Come glide with me….
Oh, this looks like fun. Austrian guy Felix Baumgartner (who, of course, speaks English better than we do) jumped out of a plane in the skies above Dover, England. But he didn’t just plummet to earth, or even parachute down. Felix was wearing “an aerodynamic jumpsuit with a 6-foot (1.8 metre) carbon fin strapped to his back” and glided…glid…glideded…um, whatever…22 miles across the Channel to Cap Blanc-Nez in France. And THEN he opened his parachute. And it kind of messed up, but he managed to fix it just in time. Whew! (According to a news report I saw on TV yesterday, he named his wingy thing Icarus. If he’d fallen, the irony would have been too great, eh?)
BBC news has got a terrific article about it, featuring nice photos and even a pretty cool graphic of the historic glide. Of course some of you will immediately start thinking of this as a promising new form of earth-friendly transportation, but some of the rest of us aren’t sure we’re willing to try it…
Posted by Deana in Fun on August 1st, 2003 Edit this page's grammar and spelling with Emend.
Tomb Raider eat your heart out!