In a new adventure sport that has killed many athletes, men don wing suits, jump off mountaintops and glide at speeds of 140 miles per hour. Steve Kroft reports. Tom Anderson is the Producer. Coleman Cowan is the Associate Producer.
60 Minutes (Oct. 11, 2009)
For hundreds of years, fully grown adults and very young children have dreamed about flying. People have made wings out of feathers and wood and jumped off buildings and cliffs in order to soar like a bird. And a lot of them have died trying.
Now, a small group of extreme sportsmen wearing specially made wingsuits have come about as close to flying as you can get outside the confines of an airplane, at least for a minute or two.
Some people call them birdmen, and we first learned about them on the Internet. The pictures we saw were so spectacular we decided to assemble some of the sport’s top athletes, and mount a small expedition with the latest high definition cameras to one of the most beautiful places on earth to see what this is all about.