Heaven Sent: Watch skydiver jump 25000 feet with no parachute

If he makes, it, Aikins will become a living legend, if he doesn’t…

In a live broadcast from the plane he’ll jump from Aikins says wearing a parachute will make the jump more unsafe because he’ll have its canister on his back when he hits the net at about 120 miles per hour.

“I said, ‘You won’t believe these guys, ‘” the affable skydiver recalls with a robust laugh.

“If I wasn’t nervous, I would be stupid”, the compact, muscular athlete said with a grin as he sat near his landing spot earlier this week following a day of practice jumps – all made with a parachute.

But in the weeks that followed he couldn’t shake one persistent thought: Could anybody actually do this and live to tell the tale?

If anyone could, it would have to be Aikins. He made his first tandem jump when he was 12, following with his first solo leap four years later. He has taught skydiving, performed all kinds of complex stunts and routines, but even when his parachute got tangled with that of another diver, he could always rely on his backup chute. In all, he’s used his reserve 30 times, not a bad number for 18,000 jumps. “It’s not a joke”.

The other three will then open their chutes at 5,000 feet, leaving Aikins alone with no one to hand him a chute in midair as has been done before. But the plunge this elite skydiver knows he’ll be remembered for is one he’s making Saturday without a parachute. Needless to say, there’s no room for errors.

Aikins has been testing the net out with 200-pound test dummies.

Aikins didn’t say what prompted the original restriction, and representatives for the show and the Screen Actors Guild did not immediately respond to phone and email messages.

It might seem like he has a dead wish, but Aikins assures us that’s not the case.

“Like any normal, sane person I said, ‘Thank you, but no thank you”. “I’ll just have to deal with the consequences when I land of wearing the parachute on my back and what it’s going to do to my body”.

Skydiver Luke Aikins figures his next leap into thin air will start pretty much like the thousands that preceded it, only with one small but significant difference.

The 42-year-old husband and father said he will use air currents to help him land safely in the net.

He’ll come down in a dry, dusty, desolate-looking section of an old movie ranch north of Los Angeles where not that long ago Shia LaBeouf was battling “Transformers”.

But on Saturday he’ll become the first skydiver to go from plane to planet Earth without a parachute.

Parachute-free jumps have been done before, but in all other cases the jumper was either grabbed in free fall by another skydiver with a parachute, or put a parachute during their descent.