The Death Swing and Thy Bridle

Producing base jumping footage that scares non-jumpers is quite easy, its about the footage that makes all other jumpers cringe… like this one:

http://www.vimeo.com/26788405

I want to add something to this…
What he did with his legs (as he says in the interview), didn’t directly lead to the bridle entanglement. The only reason that happened was that he fuck up his pull timing and pulled when he was on his back.
But why did he do that?
He already swung out of the rope with a bit of a twist, and by opening up his legs unsymetrically, the rotation axis tilted a bit more, -> this means that the aerial is added a bit of a twisting (srewing) rotation. As you can see in the slomo part at the end, right after he threw the pilotchute he was actually lying on his right side. (after fucking up his position further when pulling)
If your aerial is unintentionally moving out of axis a lot (for whatever reason), and you are not prepared for that, it can fuck up your pull timing because everything suddenly feels and looks different.

However, this is just a theory, maybe it wasn’t his day, or 5 jumps was maybe too much for one day, or he just lost body position awareness for some other reason.

As a side note, having some body armor is a good idea, he was just lucky (which is funny because thats his name…), although kneepads would have maybe killed him. But a helmet would not have done any damage.

wtb

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