Words: Roisin Finlay
Ueli Gegenschatz is just a regular guy, or so he claims. Sure, he is a white-collar office worker selling insurance by day for a Swiss company…but in his wardrobe hangs a wingsuit which he wears whenever he gets an opportunity. And, he admits, he loves to fly.
Now call me crazy, but is anyone else drawing parallels with a certain superhero of recent fame called Mr Incredible?
Need further evidence? What if I told you that this summer the aforementioned Mr Gegenschatz flew unaided across Galway Bay having jumped from a small skydiving plane over the vast Atlantic waters.
For the record, the distance he travelled was 17.6km – possibly the longest recorded flight ever undertaken in a wingsuit – from high above the ancient and mysterious fort of Dún Aonghasa teetering on the cliffs of Inis Mór, to Connemara regional airport near Inverin in Co Galway.
Not content with the mere achievement of sailing over the sea, Gegenschatz also took on the Islander, Aer Arann’s passenger aircraft, in a race, and beat it by a full 75 seconds.
“I was fortunate to have very strong tailwinds on the day which increased my chances of making the long distance. It enabled me to reach an average speed of 250km/hr and make the crossing. I was happy not to land in the ocean as I’ve heard the Irish waters are very cold! And that would have been dangerous too. You have your canopy with all the lines and of course you’re in the wingsuit. You’d need a rescue boat straight away,” he recounts matter-of-factly.
As for why the world-renowned wingsuit flyer and BASE jumper chose this location, he enthuses, “I picked the Aran Islands because they are very special historic places. I went to visit Dún Aonghasa and it’s very impressive. It’s a beautiful place to be and to see the ocean beating the rocks and the island is very impressive. It’s different to the Swiss Alps where I usually fly in my wingsuit but it’s something I really liked to see.”
Thin air
Gegenschatz’s magical flight time from exiting the aircraft to touching down was a mere 5 minutes and 45 seconds and he deployed a parachute just 200m above the ground before touching gently down on the tarmac. The passengers on the Aer Arann flight which travelled at a top speed of 193km/hr and had a cruising altitude of 200 metres were blissfully unaware of anything untoward as the gravity-defying stuntman exited his aircraft high above them at an altitude of 4,500m.
Not that he is making all that much fuss about it either. He’s insistent that there was nothing supernatural about the escapade. According to the man who also goes by the nickname ‘Sputnik’, this is merely a sport like many others where you are competing against yourself, trying to improve on your performance and where training is paramount.
“I take it step by step. I’m not the crazy dude doing something without planning. I’m a sportsman, not a fool.” But he says the thrill you achieve is unlike any other.
“It’s very hard to describe the feeling. It’s more about the precise sensation of controlling your body. You also have more visuals than in regular skydiving because your falling is much slower so you have more time to concentrate on the planet and in this case the islands and the sea. It’s very intense and that combination of really feeling your tense body is a special experience,” he states.
As for fear, Gegenschatz says it’s simply not an option. “I don’t really get scared when I jump. Being afraid slows down your mind and your body. But every time I jump I have a lot of respect. I do know what’s going on and I know the skills I need to do stunts like this.”
Of course the concept of flying using such wingsuits has been around since Icarus’s ill-fated attempts to take to the skies. It seems that particular cautionary tale must have been out of favour in the 1930s when flying suits, constructed out of materials such as canvas, wood, silk, steel, and even whale bone instead of feathers and wax, made a comeback. Needless to say, they were less than reliable and the vast majority of so-called ‘birdmen’ from that era, like Clem Sohn and Leo Valentin, died testing their suits between 1930 and 1961.
However, since the 1990s, a combination of an explosion of interest in sports such as skydiving and BASE jumping, and the advent of superior synthetic materials has led to real developments in effective flying suits. Furthermore, advanced training programmes have sprung up across the globe which lessen the risk in what is obviously a potentially dangerous sport with a high risk for unqualified jumpers.
But the Swiss man is insistent that he has no death wish. In fact he baulks at a question that suggests that there is a strong possibility that he might one day perish doing what he loves. “That’s not a very smart question. I am absolutely sure I will not die doing this because if the conditions aren’t right, I am walking not flying. And I am doing this for a long time,” he states emphatically.
Certainly Gegenschatz has prepared long and hard for his exploits. He is always in training and for this Aran Islands adventure, he started planning up to four months ago. “Since then we’ve been working out about the necessary wind and all the theoretical stuff. Then we waited for the right weather window. We even called off one attempt when we had real Irish conditions – a low cloud base and it was too windy from the wrong direction so we couldn’t go ahead,” he recounts.
Freefall virus
And he has more than a decade’s experience in the field since he first “got infected with the freefall virus” when he was 18 and signed up for parachuting and paragliding lessons with a view to doing his mandatory Swiss military service in the aeronautical field.
Since then Gegenschatz has been on a global quest to find the most challenging terrains around the world to traverse in his specially designed wingsuit. In April this year, he scaled the 321m Eiffel Tower in the dark of night to jump off at dawn and freefall for two seconds before opening his parachute to land safe and sound on Champs-de-Mars. Here he was stopped by a policeman and given a warning.
In September 2005, he succeeded in climbing the spectacular peaks of the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau on foot (a feat in itself) and jumping off all three with his parachute within 11 hours and 45 minutes.
Other feats include being the first to BASE jump from the world-famous Matterhorn;
jumping from a balloon which was flying at an altitude of over 10,000m; freefalling into a volcano crater; skysurfing from the envelope of a hot-air balloon; and jumping from the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, until recently the world’s highest buildings.
But as Gegenschatz celebrates his most recent achievement over a few well-earned and well-grounded pints of Guinness in Galway, he admits that he’s no plans to call his antics a day any time soon. In fact, he confesses, this West of Ireland exploit is just the first on a current world tour that he is planning.
“I have a thousand plans that I want to make true. Right now I’m working on a project with my wingsuit and I want to fly over very special locations all around the planet. But those locations are secret for the moment. You’ll have to wait to find out about them.”
Oh my God, that looks insane. I’d love to do it some day tho’