Top Ten Daredevil Stunts That Failed Miserably
Ambition looks magnificent right up until physics gets a vote. Every daredevil here sold his stunt with fireworks, a countdown and a slow wave to the crowd, and every one of them failed miserably in front of people who had paid for a good seat. The ambulance was always parked inside the frame. That was the professional part.
#10: Franky Zapata’s Channel Flyboard Crossing
A man on a jet-powered surfboard set off across the English Channel and had to land on a boat halfway to swap fuel packs, which is where it came apart. Daredevil stunts fail miserably for small reasons, and this one lost to a swell and a moving platform. Zapata went in the water and got fished out in front of the world’s press.
#9: Lawn Chair Larry’s Balloon Flight
Forty-two weather balloons. One aluminum lawn chair, a pellet gun, sandwiches and beer, because Larry Walters had priorities. He rose to 16,000 feet, drifted into commercial airspace, then dropped the gun he needed to come down. He finished the flight tangled in power lines, blacked out a Long Beach neighborhood, and was arrested the second his shoes touched grass.
#8: The Human Fly’s DC-8 Wing Ride
Somebody strapped a masked Canadian to the roof of a DC-8 and took off, which is a plan, technically. Then the plane hit a light rain shower. At that speed the drizzle came in like buckshot, knocked him unconscious, and turned the whole miserable spectacle into six weeks in a hospital bed. Marvel gave him his own comic book anyway.
#7: David Blaine’s Drowned Alive
Seven days floating in a water tank outside Lincoln Center is not training, it is marinating. Blaine came out with peeling skin and liver damage, then went for a breath-hold record and lasted seven minutes and eight seconds before divers hauled him out. Nobody has ever failed this miserably on live network television while that wrinkled.
#6: Robbie Knievel’s Grand Canyon Jump
Fox sold a 2,000-foot plunge. The real drop was about seventy-five feet into a side canyon at the edge of the property, which is less a Grand Canyon than a large inconvenience. Knievel still crashed on landing, got airlifted to Las Vegas, and told reporters he felt “a little dingy in the head.”
#5: Richard Branson’s Round-the-World Balloon Attempt
Branson’s $3 million Global Challenger managed nineteen hours before dumping him in the Algerian desert. The following December the balloon skipped the pilot entirely, tore off its moorings, and set out for Algeria alone. Moroccan troops cornered it in the mountains, at which point a gust of wind carried it off again.
#4: Jeb Corliss and Table Mountain
The plan was to skim a rock ledge at terminal velocity and clip a target balloon, because that is a thing a person can decide to do. The ledge won. Corliss broke both ankles, three toes and a fibula, tore a knee ligament, and still got his parachute out. Cameras on his head recorded the whole miserable failure in high definition.
#3: Kenny Powers’ Rocket Car Over the St. Lawrence
Ken Carter spent years and a small fortune building a 1,400-foot ramp to fire a rocket-powered Lincoln one mile across the St. Lawrence. On October 5, 1979, somebody else drove it. The Lincoln came apart in mid-air, flipped, and hit the water about four hundred feet out. Kenny Powers broke his back and the river kept the car.
#2: Evel Knievel’s Snake River Canyon Jump
A steam-powered rocket, a canyon, a global audience, and a drogue parachute that opened the instant the thing left the rail. The Skycycle went up, changed its mind, and drifted back down into the exact canyon it was supposed to clear. Few stunts have failed this miserably this gently. He landed feet from the water, strapped into a suit that would have drowned him.
#1: Craig Breedlove’s Spirit of America Crash
First man past 500 miles an hour, and then the parachutes did nothing. Spirit of America kept going for five miles, sheared through two telephone poles, launched over a berm and nosed into a brine lake. Breedlove popped the canopy in mid-air and swam out. Soaked, he told the rescue crew: “And now for my next act, I’m going to set myself on fire.”
Conclusion
Nobody buys a lunchbox commemorating a clean landing. The tidy attempts evaporate by morning, while the wreckage gets the comic books, the network specials and the toy replicas. Failing miserably turned out to be the best career move most of these men ever made, a lesson delivered at five hundred miles an hour, sideways, into a lake.