Skydivers Launch The World’s Longest Swing And It’s Amazing
This looks like fun if you don’t care about dying.
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Most people leave swinging behind on the elementary school playground, but skydivers Marco Waltenspiel, Georg Lettner, Marco Fürst, and Dominic Roithmair apparently haven’t. That said, their twist on a light-hearted swing in the morning sun isn’t for kids—or for the faint of heart.
In a post on RedBull.com Waltenspiel said he and his pals “just wanted to go bigger.” That’s how they came up with the Mega Swing. The “mega” isn’t hype, either. The skydivers attached a seat to a 410-foot rope then took a pair of hot air balloons almost 6,000 feet in the air.
With first-class balloon pilots they had to get the precise tension needed to support a guide between the balloons, then do a BASE jump-like dive hanging onto the seat until its support rope grew taught. Then they were swinging a few thousand dizzying feet in the air.
The stunt went off without a hitch.
It looks like every kid’s dream of just swinging off into the blue, but of course there was a danger factor, even with parachutes. For now we’ll stick with good memories of the playground and leave the mega-swinging to the pros.