Together with his team-mates Toni López and Álvaro Bultó, Santi Corella was the first person to fly over the South Pole unmotorised. In the first part of our interview the cold-resistant skydiver from Spain describes his experience of flying over Antarctica – and how 30 °C below zero can sometimes feel surprisingly mild.
Santi, what do you feel when you’re tearing across the South Pole in a wingsuit at 200 km/h? Euphoria, fear, the illusion of being immortal? Or is there simply no time for emotions, because you’re so busy trying to do everything right in order to stay alive?
You feel tiny and gigantic at the same time. All the tension and the nerves that have been plaguing you over the last few months fall away the moment you leave the aircraft. You lose all sense of time, you don’t even feel the incredible cold, you simply enjoy the experience that you have been working towards for so long. An incomparable experience ...
... during which you have to keep the hazards in mind. What were the things that you simply couldn’t allow to go wrong during this project?
For example, not underestimating the changeableness of the weather. In that part of the world the wind can change from one minute to the next from 10 to 100 knots. This is accompanied by terrible cold. At the jump-off height the pilot measured 72 °C below zero.
How did you adapt to such inhospitable climatic conditions?
We wore six layers of clothing, so that the air cushions in between could warm us up. But even that wasn’t enough: during our first attempt we couldn’t move our arms and legs anymore after two hours in the transport plane – and the pilot got a real shock when he turned round and saw that my face was frozen blue. It was a good thing that we couldn’t do the jump that day because of a change in the weather – we couldn’t even think clearly anymore.
The record-breaking jump took place two days later with blue skies and optimal conditions. But landing safely didn’t necessarily mean being safe, did it?
If we’d lost our orientation and landed in the wrong place it could have ended fatally, because after the flight we were completely overcooled. But we succeeded in landing right next to our ground team, who immediately supplied us with additional clothing that we could put on over our wingsuits. Shortly afterwards the helicopter also arrived to take us back to the base station. But after the flight from a 4000-metre height, the 30 °C below zero on the ground seemed fairly mild to us.
Proyecto Alas
Proyecto Alas
Proyecto Alas
Proyecto Alas