From the Playboy Blog : With the news that extreme sports icon Dean Potter died on Sunday, May 17, 2015, while attempting to BASE jump off of Yosemite Park’s Taft Point, we are reprinting this 2010 feature, in which Potter claimed, “I’m not going to do anything where I think I’m going to die.”
Like Icarus, the brave and foolish bird-boy of Greek mythology, Dean Potter lives to fly. He has already set the world record for height, distance and duration in a wingsuit, a nylon outfit that allows BASE jumpers to soar like flying squirrels over great distances and to land by deploying a parachute. Potter’s record flight was from a 9,000-foot drop off the Kiger, a 13,000-foot-high Swiss alp. Reaching a speed of roughly 120 miles an hour, he landed nearly four miles away and was in the air over fields and towns almost three minutes before he glided in safely under his chute.
It was an astounding flight, but it was just a first step in Potters audacious ambition, the dream he is working toward, which suggests that, had he been Icarus with his feathered wings melted away by the sun, he could have survived a landing. Potter intends to fly his body in jeans and a shirt — without a wingsuit, without a parachute — and walk away from the landing.