Last Man Flying

Wingsuit pilot Jokke Sommer has lost more than 40 friends to the sport he loves. But he has no plans to stop soaring.

 

- Bill Saporito

It’s called Le Pas dans le Vide—Step Into the Void—a tourist attraction at the top of Aiguille du Midi mountain, a ski resort in the French Alps town of Chamonix. If you’re a tourist, you take a cable car and then an elevator to the peak, where you can gaze at the spectacular scenery below.

If you’re Jokke Sommer, you take the same elevator to the top of the mountain—and then you jump. “It’s pretty crazy,” Sommer says. “You’re standing there with the tourists and then you go over. You can fly for three minutes, from 12,000 feet. It’s super trippy, like Alice in Wonderland.”

Sommer is one of the world’s premier wingsuit pilots, in addition to being a BASE jumper, paraglider, free skier/boarder, surfer, and motocross rider. “Lately I’ve have been flying my wingsuit and my speed rider in Chamonix and Switzerland, traveling around Europe, and then in Portugal for some big wave surfing,” he told me when I caught up with him in his native Norway. In a video Sommer posted in January, he was piloting another dangerous toy, a paraglider known as a speed wing, down a slope in Chamonix. Actually, above the slope, while throwing in the occasional 360. His friend Graham Dickinson, another famous flier, posted on Sommer’s Facebook page: “Jokke Sommer tearing it up in paradise on his 8.5 Mirage speed wing. Wish I was their [sic] with you bro, looks so damn fresh.” You could sense the admiring adrenaline junkie in Dickinson’s post.