Felix Baumgartner dies in tragic accident

Felix Baumgartner, the Austrian skydiver, BASE jumper and Red Bull pilot who jumped from the edge of space, has died in a paramotoring accident in Italy.

Details of the accident are still emerging, but local media have reported that the 56-year-old died in a paramotoring accident in Porto Sant’Elpidio on the Adriatic coast of the Marche region on the afternoon of Thursday 17 July.

Felix, who’d recently taken up paramotoring, reportedly lost control after suddenly feeling unwell and crashed into a hotel pool. He died instantly, according to rescue services. A hotel employee was also injured with neck injuries. The extent of those injuries are not known.

Felix was well known for many years for his BASE jumps. In 1999 he claimed the world record for the highest parachute jump from a building when he jumped from the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Later that year he successfully made the lowest ever BASE jump, of 29 metres, from the hand of the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro.

He then went on to become the first person to fly across the English Channel in 2003 using a pair of specially-made carbon fibre wings. Baumgartner leapt from a plane above Dover, landing 22 miles away in Cap Blanc-Nez near Calais just 14 minutes later. “You’re totally alone, there’s just you, your equipment, your wing – and your skills. I like it,” he said at the time.

He became the first person to BASE jump from the completed Millau Viaduct in France on 27 June, 2004 and the first person to skydive onto, then BASE jump from, the Turning Torso building in Malmö, Sweden, on 18 August 2006. On 12 December 2007 he became the first person to jump from the 91st floor observation deck of the then-tallest completed building in the world, Taipei 101 in Taipei, Taiwan.

But it was his stratospheric jump in 2012 that sealed his reputation. Watched live by an audience of eight million – a record on YouTube – he leapt from an altitude of 38,969.3m, free-falling a record distance of 36,402.6m. During the descent Baumgartner set the record for the fastest speed of free fall at 1,357.64km/h (843.6 mph), making him the first human to break the sound barrier outside a vehicle. Felix was in free fall for four minutes and 19 seconds, a fall time 17 seconds shorter than the record set during mentor Joseph Kittinger’s jump on 16 August 1960.

Besides the BASE jumps, Felix was a noted aerobatic helicopter pilot for the Flying Bulls, flying the BO 105, the Bell 47 and the Écureuil, having learnt in 2006. He was also into free flight, with his social media feed showing him flying the Moustache parakite and more recently his paramotoring adventures. We had recently reached out to him to request an interview to hear more about that journey.

On his Flying Bulls profile, he described himself as cautious with risk. “I pay close attention to my flight preparation and do it extremely meticulously. That is who I am and that was always the message I wanted to convey. People know that I never push things too far, whether on a solo flight through the mountains, a jump or at an air show in front of 100,000 people.”

In an interview with the BBC at the time of Red Bull Stratos he said his motivation for the mission was a desire to see what the human body could achieve. “It’s almost overwhelming. When you’re standing there in a pressure suit, the only thing that you hear is yourself breathing, and you can see the curvature of the Earth; you can see the sky’s totally black. It’s kind of an awkward view because you’ve never seen a black sky. And at that moment, you realise you’ve accomplished something really big.”

Felix Baumgartner, born 20 April 1969, died 17 July 2025