He Came, He Saw, He Jumped, Felix Baumgartner
Thursday December 13, by Jerome F. Keating Ph.D.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it? No it's Felix Baumgartner, Austrian extreme sport enthusiast and he treated surprised Taipei residents to a free fall leap and parachute jump from Taipei 101. If you haven't seem photos in the papers, or the video clip on TV, you will probably see it in a future commercial or some other commercial venture.
With a well-planned and well-executed scenario that brought memories of the "Thomas Crowne Affair" Baumgartner and a select team scouted out Taipei 101 in the past year, manged to stash his parachute in the building, distracted the guard, and then filmed and well-documented the jump. He landed on the roof of a carpark, got downstairs to a waiting cab and was off to the airport and gone before it settled in on everyone what had happened.
It was illegal, dangerous, and more dangerous still may embolden copy-cat jumpers, but something inside one still admires the pluck, precision and derring-do that pulled it off. Life is never dull in Taipei.