Famed Skydiver Felix Baumgartner Dead at 56 in Paraglider Crash

Felix Baumgartner, the skydiver who broke the sound barrier in his 24-mile dive in 2012, died on Thursday, July 17 at 56, after crashing his paraglider.

The accident occurred in the Italian city of Porto Sant’Elpidio, located along the country’s eastern coast. Firefighters dispatched to the scene confirmed that the paraglider had crashed into the side of a swimming pool.

“Our community is deeply affected by the tragic passing of Felix Baumgartner, a figure of global prominence, a symbol of courage and passion for extreme flight,” Porto Sant’Elpidio Mayor Massimiliano Ciarpella said in a statement shared via social media.

The mayor’s office believes Baumgartner suffered a “medical issue” and lost control of the motorized paraglider, leading to the accident.

Baumgartner, dubbed “Fearless Felix,” was best known for his 2012 dive through the stratosphere as part of the Red Bull Stratos team, in which he reached 843.6 miles per hour, or about 1.25 times the speed of sound. The feat took around nine minutes and included a potentially dangerous flat spin that lasted for 13 seconds while he was still supersonic.

Approximately eight million people watched the jump, which was streamed live on YouTube. Red Bull later made a documentary about the stunt using footage Baumgartner recorded on a helmet-worn camera.

“When I was standing there on top of the world, you become so humble, you do not think about breaking records anymore, you do not think about gaining scientific data. The only thing you want is to come back alive,” he said after he landed in New Mexico.

In addition to breaking the sound barrier, it was the highest jump of all time, breaking the record set by Joseph Kittinger in 1960 by nearly five miles. Kittinger, who died in 2022 at age 94, served as an adviser to Baumgartner during his preparation.

“Sometimes we have to get really high to see how small we are,” Baumgartner added.

Computer scientist Alan Eustace broke Baumgartner’s altitude record two years later, though he still holds the vertical speed record.

Baumgartner’s career as a BASE jumper and daredevil dates back to the 1990s. In 1999, he set the world record for the highest parachute jump from a building when he jumped from the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. That same year, he set the world record for the lowest BASE jump, leaping from the hand of Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer statue, 98 feet off the ground. Four years later, he became the first person to skydive across the English Channel.

Baumgartner never married but had been in a relationship with Romanian TV host Mihaela Rădulescu since 2014.