he was capable of a glide comparable to that of a parachute.

  During public demonstrations of his wings, Deug buzzed journalists gathered on a lookout tower at Aiguille du Midi, near Mont Blanc. At the Grand Canyon, he jumped seventy-five times, sweeping closer to the cliffs with each flight. Above Chambéry, France, he exited a Pilatus Porter, a Swiss airplane designed for tight takeoff and landing zones, and flew alongside and reentered the plane while it was still in flight. Everywhere, he caused a sensation like Sohn had a lifetime earlier.

  By 1998 Deug was thirty-eight and at the peak of his powers, but friends noticed he had grown glum and sloppy with safety, sometimes packing his parachute in haste. That spring he made his way to Hawaii, where he had an ownership stake in a drop zone on the North Shore of Oahu. He and friends stayed in a rented house equipped with a sewing machine, which he used to modify the deflector on his rig, a flap that creates more consistent airflow and improves wingsuit performance. A friend recalled Deug was lost deep in his work. “I disassemble, I unstitch, I sew, I reassemble, that’s ugly,” he recalled Deug saying. “I can’t sew properly, but it works.”

  On the morning of April 13, Deug and friends climbed aboard a small plane at the drop zone. There are many powerful sensations associated with skydiving. The interior of a small aircraft provides none of the pleasant ones. The fuselage was dark, noisy, cramped, and heavy with the whiff of human sweat and fuel. As the plane edged higher, the view outside took in a sublime landscape of banana and pineapple plantations plotted on a narrow plane between a pale sea streaked with foam and the green wrinkles of the Waianae Mountains. On the load was Deug’s friend Adrian Nicholas. Sheathed in wingsuits, he and Deug stepped from the interior into the square bay, howling with wind. Falling in succession like beads strung on an invisible filament, both men accelerated across the sky, playfully crossing paths. Nicholas could not help but notice the beatific expression his friend wore, eyes hidden behind streamlined sunglasses, hair plastered back by the wind. As Nicholas opened his parachute at 3,500 feet, Deug peeled away toward the drop zone to extend the flight.

  The men appeared small as mitochondria to those squinting into the sky from the ground. But Deug fast grew more distinct, and at a thousand feet his friends could see him pretty clearly, handles in hand, chute trailing in an uninflated tangle. He let out a deep-throated scream as he approached the ground at terminal speed, then disappeared beneath the big green leaves of banana trees and was killed instantly.

  An investigation would reveal that in his obsessive quest to improve equipment and performance, Deug had unwittingly disabled his parachute systems with the sewing machine.

  • • •

  HIS WINGSUIT WOULD NOT die, though, and less than a year after Deug’s death, Jeb Corliss got his first glimpse of a crude reproduction in Italy. Soon after ordering a custom suit from Birdman, a box arrived by mail at the drop zone in Perris Valley. Inside was a black wingsuit with black zippers, just as Jeb had specified. Using high-density nylon and double-reinforced stitching, the workmanship was clearly superior to the one belonging to the Russian jumper. But the suit came with no instructions, and when Jeb attempted to log his first jump in the flight manifest at Perris Valley, the staff had never seen a wingsuit before.

  Unsure what to make of it, they asked if, once at altitude, he should jump from the planeload before or after the others.

  Jeb was unsure. “Let me go last,” he said.

  Tumbling from the plane at thirteen thousand feet, he stretched his arms and legs wide. The wings filled with air, and he glided forward. At five thousand feet, an electronic altimeter sounded an alarm in his helmet’s earpiece, indicating the time to pull. Unzipping his wings, arms free, Jeb grabbed the risers guiding his parachute and returned to earth. He would make ten jumps that day, each time gaining greater feel for the suit. Any slight movement of his head, arms, hips, or legs deflected air, producing an instant response. His heart soared. The sadness that characterized so much of his life had gradually ebbed till there was scant trace of those feelings. He was flying.

  Chapter 6

  THE WORLD IS A PLAYGROUND

  Fear cannot be without hope, nor hope without fear.

  —Baruch Spinoza

  Around the time wingsuits arrived on the scene, the old guard of the jumping world, dedicated to an underground pastime with a tradition of secrecy and restraint, was coming to grips with a new generation intent on pulling off high-profile, public feats and basking in the publicity that followed. Training programs and businesses catering to jumpers meant that a novice no longer had to endure an apprenticeship of sitting around fires at night where beers were passed, listening to mentors telling old war stories that began, There I was, sure I was either going to die or get arrested . . . One no longer really required the imprimatur of his fellows in the jumping community to be on his way.

  When jumping had been smaller and tight-knit, it was
easier to get everyone to toe the line. “We used to use peer pressure to ostracize them,” DiGiovanni says about those who violated the sport’s codes of conduct. And if that didn’t work, there was always vigilantism.

  John Vincent, the jumper who inspired a teenage Jeb Corliss to pursue BASE, finally ran afoul of his fellow jumpers in Atlanta by leaping from a crane at a construction site and sending footage to a local TV news station for airing. Vincent did not know that others had been using the crane clandestinely. Their site burned, the other jumpers were bent on revenge. Showing up at Vincent’s apartment with pantyhose on their heads, like bank robbers, they rang the buzzer. When a groggy Vincent came to the door, he was seized, dragged inside, held down, and duct-taped. His attackers put plastic on the floor, bathed him in tar, and doused him with feathers. “Hey, man, we’re your BASE buddies,” they announced as they left, message delivered.

  The incident had been filmed, and the footage, and talk of it, made the rounds, the lesson plain to any other would-be code violators. Eventually, though, not even the threat of a tar-and-feathering would chasten a new breed.

  Perhaps it was inevitable that a personality type eager to see which objects they could get away with jumping from would also be curious about what else they could pull off. As one longtime jumper said, summing up the feeling: “I love the cat-and-mouse.”

  Another factor in the generational shift was a rise of new technology, namely development of small video cameras that could be attached to a jumper, and a World Wide Web on which footage could easily be disseminated. Suddenly it seemed possible for a man to make his name, and maybe his living, on daring jumps.