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Jari Kuosma

BIRDMAN's LEGACY articles to heroes and pioneers of human flight


Whenever you turn on your TV, sign up at YouTube channel, go to movies or read your favorite magazine, you’ll find wingsuits and videos of us flying everywhere. We have hundreds of millions YouTube hits, we soar in Hollywood movies, we have acted and inspired some of the coolest advertisements in TV and they write about us and our flights every day to their newspapers and magazines.

I am saying “theirs”, not to divide us but to make a point that we get most of the press from outside our sport and that’s something worth to mention, especially if you know the history. In 1999, almost seventeen years ago, wingsuits were non-existent and their reputation was made of a mixture of apocalypse and horror. Almost no one had ever seen a real wingsuit and there was almost nobody alive who had survived the experience. Some countries even had laws against wingsuit flying and many Drop Zones around the world had their own private bans against flying men.

These articles are part of my LEGACY series and I wrote to bring some light about the history of parachuting and wingsuits for the people who are interested about the subject. I don’t claim by any means that this is the full story and I must apologize in advance for possible data mistakes this kind of information is prone to, and for leaving out many so many great stories and people. The world of aviation is full of so many amazing stories and people that we could fill a library! But this will do for now and I hope that you, dear reader, will get a bit broader view of what our sport is all about and where it came from.

So stay tuned, next article is called: A Daredevil Named Tiny


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