Basejumper - History - Timeline of Notable Jumps

Timeline of Notable Jumps

• In 1912, Franz Reichelt, tailor, jumped from the first deck of the Eiffel Tower testing his invention, the coat parachute. He died. It was his first ever attempt with the parachute and he had told the authorities in advance he would test it first with a dummy.
• In 1913, Štefan Banič jumped from a 12 m building in order to demonstrate his new parachute to the U. S. Patent Office and military. Subsequently this design became standard equipment for U.S. pilots during the World War I.
• In 1913, a Russian student Vladimir Ossovski (Владимир Оссовский), from the Saint-Petersburg Conservatory, jumped from the 53-meter high bridge over the river Seine in Rouen (France), using the parachute RK-1, invented a year before that by Gleb Kotelnikov (1872–1944). Ossovski planned to jump from the Eiffel Tower too, but the Parisian authorities did not allow that.
• In 1965, Erich Felbermayr from Wels jumped from the Kleine Zinne / Cima piccola di Lavaredo in the Dolomites.
• In 1966, Michael Pelkey and Brian Schubert jumped from the cliff "El Capitan" in Yosemite Valley.
• On January 31, 1972, Rick Sylvester skied off Yosemite Valley's El Capitan cliff, making the first skiBASE jump (only he termed it a "ski/parachute jump" since the acronym BASE had yet to be coined), falling approximately halfway down, about 1500', before deploying his Thunderbow chute. He did this twice more, approximately two weeks later and a year later.
• On 9 November 1975, the first person to parachute off the CN Tower in Toronto, Canada, was Bill Eustace, a member of the tower's construction crew. He was fired.
• In 1975, Owen J. Quinn, a jobless man, parachuted from the south tower of the World Trade Center to publicize the plight of the unemployed.
• In 1976 Rick Sylvester skied off Canada's Mount Asgard for the ski chase sequence of the James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me, giving the wider world its first look at BASE jumping.
• On February 22, 1982, Wayne Allwood, an Australian skydiving accuracy champion, parachuted from a helicopter over the Sydney CBD and landed on the small top area of Sydney's Centrepoint Tower, approximately 300 metres (980 ft) above the ground. Upon landing, Allwood discarded and secured his parachute, then used a full-sized reserve parachute to BASE jump into Hyde Park below. Video footage is included in the Australian Base Associations' 2001 video compilation, Fistful of F-111.
• In 1987 Steve Dines (Australian) BASE 157 Made the first jump from the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
• In 1990 Russell Powell (British) BASE 230 illegally jumped from the Whispering Gallery inside St Paul's Cathedral London. It was the lowest indoor BASE Jump in the world at 31.1 m.
• In 1990 Australian Mark Scott BASE# 165 / OZ BASE # 13 / SA BASE #1 made the first BASE Jump off London's Canary Wharf Tower 4 days before the topping out ceremony. "
• On August 26, 1992 Nic Feteris and Glenn Singleman (two Australians) made a BASE jump from an altitude of 20,600 feet (6286 meters) jump off Great Trango Towers Pakistan. It is the world's highest natural BASE jump off the earth.
• In 2000, Hannes Arch and Ueli Gegenschatz were the first to dare a BASE jump from the imposing 1800-metre high north face of the Eiger.
• In 2005, Karina Hollekim became the first woman to perform a ski-BASE. To this day, she is still the only woman who has achieved such a jump.
• In April 2008, Hervé Le Gallou and David McDonnell infiltrated Burj Khalifa, and jumped off a balcony on the 155th floor. They evaded arrest following their successful jump. However, on a second attempt two days later, Le Gallou was caught and subsequently detained in Dubai for three months.
• In 2009, three women—29 year old Australian Livia Dickie, 28-year-old Venezuelan Ana Isabel Dao, and 32-year-old Norwegian Anniken Binz—base jumped from Angel Falls, the highest waterfall in the world. Ana Isabel Dao was the first Venezuelan woman to jump off Angel Falls.
• On 8 January 2010, Nasr Al Niyadi and Omar Al Hegelan, from the Emirates Aviation Society, broke the current world record for the highest building BASE jump after they leapt from a crane suspended platform attached to the Burj Khalifa's 160th floor at 672 metres (2,205 ft).

However, these and other sporadic incidents were one-time experiments, not the systematic pursuit of a new form of parachuting. After 1978, the filmed jumps from El Capitan were repeated, not as a publicity exercise or as a movie stunt, but as a true recreational activity. It was this that popularised BASE jumping more widely among parachutists. Carl Boenish continued to publish films and informational magazines on BASE jumping until his death in 1984 after a BASE-jump off of the Troll Wall. By this time, the concept had spread among skydivers worldwide, with hundreds of participants making fixed-object jumps.