American skydiving showman Miles Daisher makes his living doing extreme sports but even he’ll admit a recent jump was out of the ordinary. Daisher and other members of his Miles Above television series were doing a wingsuit jump for the cameras when the boot on the suit snagged around the gear leg step of the Cessna jump plane. That left him hanging upside down and backward in a big draggy suit, which undoubtedly altered the flight characteristics of the airplane.
In his narrative, Daisher said he concentrated on staying calm and stabilizing himself so the pilot could counteract the pull to the right he and his suit were causing. “I’m thinking I better lock this up and keep it together because if I spin this thing (the aircraft) it’s gonna go bad,” he said in the clip of the outtake, which was posted on YouTube Oct. 6. He managed to configure the wing so he was being “towed by my foot from a Cessna … flying a wingsuit backwards” while jump mates on the aircraft worked to free him. One succeeded in cutting the fabric free of the step and Daisher tumbled away to the relative safety of a wingsuit freefall. Naturally it was all caught in multiple angles from helmet and aircraft-mounted cameras.
