NAME: Felix Baumgartner

AGE: 34

NATIONALITY: Austrian

CLAIM TO FAME: The ‘Birdman’ who flew across the English Channel

THE Wright Brothers would have been proud. Louis Berliot would have been prouder. What he achieved 96 years ago, with the help of an airplane, Felix Baumgartner managed to do with just a carbon fibre wing.

Ten days back, the 34-year-old Austrian mechanic became the first man ever to successfully cross the English Channel without the help of any mechanized motor. All he had with him was his flying suit and the guts to do what men had only previously dreamt of doing.

Felix Baumgartner, a daredevil and the first man to parachute down from Petronas Towers — the world’s tallest building — made the 34 kilometre journey in 14 minutes. Though he was dropped from a plane, above Dover at 6.09am, at an altitude of 30,000 feet, Felix relied entirely during his quarter of an hour flight on the 1.8-meter wing attached to his back. He parachuted into the French port of Calais at 6.23am.

Height is something that has never scared Felix. His love affair with the open sky began as a teenager before ending up in the extreme sport of BASE jumping. Today he is the self-styled ‘God of the Skies’ whose feats also include a jump from the statue of Christ in Rio de Janeiro. During his flight, which some are calling a freefalling skydive; Felix attained speeds measuring as fast as 217mph. His equipment also included camera and tracking equipment that was attached to his special suit. During his flight, there were times he was forced to follow the two lead planes, due to heavy cloud cover.

Just after the flight, he commented that he felt like a bird and that the cold up there had left parts of his body, numb. For this unusually risky proposition, that was named Icarus 2 after the mythical figure who came to grief after flying too near the sun, which melted the wax holding together his wings, air traffic controllers had granted him a 30-minute window. Felix had from 5.45am to 6.15am, to make his jump, scheduling the event for early morning to avoid problems with conventional air-traffic.

In contrast to Felix’s pioneering effort, Louis Bleriot, the first man to cross the English Channel took 37 minutes to make his ground-breaking flight in 1909. And Matthew Webb took 22 hours to swim it for the first time in 1875.