I think
I always wanted to push the edge.
— Luke Aikins
He is a third generation pilot and skydiver, following in the footsteps of his grandfather Lenny Aikins who started a skydiving club and his father Lance Aikins. It was Lance who taught both Luke and Farrington how to fly with both getting their pilot’s licenses simultaneously with their driver’s license.
Skydiving very much held Aikins’ attention from probably as early as the black and white photo of him taken at three months old laying on the packing table of the family skydiving center.
Watching family members and others freefall and then glide gracefully through the air was captivating. And even living in stops in Florida, Guam and Japan – his father was in the Navy – he would watch unfathomable stunts from Evel Knievel, as well as shows like Wide World of Sports and That’s Incredible that often tested the laws of physics for entertainment’s sake.
“It was almost something that was unattainable to the rest of us,” Aikins said. “I was like the rest of us watching it on TV, in awe. Those kinds of things were inspirational to somebody who aspired to be a skydiver.”
Aikins did his first tandem jump when he was 12, and began skydiving when he was 16. From there his thirst for thrill-seeking was hard to quench. “I was the kid that when we built the bicycle jump in the neighborhood, you would build it higher,” Aikins said. “We would go until you broke a person or a bike. If somebody went faster than you when you were running, you wanted to run faster than them. That competitive nature, some people have that and they live to be fighting for that first position. And then other people are just happy doing stuff. I think I always wanted to push the edge.”
The wins have been plentiful for Aikins throughout his life careening through the air.
TAKING
OFF
He improved at skydiving so much that when he was still in high school, he was asked to parachute into the school’s homecoming game. With the game ball! Yet it wasn’t just wanting to jump higher and hit a mark the size of a frisbee. He was learning about the art form, trying to improve on his technique, and also testing any limits. “That was more the norm for me,” Aikins said. “You’re obviously looking to push from there and you just didn’t know what was possible. Skydiving and knowledge of human flight, how we’re able to steer our bodies and all the things we’re actually able to do now. It’s kind of mind-blowing compared to when I started skydiving. The learning curve has ramped up so much.”
When asked how to describe what he’s feeling when he’s jumping out of an airplane, Aikins compared it to jumping off a dock and into a body of water. For anyone who has not done it, and for those who have only a handful of jumps, here is a tantalizing description. “You’re going, but your foot’s still on the dock, and there’s no going back. That feeling is probably one of my favorite things about skydiving,” Aikins said. “That full commitment to what’s about to happen. You can’t go backwards, but it hasn’t happened yet. That limbo-ey moment is kind of my favorite part. Then once you jump out, and the wind starts to take, you don’t get that feeling of being on a roller coaster. You feel almost like you’re floating on a pillow of air. It sounds sketchy and crazy to someone who’s never skydived before. It’s almost a calming feeling. You’re falling through the air, but you feel like you’re laying on a giant cushion of air. And what you do with your hands and your body moves you around the sky. It’s such a free, fun feeling until it’s time to open up your parachute, then everything gets fast again. But that middle of the skydive portion, it’s such a surreal moment.”
As Aikins began to gain acclaim in the skydiving arena, he was picked up by the Red Bull Air Force in 2005. His first event will forever be special to him, as he was set to parachute into a Seattle Seahawks game. A diehard Seahawks fan, this was a special moment. “When I jumped into the Seahawks stadium,” Aikins said, “I didn’t tell anybody, but I took a 12th Man flag with me. I opened up and I pulled the flag out and hooked it to my foot. I had this 12th Man flag hanging. When I came into the stadium, I was flying one direction and needed to land the other way. I looked at the Jumbotron, I could see me flying into the stadium with the 12th Man flag and the smoke, and the crowd going crazy. It was one of my most memorable jumps of all time.”
I really, really wanted to jump out of a plane and get into another plane.
— Luke Aikins
Plane Swap on April 24 Features Luke Aikins and Andy Farrington in the First-Ever Dual Skydive Into Separate Planes.
space
mission
Luke Aikins vividly remembers the magazine cover that would portend his future. It was the 1990s, and the artwork on the skydiving magazine showed a biplane pointing straight downward with a drogue parachute trailing behind it and a skydiver in a yellow jumpsuit flying even with the aircraft.
The idea would seem outlandish to a great majority of the population. A skydiver maneuvering toward another plane and looking to get in? That wasn’t just testing physics, but possibly rational thinking. For Aikins, it was more inspiration fueled by an ever-present feeling of continually breaking through barriers of conventional thinking when it came to flying through the heavens. “I thought how cool that was,” Aikins said. “I always remember that photo. I wanted to do a version of that on steroids. It was somewhere in my future. I really, really wanted to jump out of a plane and get into another plane.”
That day is coming. Plane Swap comes to life in a three-hour live stream broadcast exclusively on Hulu on April 24. Aikins and his cousin Andy Farrington, teammates, cousins, and accomplished skydiving masters will attempt a first-of-its-kind event where they each solo pilot an aircraft, put the planes into a nosedive, jump out of the planes, race through the sky into each other’s planes, take control and fly away. Yes, you just read those words. Never in the history of flight has a solo-piloted aircraft taken off with one pilot and landed with another. And the audience will see it happen live for the first, and only time.
"I honestly think that doing something like this live is the only thing left with TV, in my opinion,” Aikins said.
“I think sports are so popular because they’re live, happening right now. A taped version of this, you can do it 30 times until you get it right and show that. But then if you don’t see it live, I think that makes it like reading a day-old newspaper. That’s what’s very cool about Hulu stepping in and broadcasting it live, streaming while it happens when it happens. Win, lose, or draw, it’s going to be live on the 24th of April.”
This request saw him just jump with a camera on his head and film his skydive. It was for a project for an Austrian skydiver named Felix Baumgartner. After he landed, Aikins looked at the equipment Baumgartner was using and felt it was “subpar.” He said there were improvements that could be made, and mentioned what could go wrong if those improvements weren’t made.
His years of skydiving expertise would now serve him in a different fashion. Aikins was invited to join the Red Bull Stratos team, which was working to send Baumgartner to the “Edge of Space” to set the world record for the highest skydive in history. Aikins was given massive responsibilities from the start. “I end up designing the equipment, training Felix to do the jump, working hand in hand with him for 3½ years designing all the equipment and basically running the skydive portion of the project,” Aikins said.
He also got to work with Joe Kittinger, the man who held the record for the longest recorded freefall at 4 minutes, 36 seconds. This proved to be equally as thrilling as working on the project itself. “I grew up as a little kid knowing who Joe Kittinger was,” Aikins said. “I knew who jumped from the highest.”
A few years later, Aikins was asked to help out with a secret project.
It also let me experience the engineering side of things. I was designing equipment. I was testing equipment. Things that I always thought I could maybe do, but I never had an opportunity.
— Luke Aikins
When the Oct. 14, 2012 jump occurred, Aikins was in Red Bull Mission Control. As Baumgartner experienced fogging on his face shield, it was Aikins who was directly in communication with the Austrian jumper to talk him through what to do. As the jump from 128,000 feet – more than 24 miles above ground – happened, Aikins was one of many team members feeling the thrill of shattering many records.
This project was especially important to Aikins’ career, as it showed him a different way he could use his varied skill set on a stunt that would thrill the world. "It also let me experience the engineering side of things. I was designing equipment. I was testing equipment. Things that I always thought I could maybe do, but I never had an opportunity,” Aikins said. “What Stratos did is it opened my mind up that, even though I don’t have an engineering degree from college, I can run a team. I can develop a flight test program. I can do all these things I thought I wasn’t capable of doing. I learned all of that because of Stratos and them giving me more and more reins to make that jump happen.”
NEXT
Gigantic
leap
This new idea would be to jump from 25,000 feet and freefall without a parachute, before landing in a giant slide. Aikins initially dismissed it, yet the idea never left his mind.
After a couple of weeks, he started to ask himself if this could be possible. He started to formulate ideas and called back the people who had pitched it to him. He proposed that instead of jumping into a giant slide, a large net would be constructed to catch him. When everyone went for it, the background work began.
The 100 x 100-foot net was perfected over time. He made test jumps with parachutes where he pulled the ripcord low to the ground. He would only do the jump without a parachute once, at the event on July 30, 2016, in Simi Valley, CA.
The jump itself was a spectacular feat. Aikins remembers his target from the plane looked like a postage stamp from almost five miles up. He was able to maneuver and do flips to prepare for landing. He locked hands with the other three skydivers, including Farrington, to make different formations. It really looked like another jump, until three of them pulled their ripcords and Aikins kept falling. Let’s have Aikins describe what happened next.
What Red Bull Stratos did also was open him up to other opportunities. He did some work in movies like Iron Man 3 and Transformers. He participated in a wingsuit race with Red Bull. He was also approached with an off-the-wall idea: skydiving without a parachute.
“In that moment your focus and training kind of just takes over. You’re almost on autopilot, which is very cool because the physical acts you’re not really thinking about. It lets you focus on all the external stuff that goes into making that jump happen. They call it being in the zone. I always thought that I’d experienced that, but in that moment from like 5,000 feet down it was all just automatic.
“I had to roll over onto my back. I actually had to look blind at the sky just before I hit the net. But I knew I wasn’t going to drift off the net because of all the practicing and stuff we’d done. That moment in that jump everything was super slowed down.”
A couple seconds before hitting the net, Aikins flipped so that his back would hit the net and his body would bend accordingly. He gave himself a moment to soak in the gravity of the accomplishment, and when the net was lowered to the ground he stood up with fists raised in triumph.
“When I saw the net come up at the corners and it rolled me into the middle, I still vibrate thinking about that,” Aikins said. “It made my whole body shake, even now, that is a rush and a feeling that I’m afraid to chase because I’m afraid that I’ll never experience that level again. The feeling was unbelievable, and that feeling of accomplishment in that moment.
"I took a second, took a breath and I couldn’t believe it. We did it.”
In that moment your focus and training kind of just takes over.
— Luke Aikins
When I saw the net come up at the corners and it rolled me into the middle, I still vibrate thinking about that.
— Luke Aikins
plane
swap
“The goal is, I’m going to fly one, he’s going to fly the other one. Nobody else in them,” Aikins said. “We’re going to go up to 14,000 feet. We’re going to put the planes in a formation dive at the ground, with the speed brake out where they’re locked in where there’s no way out and they can’t fly away. We push them over into this dive. Now they’re on a trajectory headed straight to the spot over the desert. At that point, I’m going to get out of my plane, he’s going to get out of his plane, and we’re going to switch planes.”
Already they have done practice jumps from planes using the speed brake specially created for their Cessna planes. The goal is to be able to successfully get into the second plane, though in practice that one will already have a pilot. Both talk about an almost unspoken language they have with each other, where a hand movement or head bob will signal the other whether they need help or are going in a different direction mid-freefall.
What’s exciting about this feat is how they are challenging the laws of gravity to suit them to make this unprecedented stunt a reality.
“It's taking almost every notion of flight and almost like crumpling up and throwing it away,” Farrington said.
That made Farrington a natural to partner up for Plane Swap. The pair work closely near daily on making refinements at their home bases. Occasionally they trek down to San Luis Obispo, CA for more training sessions with the lead engineer on this project, Paulo Iscold. The focus is on thrilling the world with another event that will be talked about for years to come.
It's taking almost every notion of flight and almost like crumpling up and throwing it away.
— Andy Farrington
“Like we're trying to create some drag. We're trying to make the airplane fly straight down at a reasonable speed, and kind of making it so it works for our needs. With the science behind it and the data and everything that we adjusted and tweaked and made it work so that it's really close to being the way we want it.”
Don’t miss this first-of-its-kind aviation spectacle on April 24th exclusively on Hulu where Luke Aikins and Andy Farrington will raise the bar in aviation artistry and bravery.
Plane Swap - Livestream Event on Hulu Sunday, April 24, 2022
meet
andy
Though he’s six years younger than Aikins (48), Farrington (42) has more of a brotherly relationship with his cousin. The two own homes on the same 40-acre plot in Washington state. Both their homes have airplane hangars and plenty of area to skydive. Their children have grown up about as close as siblings, and like Aikins, Farrington was skydiving on his 16th birthday before getting his driver’s license.
Farrington is an accomplished athlete in his own right. An expert in wingsuit flying and able to perform skydiving acrobatics, Farrington has been one of the go-to people for some high-profile jumps. He won the inaugural Red Bull Aces Wingsuit race in 2014. He was one of the many wingsuit flyers who lit up the night sky over Los Angeles in 2019 during the most recent Super Moon. BASE Jumping around the world has been his calling card. He’s also been in movies, and even made several wingsuit jumps from the Sears Tower in Chicago during a movie filming.
His search for that hard-to-find feeling in flight is one of his motivating passions when it comes to his own flights of fancy. “BASE Jumping off a rock or like a solid platform, the first section where it's like no air and you feel this speed just starting to pick up and pick up and pick up is a pretty surreal feeling like if you're going through trees or in between little cliff lines and all that,” Farrington said. “There's nothing that makes you feel more like a superhero than that. I mean, it's a childhood dream. It's the closest that you're flying by yourself. You’ve got some nylon around you and you do have a parachute on and everything, but when you're in the trenches and the trees and everything, it's a surreal experience for sure.”
Farrington is a big part of that “we,” both for Plane Swap and throughout Aikins’ career.
There's nothing that makes you feel more like a superhero.
— Andy Farrington
Farrington will continue to push the envelope, as he finds many new destinations to conquer for never-before-seen jumps where he’ll be “flying wingsuits past some pretty iconic locations, whether it be Mount Rushmore, the St. Louis Arch or the Hollywood sign, or the Space Needle in our hometown, or flying by some pretty iconic locations and maybe cap it off at the Statue of Liberty.”
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Born to fly. Aikins grew up at the family business
Extensive training has gone into making Plane Swap possible
Aikins is comfortably at home in an aircraft hangar
Luke and his father Lance in the summer of 1974
Aikins racing during one of his early Red Bull events
Can you spot Aikins among this group of skydivers?
Lenny Aikins opened his own skydiving club with his friends
The pressure suit and capsule have been displayed all over the world. Here in Salzburg, Austria
Mike Todd, Felix Baumgartner, Joe Kittinger, Art Thompson, Luke Aikins
Aikins helped the Red Bull Stratos team design and test much of the equipment
Aikins saluting the camera during a jump at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway circuit
There's nothing that makes you feel more like a superhero.
— Andy Farrington
Like Aikins, Farrington was flying at the same time as learning to drive
A smile is never far away when the duo jump together
Farrington on a flight at Red Bull Rampage in 2019
The Cessna 182 single-seat planes in a nose-dive
Come rain, shine or birthdays the Aikins family were always skydiving
Lance, far right, celebrating an award in 1971
Luke followed in the footsteps of his grandpa Lenny
Andy Farrington, TJ Landgren, Jeffro Provenzano, Luke Aikins after a jump
Growing up around shows and exhibitions, Aikins was always learning
Writer: Jorge Martin