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August 01, 2003

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 at August 1, 2003 09:26 AM

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