Record-breaking Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner has been killed in a paragliding accident in Italy.
Baumgartner rose to global fame in 2012 when he jumped to earth out of a helium ballon from a height of almost 40km.
A one-time media darling, Baumgartner later fell from grace after expressing views deemed “right-wing” by the media and criticising Austria’s harsh policies during the Covid-19 era.
On 16 July, the 56-year-old was flying a motorised paraglider above Porto Sant Elpidio, an Italian resort town on the Adriatic Sea in the Marche region, where he was holidaying.
Shortly after take-off, Baumgartner’s paraglider lost speed and fell to earth, according to witnesses. He crashed into a wooden hut next to a hotel swimming pool.
Emergency services immediately attended but he was pronounced dead at the scene. A hotel employee was injured in the neck from flying debris.
Italian police said they suspected Baumgartner may have had a heart attack in the air and have ordered an autopsy.
He had shared pictures of himself paragliding in Italy on his Instagram account shortly before the accident. In his last story he wrote: “Too much wind”. In a Facebook post on July 12 he sent his fans “flying holiday greetings from Italy”.
Baumgartner was born on 20 April 1969 in Salzburg, Austria. A mechanic by profession he later joined the Austrian military where he was trained as a parachutist. In 1996, he did his first base jump at New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia, US.
From 1997 Baumgartner worked as a professional skydiver sponsored by Red Bull, headquartered near Salzburg.
His major skydiving achievements included a jump off the Petronas Towers, then the highest building in the world, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 1999, and a leap from the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in the same year.
Baumgartner’s most spectacular skydive was the “Red Bull Stratos” project in 2012. In that, he rode a helium balloon up to a height of 38.97km, reaching the stratosphere, the second layer of the Earth’s atmosphere.
From there, he jumped back to earth, free-falling for more than 4 minutes and reaching a speed of 1,357kph, thus becoming the first human to break the sound barrier without engine power.
After deploying his parachute Baumgartner descended for another six minutes before landing safely in eastern New Mexico.
Originally adulated by the media, Baumgartner later fell from grace after a series of comments that went against the politically correct mainstream.
In an interview with Austrian newspaper Kleine Zeitung in August 2013, he said: “You can’t move anything in a democracy. We would need a moderate dictatorship where there are a few people from the private sector who really know their stuff.”
In 2015, he proposed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán for the Nobel peace prize.
After the onset of the European refugee crisis in 2015, Baumgartner defended the anti-immigration Identitären movement and criticised Austria’s open-border policy, writing: “Only idiots can govern a country in which fishing without a fishing licence is punished while people cross the border without a passport.”
He criticised climate activist Greta Thunberg and insulted several left-wing media personalities, including calling left-wing German TV comedian Jan Böhmermann “a stupid son of a bitch”.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Baumgartner criticised Austria’s policy of tightening lockdowns at a time when most other countries were already easing restrictions and speaking out against Austria’s forced-vaccination policy, writing: “[The Covid virus variety] Omicron is less dangerous for the population than the Austrian government with its compulsory vaccination programme.”
In a 2022 interview he said he did not regret anything he had said, stating: “I stand by everything I have said or posted. I have the luxury and the freedom, which many people envy me for, to speak my mind.”
