Kittinger is my Hero

You know that feeling you get when you stand on the edge of a cliff? Especially when there's a railing but it sits just below your hip. You can lean out over the abyss with a moderate impression of safety, but you still have all your weight low to the ground in case of earthquakes. You know the feeling I'm talking about. Something tugs at your centre, pulling you towards the edge. It's the void sucking at you. It's not vertigo and it's not entirely a fear of heights either. Why are we drawn towards something we have an inborn¹ visceral fear of? What is it?

Read on dear reader, and I will tell you... in a bit.

Extreme sports can be placed into two categories: those that involve a great height and those involving some form of acceleration brought on by an outside source (e.g. a wave, a mountain, the lack of a plane floor). The general consensus for why they are considered enjoyable is that they give either an adrenaline rush (brought on by a heightened sense of danger) or a sense of emotional achievement through completing a difficult task via the use of l33t skillz. These reasons are partly true.

Of the x-sports, climbing belongs in a league of its own. Like the others it requires utmost concentration and precision, but unlike them it must be completed slowly. It is also the only one that provides you with the aforementioned sucking sensation continuously, without pause, for the entire experience². So why do it? The sense of achievement, sure, but also to stand on the roof of the world. To sit in the sky.

Other x-sports use a smooth, controlled, high-speed descent to create an experience that adrenaline junkies will scour the world for. The emotional rush mimics the physical rush that the body is put through. Surfing, skiing, rafting, sky diving, jet boating, bungee jumping, even car racing or water-slides (to stretch the definition) all share this smooth, near frictionless quality. The whole body moves in a vector rather than being jerked around by the comparatively cumbersome striding motion.

So why do we feel (and suppress) the need to throw ourselves from cliffs or buildings? To glide down mountains of rock or water? To throw ourselves from bridges and planes? To sit in the sky?

We do them because we yearn to fly.

You know it. I know it. It's not a secret. It's not even important. It just is...

Maybe somewhere, way back up the evolutionary chain, we were birds. Or reptiles with wings. And that snake in our spine remembers what it was like to fly. And occasionally, if we are very lucky, we get to go there again. In dreams.

People have dreamed of flight for thousands of years. Some scholars even argue that the ancient Indians and Egyptians³ succeeded in building flying machines. But as the evidence is written in Sanscrit it is a little difficult to verify. Probably the most famous 'modern' flight-tinkerer was Da Vinci, who spent much of his life examining the flight of birds and designing machines with which to mimic them. I'm sure there were many others but two bicycle making brothers are usually the next quoted, and after Orville and Wilbur Wright everything escalated (historically speaking) quite quickly.

But I am not talking about flying a plane. The plane flies. You just sit there. I'm talking about flying, superman style. Just you. In the air. And this is where dreams come in.

Did you know that a third of the dreaming population dreams of flying? My own are something akin to the perspective of a Kangaroo, if it were the size of a bus. I'll sprint along the ground until I can feel the wind pushing against me then bound into a floating long-jump that is straight out of Naruto, on landing I'll bounce into a larger arc, then finally rebound into an leap the size of the Sydney Harbor Bridge. The closest I've seen to the experience is the Hulk jumping around in the 2007 movie.

In fact, sometimes, as I'm drifting off to sleep it's just possible that I'm making my dream a reality. I've read that the feeling of falling is quite common when going to sleep but just hear me out... I sleep on a reasonably thin but firm foam mattress over wooden slats. A couple of months ago as I drifted off to sleep it happened. I literally crashed back onto the bed. "Old news Benny" I hear you say "happens all the time". Not like this! It was hard. It was loud. And it freakin' hurt! It was so loud that, and I swear that this is true, I actually had to lift my mattress to check that I had not broken a slat on landing.

But enough about my awesomely cool super-powers. I need to mention one last thing. One last person in fact. The only man who I feel deserves the moniker "The Man Who Flew". Because he did. No plane. No pansy wings. No weak-ass 10,000 feet scared-shitless jump out of a plane. He actually flew.

Before Armstrong or Uri there was Joe Kittinger. Joe Kittinger did something so unbelievable that he makes Chuck Norris look like Taylor Hansen. If you take nothing else from this mad ramble you must at least WATCH THIS CLIP. Watch it now... I'll wait.

Have you watched it? You aren't allowed to read more unless you've watched it...

Okay... Joe Kittinger (henceforth known as Captain Big-Rocks), from a height of 31km, looking down at the entire planet... jumped. Jumped onto the Earth! He reached super-sonic speeds (989km/h) with nothing but a flight-suit and a set of adamantium balls... and he lived. He walked away! He flew. For real real. Not for play play...

I need to say something to sum things up here but I can't. My mind is numb. I am just filled with awe...

¹ Experiments using what are known as "visual cliffs" have shown human infants and toddlers, as well as other animals of various ages, to be reluctant in venturing onto a glass floor with a view of a few meters of apparent fall-space below it. Read more here.
² Sky diving would only provide this sensation when you are about to step out of the aeroplane.
³ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_astronaut_theory