Felix Baumgartner, first man to break the sound barrier in freefall, dies at 56

Austrian extreme jumping champion Felix Baumgartner died this Thursday, July 17, in Italy, a firefighter official in the Marche region in the north of the peninsula said. The carabinieri identified the champion in Sant'Elpidio, a town in the Marche region, the official said, although he was unable to provide details on the circumstances of his death.

The Italian newspaper La Repubblica, for its part, reports a fatal paragliding jump in Porto Sant'Elpidio, near Fermo, on the country's east coast.

Portrait

On October 14, 2012, at the age of 43, he became the first man to break the sound barrier in freefall after launching himself from a capsule attached to a helium balloon from a record altitude of just over 39,000 meters in the sky above New Mexico, an event followed live by millions of people around the world.

Felix Baumgartner, whose performance was filmed, broke the sound barrier after a few dozen seconds and was then able to open his parachute after a total of 4 minutes 20 seconds of freefall. He reached a speed of 1,341.9 kilometers per hour, or 1.24 times the speed of sound, during a record-breaking fall.

During his descent, the Austrian adventurer also broke two other world records: that of the highest altitude reached by a man in a balloon, and the record for the highest freefall jump, held since 1960 by a former US Air Force colonel, Joe Kittinger, who jumped from 31,333 m.