Skydiving

A skydiver attempting a stunt was killed when he hit a suspension bridge and fell onto the rocks below, police said. Dwain Weston, 30, died following the inaugural Go Fast Games. He struck the 1,053-foot-high Royal Gorge Bridge in Canon City, said Heather Hill, a vice president of event sponsor Go Fast Sports & Beverage Co. Weston, of Australia, had jumped from an airplane with another parachutist.

  Skydiver Craig Stapleton, 51, is lucky to be alive after his parachutes failed during a jump on Sunday. Stapleton jumped from 8,000 feet, and then his primary and backup parachutes failed. "I thought, 'God hates me,'" Stapleton told ABCNews.com. "I felt like nothing was going right here. I knew I was going to die. I thought, 'If I live through this, I'll have months of rehab.' " Only part of Stapleton's main chute deployed, so he went to his backup. That got tangled in the main chute.

An Austrian stuntman on Thursday became the first person to skydive across the English Channel, gliding on carbon fiber wings at up to 217 mph. Felix Baumgartner jumped out of a plane about 30,000 feet above Dover, England, and parachuted into hills 21 miles away above Calais, France, 14 minutes later, spokeswoman Sarah Christofi said. "It's pretty cold up there. I still can feel nothing," Baumgartner said after landing.

It's a good thing George Steinbrenner isn't around to see this, because you know he would have given him some grief when he had learned that Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman broke his right leg and dislocated the ankle while skydiving in Florida on Monday. Cashman jumped with the U.S. Army Golden Knights in a fundraiser for the Wounded Warrior Project. He landed badly and suffered a broken fibula and dislocated ankle. “I'm in great spirits, and it was an awesome experience,” Cashman said in a statement.

A veteran skydiver died after jumping out of an airplane with a group of friends. Dan Scary, 52, of Oakland may have experienced a health problem while in the air Saturday. He and others were forming a circle, and Scary was holding a friend's wrist when his grip reportedly got weaker, said San Joaquin County Sheriff's Sgt. Joe Herrera. Scary's parachute opened correctly, but it was unknown whether he was able to control it.

A Navy SEAL learning a free fall skydiving technique died Wednesday when his chute appeared to malfunction. He was practicing accelerated free fall techniques at a civilian skydiving area in Riverside County, according to a Navy news release. The SEAL was part of Team Five, based in Coronado. His name was withheld pending notification of his family. The Navy Special Warfare Command was investigating. A message left with a Navy spokesman was not immediately returned.

Forget Prancer, Donner and Dasher. Santa Claus arrived at La Seda Elementary School on Thursday via parachute. From 9,000 feet up. Seven hundred schoolchildren squinted in the sun and shrieked as Santa and five other skydivers with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department skydiving team leaped out of a plane and floated to the schoolyard. It was the latest in what has become an annual tradition of offbeat Santa Claus visits to this school, located in an unincorporated area near La Puente.

With just a sliver of sight in his left eye and even less in his right, John Fleming loves hurling himself out of, as he calls them, perfectly good airplanes. On a recent Sunday morning, he and seven comrades clustered at the back of a DeHavilland Twin Otter slicing through the clouds above Perris at 14,000 feet. In a jumble of red, black and yellow flight suits, they tumbled out and disappeared.

A parachute that opened prematurely became tangled in the tail of the plane a skydiver was jumping from, killing the man and forcing everyone else aboard to leap before the Cessna 206 crashed near Taylorville. The name of the victim was withheld pending notification of relatives. The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the accident.

Six weeks ago today, a plane carrying a pilot, an observer and 20 skydivers crashed on takeoff at Perris Valley Airport. Sixteen died. The six who survived were spared because of their positions in the airplane. They were in the back, behind those who perished.

Authorities in Washington state narrowed their search Saturday for a skydiver who disappeared after jumping from a helicopter above the Cascade Mountains and are hoping to find the 29-year old alive after two days in the rugged terrain. Sgt. Cindi West of the King County Sheriff's Office said authorities used cellphone signals and the helicopter's flight pattern to focus on a quarter-square-mile area on Mt Si east of Seattle. The skydiver's cellphone is no longer working, she said.

Former President George H.W. Bush is being treated for bronchitis in Houston's Methodist Hospital, officials there confirmed Thursday. Bush, 88, has been in and out of the Texas Medical Center for treatment and is scheduled to be released within the next 72 hours, his representatives said in a statement. The 41st president is listed in stable condition. The Houston Chronicle reported Bush has been in the hospital for about a week. The former director of the CIA has been known for his vitality in spite of his advanced age. He celebrated his 75th, 80th, and 85th birthdays by going skydiving and joined President Clinton on a humanitarian trip overseas after the 2004 tsunami and visited New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Daredevil skydiver Felix Baumgartner became the first person to break the speed of sound Sunday while also making the highest jump ever, as the world watched on the Internet. After jumping from a balloon from 128,100 feet, more than 24 miles above Earth, Baumgartner hit Mach 1.24, or 833.9 mph, according to preliminary data, to become the first person to reach supersonic speed without traveling in a jet or spacecraft. “Sometimes we have to get really high to see how small we are,” Baumgartner told reporters outside mission control after the jump.

One small step for Felix, one great leap for Lego. OK, one big jump for daredevil Felix Baumgartner. It only seemed like there were tributes posted in world-record time after he landed in the record books on Sunday, breaking the sound barrier in a 24-mile fall. One of those was this video clip, a re-creation using Lego figures to promote the ModelMaker Fair in Vienna, which starts Oct. 25. All that was missing was the authoritative, British-accented narration we were treated to during the Summer Olympics.

Among the several records broken by ultra-skydiver Felix Baumgartner on Sunday, there was one that may have been unexpected: most viewers to a live event ever on YouTube . The highest skydive in history, during which Baumgartner became the first free-falling human to break the sound barrier, racked up 8 million simultaneous views on YouTube. The live stream of the event lasted more than two hours, showing the relatively slow accent by balloon to about 24 miles above Earth, then the jump that hit speeds as high as 834 mph and took a little more than 10 minutes.

The newly released version of NASA's descent video showing Curiosity zipping down to Mars takes the perspective of "a skydiver's helmet-cam," says a mission scientist. The video, taken by the Mars Descent Imager, features mission control audio, synced up with the video to give an overall picture of the landing drama on Aug. 5. "So now we can see what the spacecraft was doing when we all had our ears glued to the flight directors who were calling out the landing," said Ashwin Vasavada, deputy project scientist with the Curiosity mission, in an interview Thursday with the Los Angeles Times.

Birds were born to fly, fish to swim and humans to walk the earth. The first two know their places. The other's inclination to tempt the order of nature has led 40 apparently stable and intelligent men and women to Perris Valley Airport south of Riverside, where they have climbed aboard an ancient plane and sit on the floor toboggan style, backs toward a wide-open door. All wear grins, goggles, jump suits and parachutes, but the 'chutes are only for the last few thousand feet.

To get a good idea of what competitors in the accuracy landing division of this weekend's skydiving championships will go through, follow these steps: 1. Draw a circle about the size of a silver dollar and put it on a dinner plate in an open field. 2. Strap a parachute on your back. 3. Climb aboard a plane with an open door. 4. Fly up to 3,500 feet. 5. Jump out. 6. Float down and plant your heel directly in the center of the tiny target. Sound easy? "When you do it enough ...

Reporting from Perris -- The competition was high-performance and high-risk, and Sean Carey and his 16 fellow skydivers knew it. They were equipped with special parachutes that allowed a faster and better-controlled descent, and their goal Saturday was to dive toward a shallow pond in an advanced maneuver known as swooping. One by one, they plummeted toward the surface, executing a last-minute turn to accelerate before leveling off and gliding just above the pond. But Carey, an instructor at Skydive San Diego who had done the maneuver successfully hundreds of times, made his turn too low and crashed into the pond.

A Canadian sky diver who plummeted to his death in Perris miscalculated a move while performing a highly risky maneuver referred to as "swooping. " Michael Ungar, 32, of Ontario died Tuesday afternoon after he crashed into a pond at the Perris Valley Skydiving facility in Riverside County. Dan Brodsky-Chenfeld, manager of Perris Valley Skydiving, said the experienced sky diver was performing a high-speed parachuting trick that requires deploying the parachute at the start of the jump and then building up speed as he descends from the plane.