i doubt he's gonna do it anytime soon. it took them ages to prepare for this and in local interviews (saw them in Austria) he mentioned a couple of times that he finally wants this to be over and move on to something else. but technically, there's definitely more room to go crazy.
Current Free Fall Record - 4:36 - and still holding
Felix's Free Fall time - 4:22
Short by 14 seconds. Guess he pulled the parachute, when his helmet wiser started fogging up. Would have been great to have him break the existing record after having jumped off from a higher altitude than the earlier record jump. Good luck next time - to whoever makes the next jump.
I have huge respect for people who make this sort of call - deploy the parachute when it needs to be deployed, not when it would land him another record.
Like mountaineers who turn back before reaching the summit, because they know that getting there is only part of the effort.
As skydivers, we don't count. That's just the stuff from movies.
We have altimeters that we trust to tell us our height. But more than those, we trust our best altimeter - our eyes. Visor fogging prevents you from knowing how high you are - either by looking at your altimeter, or looking at the ground. And that's a very dangerous place to be - particularly on an unprecedented freefall like this one.
My guess is that Felix spent a while trying to get a glimpse at his altimeter. He finally saw enough to tell him he was getting somewhere close to deployment altitude, and decided to make the safe choice.
Okay, if he thought he was close to the deployment altitude then of course it's perfectly sensible to use the parachute. It's only if he was nowhere near it that I would question using the chute right away in response to vision impairment.
And I haven't watched any movies with skydiving, I just figured that if you were watching an altimeter drop you would be able to extrapolate for a limited time.
It's definitely an interesting question to consider. Our rule of thumb in skydiving is, "When in doubt, whip it out." You'd rather deploy too high than too low. There's a big hunk of granite coming up pretty fast that you don't want to interface with. :)
In Felix's case, deploying too high could be a huge problem as well. So I'd be very interested to hear why/how he chose to deploy where he did.
And yeah, under normal circumstances you could possibly extrapolate your altitude...but the problem is that once you can no longer see, you can't go back and get a good idea of where you were at prior to it happening. Visor fogging creeps up fast (even from 12,500'), and once it does, it's very difficult to even find a baseline from which to extrapolate.
