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AndyC wrote:

lonewolf wrote:I certainly appreciate the epic magnitude of his feat, but speaking for myself I just can't imagine jumping out of a perfectly good aircraft.

There are no perfectly good aircraft - that's the flaw in your logic ;)

I have jumped both tactically and as free fall (just a few of the latter). My step dad is a high time Air Force (I calculated his hours as adding up to three and a half years). Much of that time was with MAC. He was gigging me about being airborne and asked the tired old, "Why would you jump out of a perfectly good airplane?" Without missing a beat and as deadpan as I have ever been fired back, "If you've ever flown with a MAC pilot, you'd know." My BIL who was there and a retired Cobra pilot, laughed out loud. The only time I have seen him move beyond a smirk.

Joe Kittenger also broke Mach but that feat and his altitude were not recorded as records due to the USAF not allowing the Institut Aeronautique et Spatial to add instruments and "officially document" the event. Also it was an "experiment" to see if a man could survive a bailout at that altitude. Oh yeah, he did it with a leaky glove effectively (and thankfully temporarily) disabling a hand.

My step-dad knows him and I got a personalized and signed copy of his book, Come Up and Get Me for Christmas two years ago. Great read, especially when you find out the origin of the title.