Long before Patrick Swayze made it cool to jump out of a perfectly good airplane with a bag o’ cash strapped to your chest, another extreme skydiver made the leap.  For those of you not familiar with the story, Dan Cooper, aka D.B. Cooper, hijacked a 727 in November of 1971 and demanded $200,000 in cash and four parachutes.  After receiving his demands he ordered the crew to fly the jet from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to Reno.  He then opened the loading dock on the plane and JUMPED into the cold November night somewhere over Washington State near the Oregon border.  He was subsequently not seen again and his fate remains unknown.  He’s actually developed into something of a folk hero over the years – several communities in Washington State hold “D.B. Cooper Nights” at neighbourhood taverns, and many a pint has been been shared over the strange man – who captured the imagination of a nation and who ultimately never hurt anyone – in the hope  that maybe he made it somewhere warm and tropical and he’s been living the good life ever since.  Is this likely?  Probably not.  I certainly don’t condone hijacking airplanes, but you gotta admit, a man who jumps from a commercial jet over some of the most inhospitable terrain on Earth, long before the advent of GPS and modern-day survival suits, has cojones.  This post is for D.B. Cooper, a true bad boy.

Don’t try this at home boys and girls.  Last month, two skydivers, Omar Alhegalan and Nasser Al Neyadi, went beyond the insane and entered world record territory by jumping off the world’s tallest building, Burj Khalifa (formerly Burj Dubai).  But what good would a jump off the world’s tallest building be without making a movie of it on the way down?  That way, we can all share in the insanity, the motion sickness, the paralyzing fear of heights as Omar peeks over the top and hopefully shed our inhibitions, or last meal, as our two friends hurtle from 2205 feet, or roughly the CN Tower plus the Space Needle, at 137 miles an hour, and set a new BASE Jumping record in the process.  To Omar and Nasser, from me to you, you got cojones the size of bowling balls.  Warning: if you seriously don’t like heights, don’t watch this video.  If you don’t have a heart condition, you will very soon.  The video is below the two images.

A preoccupation with size. Hey, they just jumped off the world's tallest building, they're allowed to gloat!!