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Picture Of The Day

Picture of the Day

Franz Reichelt

The last image of Franz Reichelt, an Austrian-born French tailor who is remembered for jumping to his death from the Eiffel Tower while testing a wearable parachute of his own design.

Like all parachutes, Reichelt’s idea relied on the increasing the surface area of a falling person in an attempt to slow their descent, but instead of being attached to an overhead canopy, his parachute would be integrated into the flight suit itself.

Reichelt’s suit had a number of extra panels and flaps that would deploy as a person was in freefall. Or at least that was the idea.

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Video of the Day

An experienced parachutist filmed his own two-mile death plunge after he fell from an airplane without realizing he had no parachute.

April 6, 1988: LOUISBURG, N.C. (AP) – A tired parachutist’s fatigue and his preoccupation with videotaping other jumpers could have led him to leap from a plane without a chute, plummeting 10,500 feet to his death, an acquaintance says.

The death of Ivan Lester McGuire was accidental, although ″a man who has jumped 800 times ought to remember his parachute,″ said Franklin County Sheriff’s Capt. Ralph Brown.

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