Even helping Jeb Corliss looks scary. Here’s the master of the wingsuit doing his thing in close proximity to canyon walls, as seen from multiple camera angles. Watch for the guy holding the balloons at around the 1:40 mark. Corliss was profiled in our October/November 2010 issue.

A WAVE parachute rigger. U.S. Navy photo.

On March 23, 1944, a British Lancaster bomber over Germany’s Ruhr River took heavy flak and exploded. As his oxygen mask and goggles began to melt, and his flight suit burned, tail gunner Nick Alkemade heard the pilot ordering the crew to bail out.

The aircraft was at 18,000 feet, and while Alkemade was wearing his parachute harness, he could see that his silk parachute—stored in its rack by the turret doors—was already burning.

What to do?

Well, if you’re Alkemade, you walk calmly over to the turret doors and backflip into space.

As Paul Brickhill wrote in 1950 (“They Fell without Parachutes—and Lived!”), three hours later Alkemade “opened his eyes and saw pinpoints of stars through a screen of pine branches above…. The branches had broken his fall, and then he had dropped into a deep snowdrift, and the snow and his lined leather kit had softened the blow still more.”

Dazed from a bump on his head, and immobile due to a wrenched knee, Alkemade lay in the snow until the Germans arrived. They took Alkemade to Stalag Luft III, where he met Brickhill, an Australian Spitfire pilot and  journalist who had also been shot down.

19th-century concept parachute. Illustration courtesy NASM.

The Germans gave Alkemade a document which said, It has been investigated and corroborated by the German authorities that the claim made by Sergeant Alkemade is true in all respects, namely that he made a descent from 18,000 feet without a parachute and made a safe landing without injuries, the parachute having been on fire in the aircraft. He landed in deep snow among fir trees.

Amazingly, Alkemade was not the only airman in the camp who had survived a parachuteless fall; Brickhill interviewed several others during his time as a POW. There was Wing Commander Ken Burns, whose Lancaster exploded at 18,000 feet, throwing him (still strapped in his seat) from the aircraft. When he regained consciousness, he was lying in a cabbage patch with his parachute still on—unopened. (Burns’ fall resulted in a collapsed lung, a cracked spine, and an amputated arm.)

Flight Lieutenant Gutowski, also in the RAF, had to bail from his Spitfire after being hit by a Focke-Wulf Fw 190. His parachute malfunctioned; after falling 150 feet, he landed in a pile of beet leaves, where he “rolled unhurt to the ground.”

There’s also the case of Pilot Officer Fred Bist, of the Canadian Air Force. His Douglas Boston bomber was strafed at 500 feet when the airplane broke in two; Bist was thrown out of the aircraft—without his parachute. He landed in a plowed field, where he was discovered by two German soldiers. They took Bist to the hospital where he was treated for a broken neck, severe burns, and a broken hand.

French artillery spotter Capitaine Larmier was in a Potez 63 when an enemy shell hit his aircraft and damaged the controls. Larmier jumped over the side. Unfortunately, he was at 100 feet, and parachutes need 400 feet to deploy. Just as the parachute started to stream out of his pack, Larmier hit “the top of a haystack, bounced, and stayed up there, winded, shocked and dumbfounded.”

Alas, his luck didn’t hold out. The Germans found him, “and he went on to five years behind barbed wire.”

Baumgartner making a test hop (Photo: Red Bull)

On Tuesday, the energy drink giant Red Bull said it was postponing its Stratos effort, in which Felix Baumgartener will try to break Joe Kittinger’s 1960 free-fall record, until a lawsuit is settled. Courthouse News Service reported in April that Daniel Hogan was suing Red Bull for stealing his SpaceDive idea, which he pitched to the company in 2004,complete with a team comprising a balloon manufacturer, spacesuit developer, flight surgeon, and filmmaker. Red Bull informed Hogan in 2005 that it “would not like to continue our joint work on the SpaceDive project.” (The company debuted its Stratos effort last January.)

What this postponement might mean for other contenders is at the moment unclear. The United States’ Cheryl Stearns and Britain’s Steve Truglia have long campaigned to make the jump, but both seem to have fallen out for lack of funding.

In recent years, with the help of special suits that incorporate webbing from the wrists to the ankles and between the legs, skydivers have been traveling forward the way the space shuttle comes back to Earth—a steep glide, but a glide nonetheless.

Earlier this spring, U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Ben Borger of the Army’s Golden Knights parachute team traveled 11.5 miles forward during a single fall, 1.5 miles farther than the old record. To achieve this, he jumped from a C-17 Globemaster III cargo jet at 32,000 feet and opened his chute at 3,500 feet. Borger carried oxygen equipment to breathe at high altitude, and wore an advanced suit that insulated him against the minus-50-degrees Fahrenheit air in the stratosphere and upper troposphere. A cool series of video segments starts at the 2:20 mark that show him jumping out the back of the airplane.

We wonder if airlines may take notice, as a means to connect passengers through airports without the expense of landing.

The 1970s averaged 42.5 fatalities per year, but that 10-year average has steadily dropped: The 1980s saw a 34.1 average; the 1990s, 32.3; and the 2000s 25.8. The USPA attributes the decline to safer equipment, better training, and the personal commitment of each skydiver, instructor, rigger, and drop zone manager.

Sixteen in three million is about one death for every 62,500 jumps. Not quite as good as the 2008 rate of one airline passenger death for every eight million airplane passengers who flew that year. But we’d all agree that skydiving may always be a little riskier than simply flying on an airplane. They’re better than the odds that you’ll die accidentally from a fall due to snow or ice: 1 in 1,270, something people in the mid-Atlantic are thinking about, maybe, right now after getting three feet of snow this week. They’re also better than the odds that you’ll become employed as a fashion designer: 1 in 7,990.

Frankly, I’ve never understood odds, and struggled with the probability and statistics class I took in college. That professor would probably tell me that just because you can divide three million by 16 and get one death for every 62,500 jumps doesn’t actually mean the odds are one in 62,500. That just happened to be the rate last year.

Niklas Daniel (above) swoops across a pond during the canopy piloting competition at the 2009 U.S. Parachute Association's National Skydiving Championships near Houston, Texas. Photo: Craig O'Brien/USPA. Jessica Edgeington (right), one of the top female swoopers in the U.S., goes for distance over a slalom-like course laid out over a pond at the same 2009 National Championships. Photo: Joao Tambor/USPA

I’ve never skydived. I did bungee jump once, 20 years ago, and was somehow comforted by the fact that I was attached to the bridge the whole time. Didn’t have to rely on the mysterious function of a rip cord, or the proper unfurling of the chute. To this day I can’t seem to find firm numbers on fatalities per million bungee jumps, or whatever. I’m oddly comforted by that too. There are numbers all over the place on the web. Helen, a student in Mr. Varsava’s Grade 11 Physics class back in 2004, somehow dug up information that the odds of death by bungee jumping are one in 500,000. I’m going with that, even though I’m done bungee jumping.

By the way, the folks shown here aren’t skydiving over water for safety reasons. They’re  swooping, which is a popular event at skydiving meets. Swooping is part of canopy piloting competitions, the most extreme discipline in the sport of skydiving. Competitors are judged on speed, distance, and zone accuracy. The swooping part, which obviously comes last, also provides some giddy fun, particularly when an overambitious swooper touches down on the water too far from shore and sinks before getting to dry land. That’s called “chowing.”

Sorry, no data available on the odds of chowing.