Patrick de Gayardon
Encyclopedia
Patrick de Gayardon was a French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 skydiver, skysurfer
Skysurfing
Sky surfing is a type of skydiving in which the skydiver wears a board attached to his or her feet and performs surfing-style aerobatics during freefall....

 and a BASE jumper
BASE jumping
BASE jumping, also sometimes written as B.A.S.E jumping, is an activity that employs an initially packed parachute to jump from fixed objects...

.

De Gayardon was famous for pushing the boundaries of skydiving. He was one of the first people to develop the unique style of skysurfing, in which skydivers use a snowboard to make aerobatic maneuver
Aerobatic maneuver
Aerobatic maneuvers are flight paths putting aircraft in unusual attitudes, in air shows, dog fights or competition aerobatics. Aerobatics can be performed by a single aircraft or in formation with several others...

s. He also made many famous stunts with his wing-suit (sometimes referred to as a "bat suit"). In 1998 Patrick died in Hawaii
Hawaii
Hawaii is the newest of the 50 U.S. states , and is the only U.S. state made up entirely of islands. It is the northernmost island group in Polynesia, occupying most of an archipelago in the central Pacific Ocean, southwest of the continental United States, southeast of Japan, and northeast of...

 during a skydive with Adrian Nicholas
Adrian Nicholas
Adrian Nicholas was a British skydiver who completed more than 8,000 jumps in 30 countries.He is best known for his successful test of Leonardo da Vinci's parachute design, proving it to be in retrospective the world's first working parachute...

 using the wing-suit while testing a modification to his parachute container; his death is attributed to a rigging error he made while making the modification.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK