On 23 May 2012 Connery made his
wingsuit jump from a helicopter flying at a height of over Ridge Wood in
Buckinghamshire near his hometown of
Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. Coming back from California (
Perris Valley) in 2003, where he did his first
wingsuit flight, he said: "that could be landed!" and he went for a week to do wingsuit flight training at
Empuriabrava on the coast of Spain, the
largest dropzone in Europe. Before the final attempt, he had made two test flights landing with a parachute. He had also trained for weeks in Italy and Switzerland in preparation for the jump. He had to obtain permission from the
Civil Aviation Authority for the dive. The flight was filmed by
Mark Sutton. The landing was attended by about a hundred spectators. The landing rig, also known as the
box rig,
Reaction Landing in a wingsuit without using a parachute had been one of
Jeb Corliss's main objectives since 2010. Corliss and other top-level wingsuit jumpers had tried for years to design wingsuits similar to the one which Connery helped design and subsequently used for his record-setting leap. In the beginning, Corliss thought that Connery's stunt was an April Fool's joke and that the stunt Connery was attempting was impossible. Connery's landing was studied as an extreme example of the effectiveness of
shock absorbing material.
Rhett Allain, associate professor of
Physics at
Southeastern Louisiana University, has analysed Connery's flight in
Wired magazine's science blog
Dot Physics to determine the landing velocities which allowed Connery to remain uninjured. Connery received a nomination for the
Epic TV Adventurer of The Year Award. ==Queen's stunt double==