Want to be one of the best BASE jumpers around? Try jumping from a helicopter, parachuting to the top of a building, and then jumping again and parachuting to the ground. Not your thing? You could just try plunging into the darkest depths of a haunted cave... Check out the video in the Media Gallery!
Oman Cave BASE Jump
Just recently you could have been forgiven for thinking that B.A.S.E. jumper Felix Baumgartner had vanished off the face of the earth: following months of preparations, however, he was in Oman for a jump into the second largest cave in the world...
It's 120 metres deep, curved like a tube and, if you believe the endless tales, inhabited by evil spirits: the "Seating of the Spirits" cave on Oman's 1,200 metre high Selma Plateau is not one of the Middle East's most inviting destinations. Jumping into the absolute darkness from its vertical mouth hasn't yet crossed the mind of anyone with any sense of self-preservation. "But I’m someone who sets himself goals that no-one has ever set before and achieves them," says B.A.S.E. jumper Felix Baumgartner. At 10:55am on a day at the end of January, he launched himself off a ledge into the cave - one of the biggest risks of an adrenalin-filled career, even for Baumgartner.
Corageous Control Freak
The jump lasted six seconds, most of it through pitch darkness - making sure that the lighting conditions were as favourable as possible for the start of the jump didn't help much, either. Because "Fearless Felix" is known not just for his casual intrepidness but also for his meticulous and highly professional attention to all of the risks involved, months of preparation went into the jump. "I visited the location many times with my team to explore it, take notes and define the necessary measures to set before the jump." To help the 37-year-old Austrian to find his bearings during the flight through the contorted tunnel, his team marked out the floor of the cave with lights, the idea being to steer towards them. And precise calculations on the depth and curvature of the cave and his own velocity of fall were made to determine the right time to pull the ripcord of his specially constructed parachute.
His free fall into the darkness of the cave was "a gigantic feeling", according to pioneer Baumgartner, who regards victory over himself as the most important goal of his projects: "I don't lust after fear, but fear is what makes a goal worthwhile," he says, "which makes fear part of the job." Fear is something he's overcome by jumping, for example, from the 451 metre high Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, from the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro and, most recently, from the Turning Torso in Malmö. No wonder, then, that even the cursed spirits of Oman respectfully kept their distance ...
Felix Baumgartner
