Later, Patrick de Gayardon applied Ram Air technology, which has been used in parachutes since the 1970s to keep them inflated. He adopted the acronym Base (building, antenna, span and earth). In 1981 Carl Boenish legitimised jumping off a cliff and pulling a parachute as a type of extreme sport. From the 1940s up to the 80s Jhonathan says that, “all the people who were attaching canvas wings died.” The idea of wingsuiting from planes started with the “Birdmen” in Europe in the 1940s, but that met with mixed results – and several deaths. He’s flown in the Alps, Andes, the floating mountain in Zhangjiajie in China, Italy, France, and the fjords of Norway. In 2012, in La Guajira, Colombia, he set four Guinness World Records: longest time in freefall (9 mins and 6 secs), longest horizontal distance (26.257km or 16.31 miles), highest wingsuit jump (11.358km or 37,265ft), longest total distance (28.163km or 17.5 miles). Jhonathan, a native of Medellín, Colombia, now lives in Sacramento, California, and is the current gold medallist in the World Wingsuit League (WWL). You can do either skydiving or Base jumping with a wingsuit,” he says. Wingsuiting is not a sport: wingsuiting is a sub-discipline of each one of these sports. Skydives are always performed from a helicopter or plane, while Base jumps are from a cliff or fixed object. This is skydive proximity flying, also known as wingsuit flying.

Jhonathan’s goal is to drop down and into a valley, below the treeline, and fly at 127mph – terminal velocity – while using his feet as rudders to steer. He accelerates, arches his chest and climbs slowly, then heads down toward a mountainside. Air fills the chambers in his suit and causes him to go from dropping to floating in a Batman-esque display. He dives, his black-winged arms pulled inward until he clears the plane he extends his arms, pivots his shoulders forward and spreads his webbed legs.

Alto adventure proximity wingsuit