Born to Fly – American wingsuit skydiver Joe Ridler on the rush of being one of the world’s fastest skydivers.
WATCHING JOE RIDLER jump out of planes from 3,800m wearing his nylon wingsuit and cruising down to Earth at 350kph, you might not believe that the Chicago packaging-company employee used to be scared of heights. But he overcame that fear, alongside a host of other challenges, to take on a second job – as a professional wingsuit performance competitor. “Wingsuit flying pushes your body and brain to the max. You need to be totally conditioned, razor-sharp upstairs, and maybe just a little bit crazy,” he says. “That moment when I land, it’s pure happiness. I just did the thing I’m afraid of and I’m still alive.”
That moment, he says, is what makes every- one around him – even his grandmother – support him despite the risks. “I haven’t seen a smile on your face that big since you were a kid,” she told him, when she first saw him land.
It turns out, however, that Ridler actually picked the obscure, if up-and-coming, niche sport in part for safety. As a boy, he had always hoped to be a pilot, in the military or on commercial flights, but a routine eye exam at school dashed his hopes: he is colour-blind. Years later, clicking around YouTube with his brother, he discovered wingsuit BASE jumping – wearing the same suit he now does, but jumping from cliffs or man-made objects. In his quest to get to do that, he learned just how dangerous it was – it’s estimated to be about 100 times more fatal than skydiving.
Wingsuit skydiving – or jumping out of a plane wearing what Ridler describes as an “inflatable mattress of sorts” – allows him to glide through the sky in a controlled manner. Unlike BASE jumping, where there’s less than a minute of falling time, Ridler has as long as three-and-a-half minutes to play on his way down to the ground. “It’s like flying your own jet or gliding around like a bird,” he says. “It has both ends of the spectrum and everything in between. You can make it like riding a roller coaster.”
“IT’S LIKE FLYING YOUR OWN JET OR GLIDING AROUND LIKE A BIRD”
But for serious competitors like Ridler, there’s more to wingsuit skydiving than just goofing about in the clouds. In 2015, the governing body for air sports, the Fédération Aeronautique Internationale (FAI), recognized wingsuit performance flying and instituted official competitions. Ridler and his fellow skydivers are judged on their performance from 3,000m to 2,000m as they dive, in three different tasks: time (how long they stay in the altitude window), distance (the horizontal distance they travel in the altitude window), and speed (the average horizontal speed in the altitude window). The competitors are tracked using a GPS device and the scores are a complex calculation that com- bines relative performance averaged over three jumps in each of the three tasks. “Aside from what we’re doing in the sky,” Ridler says, “it’s very nerdy.” But the data-focused part of the sport appeals to his extremely competitive nature.
In August, Ridler placed fourth at the 2nd FAI World Wingsuit Flying Championships in Prague, and in September he finished second in the 2018 season of the Wingsuit World Performance League. For competition rules, he holds the speed world record and previously held the distance record. He also held the Guinness World Record for fastest horizontal speed – 385.8kph – but that was bested in 2017 by someone jumping from higher altitude.
Still, having that Guinness World Record was a childhood dream, and has just given him motivation to go faster. He’s currently looking for sponsors to fund his goal of going mach .5, or half the speed of sound, and reclaiming his world record.
by PAIGE DARRAH, Oryx – Qatar Airways