On 30 July 2016, 42-year-old professional skydiver Luke Aikins stepped out of a plane 25,000 feet above Simi Valley, California — with no parachute and no wingsuit. Just a GPS, a camera, and an oxygen mask he handed away on the way down. For about two minutes he fell at 120 miles an hour, steering with his body alone, guided by lights on the ground: white meant he was on course, red meant he was off. His target was a net 100 feet by 100 feet, held 20 storeys up by four cranes. In the last seconds he flipped onto his back and hit the dead centre of the net — then climbed out, uninjured, and walked away. Hours before the jump, the actors' union had ordered him to wear a parachute. He refused — a parachute would have made the landing more dangerous — and the union relented. A year and a half of preparation by a third-generation skydiver with more than 18,000 jumps. The first person to jump from a plane and land in a net with no parachute and no wingsuit — a Guinness World Record. The jump was broadcast on Fox, and more than 32 million people have watched the video since.
The opening "Picture this" line is an imagined question to the viewer, not a real event. The rest of the story is verified across Guinness World Records, Scientific American, NPR and Gizmodo.
Music: original music bed mixed by Claude in the build.
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