Felix Baumgartner, an Austrian daredevil known for skydiving from a balloon in the stratosphere in 2012, met a tragic end in a hotel swimming pool during a paragliding accident on Thursday. He was 56.
Baumgartner reportedly experienced a “sudden malaise” that caused him to crash his motorized paraglider in Porto Sant’Elpidio on Italy’s Adriatic Coast, rescue units told Sky Austria. Two hours before his death, he posted an Instagram story commenting that there was “too much wind.”
Baumgartner died immediately on impact, according to the outlet. An unfortunate hotel employee in the vicinity of the crash was hospitalized for neck injuries caused by flying debris. The paraglider bounced against a wooden structure by the swimming pool, saving the nearby children from a similar fate.
Baumgartner was renowned as a record-breaking skydiver and BASE jumper. When he made his 128,100-foot journey to Earth for his Red Bull STRATOS mission, Baumgartner became the first human to break the speed of sound, racing down to Earth at 843.6 miles per hour.
But that was far from the first time Baumgartner made history.
Since childhood, Baumgartner had always dreamed of flying. Baumgartner was an “obsessive tree climber” who tired the adults in his life by constantly asking them to “throw him in the air,” The Daily Telegraph quoted his friends and family as saying.
He started parachuting lessons at 16. After the teenager completed his first skydive in 1986, his mother gave him a drawing of a stick-figure parachuter that Baumgartner made as a five-year-old, which he shared on Facebook. In 1988, he began performing skydiving exhibitions for Red Bull, he wrote on his blog. The company would go on to sponsor the athlete’s dramatic stunts. Baumgartner practiced parachute jumping with the Austrian military.
In 1999, the then-29-year-old broke the world record for the highest parachute jump from a building when he jumped from the 1,483-foot-tall Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Four years later, Baumgartner became the first person to skydive across the English Channel.
He couldn’t get enough. By the 1990s, Baumgartner explained on his blog, he “felt that he’d gone as far as he could with traditional skydiving,” and advanced to the riskier sport of BASE jumping, which requires diving from fixed objects at lower altitudes.
In 2004, Baumgartner became the first to BASE jump from France’s Millau Viaduct. In 2006, he was the first to skydive onto and BASE jump from Sweden’s Turning Torso building. In 2007, he was the first to BASE jump from Taipei 101, which was the tallest building in the world at the time. The maverick’s unauthorized stunt got him banned from Taiwan.
After he made his space jump in 2012, he claimed that he was done skydiving and was set on a career as a helicopter pilot. His longtime mentor, Roland Rettenbacher, expressed his doubts to the Telegraph. “I cannot imagine Felix sitting down calmly reading newspapers and drinking a little beer,” he told the outlet, “Felix needs action all the time.”
Indeed, Baumgartner used his helicopter license to do “extreme flights.” The athlete was also a humanitarian and advocate for spinal cord research. He also joined Audi Motorsport for a brief stint as a race car driver.
Baumgartner died a 14-time world record-holder.
He is survived by his partner, Mihaela Rădulescu.
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