Felix Baumgartner, adventurer who leapt from the stratosphere and broke the sound barrier on his descent

Yahoo

18-07-2025

Felix Baumgartner, who has died in a paramotoring accident aged 56, was a daredevil skydiver, BASE jumper and aerobatic helicopter pilot who achieved global celebrity after leaping from the edge of space.
It was on October 14 2012 that the then 43-year-old skydiver stepped out of a pressurised capsule at an altitude of almost 24 miles and began a freefall to Earth. As he jumped he said: 'I'm coming home now.' Afterwards, he said: 'It's almost overwhelming. When you're standing there in a pressure suit, the only thing that you hear is yourself breathing, and you can see the curvature of the Earth; you can see the sky's totally black.'
It took just 34 seconds for him to hit Mach 1, the speed of sound, creating a sonic boom that could be heard by those watching from the New Mexico desert below and the millions around the world watching the mission live (more than eight million tuned in, a record for YouTube at the time, almost breaking their servers.)
Then to everyone's horror, he went into an uncontrollable spin. 'A lot of the scientists said prior to the jump, 'You're going to spin like crazy', he recalled in a documentary. 'I was mentally prepared to spin. The problem is there's no protocol. There's nobody in the world telling you: 'Listen Felix, if this happens you have to do this.'
'I was trying to move my arms around a little bit – maybe it does something? – and then it stopped for a second [before going] in the opposite direction. Then it really ramps up, and at that moment it's not about breaking records any more. It's all about survival.'
After a few nailbiting moments, Baumgartner managed to exit the spin. Finally, after four minutes and 20 seconds he opened his parachute and landed safely. He had become the first human to travel faster than the speed of sound outside a vehicle and set the unofficial record for the highest manned balloon flight, of 123,491ft.
He also broke the record for the highest-altitude jump, set in 1960 by the USAF Colonel Joseph Kittinger, who was Baumgartner's mentor and communicator at mission control.
Before stepping from the capsule, perhaps conscious of the need for some portentous words, Baumgartner said: 'I wish the world could see what I see. Sometimes you have to go up really high to understand how small you are.'
In 2014 the Google executive Alan Eustace broke his altitude record. 'Nobody remembers the second one,' said Baumgartner.
Felix Baumgartner was born on 20 April 1969 in Salzburg, Austria, the elder son of a carpenter and a housewife. As a child he had two ambitions, to become a skydiver and to fly a helicopter. After completing an apprenticeship as a machinist and working as a car mechanic, he enlisted in the Austrian armed forces for five years, receiving training as a parachutist.
He completed his first BASE jump in 1996 from the New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia. BASE jumping had emerged as a thrill-seeking low-altitude variant of skydiving that involved leaping from fixed structures ('BASE' stands for buildings, antennas, spans and earth). He dedicated himself to the pursuit full-time and was soon sponsored by the Salzburg-based energy drinks company, Red Bull, which was then embedding itself in extreme sports.
In 1999 he claimed a world record for the highest parachute jump from a building when he leapt from the Petronas Towers in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur. Later that year he made the lowest ever BASE jump, of 95ft, from the hand of the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro.
In 2003 he became the first person to fly across the English Channel using a pair of specially made carbon-fibre wings. He leapt from a plane above Dover and landed 22 miles away in Cap Blanc-Nez, near Calais, 14 minutes later. 'You're totally alone,' he said afterwards, 'there's just you, your equipment, your wing – and your skills. I like it.'
He became the first person to BASE-jump from the Millau Viaduct in France in 2004, and the first person to skydive on to, then BASE-jump from, the Turning Torso building in Malmö, Sweden, in 2006. The following year he became the first to jump from the 91st-floor observation deck of the then world's tallest completed building, Taipei 101, in Taiwan.
But it was the Red Bull Stratos edge-of-space project that catapulted him into the stratosphere, literally and metaphorically. Afterwards, he dedicated himself to his other childhood ambition. He had learnt to fly a helicopter in 2006, and he became an aerobatic helicopter pilot for the Flying Bulls team in Salzburg.
More recently he had got into paragliding sports, initially flying fast and dynamic parakites – a cross between a kite and a conventional aerofoil wing – and latterly he had enthuiastically taken to paramotoring, the sport of motorised paragliding, in which pilots fly paragliders with an engine propeller on their back.
It was while paramotoring in Porto Sant'Elpidio on the Adriatic coast of the Marche region in central Italy that he suffered a fatal accident, apparently undergoing a medical emergency and crashing into the swimming pool of a hotel.
He always denied that he took unnecessary risks: 'I pay close attention to my flight preparation and do it extremely meticulously. That is who I am and that was always the message I wanted to convey. People know that I never push things too far, whether on a solo flight through the mountains, a jump or at an air show in front of 100,000 people.'
Down on Earth Baumgartner was a controversial figure in his homeland. In 2010 he was fined €1,500 (£1,300) after punching a Greek truck driver in the face during a roadside altercation near Salzburg. He was also noted for his robust political views, once telling the Austrian newspaper Kleine Zeitung: 'You can't achieve anything in a democracy. We would need a moderate dictatorship, where there are a few people from the private sector who really know what they're doing.' He received the (negative) 'Pink Handbag' award from the Austrian Women's Media Network for other uncompromising views, which also covered immigration, the LGBTQ community and the Covid pandemic.
Baumgartner is survived by his partner of 11 years, Mihaela Schwartzenberg, a Romanian television presenter who he referred to as his 'great love' in an interview for Playboy.
Felix Baumgartner, born April 20 1969, died July 17 2025
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