DAEDALUS: SWIC Basejump from Fred Noonan Skyport

YOSEMITE PARK – TWO YEARS LATER

One thing led to another, and a couple of years later, on May 16, I found myself standing on Taft Point in Yosemite National Park, dressed in a fire-engine-red wingsuit. It wasn’t as if I had permission or anything, it was just something I had to do. I was there to commemorate the ill-fated flight of Dean Potter and Graham Hunt from the same spot on the same day back in 2015. A couple of Forest Rangers with a bullhorn did their very best to stop me. They had followed me to the Point, and were perhaps three meters away, and I still wasn’t quite ready – I mean, I still had to narrow my focus. But it was then or never, so I jumped.

The first hundred meters were a bit rough as I got my act together. I would have flipped off the Rangers, but my hands were kinda full. My wingsuit was significantly better than was Potter’s. He had a three-to-one glide ratio – better than most, but not quite good enough to hit the slot that loomed ahead of me. It could have been a down-draft that got him and Hunt, but I think they cut it a bit too close. I had a glide ratio of five-to-one, which meant hitting the slot was a piece of cake. I cleared it by about a meter-and-a-half, with clear flying beyond. I stretched it out as long as possible, and finally popped my canopy as close to the ground as I dared – maybe a hundred meters or so. I landed standing, soft as a feather. By the time the Rangers got there, my pickup crew and I were long gone.

Like I said, that’s how I got from there to here.

CORONADO, CALIFORNIA – THE GRYPHON

The worldwide wingsuit community is quite small, although it has grown in the last few decades. Even so, there were less than a thousand of us – that is until the military figured out how to turn our sport into a pretty nifty weapon system with a little help from the Special Parachute and Logistics Consortium (SPELCO) in Germany. SPELCO had built an experimental wingsuit called the Gryphon that, in its original version, had a glide ratio of five-to-one – when everything else was between two-and-a-half and three to one. It was pretty exciting, except no one could afford one. It turned out the Navy SEAL Teams picked up on the concept, and quietly developed a combat model.

Someone in the SEAL hierarchy concluded it might be useful to recruit guys from the wingsuit community. They even put together a special program that bypassed regular boot camp and all the other stuff a guy normally goes through before being assigned to BUDS – Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training. About a year after I shot the slot in Yosemite, I found myself in Coronado, California, training with a bunch of the toughest bad-asses I had ever met. BUDS was the hardest thing I ever did, literally, absolutely! Somehow I made it through. Don’t ask me how I did it, because I don’t have a clue. I just put one foot in front of the other, raised my arms for one more stroke in the surf, dug down and found another push-up…I just slogged along, firmly believing I was sucking hind tit, barely surviving, hoping against hope that I would make it through.

As it turned out, to my total astonishment, I was one of the top guys in my class. Beyond BUDS, I went through a whole series of advanced training scenarios. Even though I had been recruited specifically for my wingsuit background, the SEALs insisted that I undergo the entire training cycle. Two years later – yeah, that’s right, a full two years later – I finally reported to my new outfit, the SEAL Winged Insertion Command, SWIC for short.