The man about to leap from an 8,000-metre peak

Lhotse is the fourth highest mountain on the planet. Alongside Everest to the north, and Nuptse to the west, it forms a hulking horseshoe of rock and ice that towers over Nepal’s famous Khumbu valley.

This month — maybe in the next week — a 35-year old Englishman hopes to reach the 8,516-metre summit, traverse to the edge of Lhotse’s 3,300-metre south face, one of the biggest walls on Earth, and jump off.

If it goes to plan, Tim Howell will free fall for up to 450 metres before his fabric wingsuit begins to glide him away from the wall at a ratio of 2.3 metres forward to 1 metre down. Hurtling head first through the thin air, his arms stretched out behind him, he will reach speeds of more than 230km per hour. In total, he is likely to “fly” for about three minutes, dropping 3,000 vertical metres, before he opens his parachute 200 metres above the ground and lands, into the wind, roughly 6km from where he started.

But it is a big if. Nobody has ever base-jumped from above 8,000 metres and little is known about how Howell’s wingsuit will perform at such a high altitude. Wingsuits have inlets that fill with air, stiffening the material to allow the jumper to glide rather than fall, but the suit will take longer to pressurise so far above sea level. 

Lhotse’s south face provides an enormous vertical drop but until Howell reaches the edge and peers into the abyss he will also not know the exact angle of the wall and whether the push of his feet will give him enough forward momentum to clear any obstacles below.

Once in the air he must remain absolutely focused. “To the smallest degree moving your head left and right can have an effect on your flight because of the way the airflow goes over your wings,” Howell tells me on April 24 as he prepares at Everest base camp, where the route up Lhotse starts. “Many people have died because they’ve had the wrong body position,” he says.

Even in the niche sport of wingsuit base jumping, Howell is a rarity, combining mountaineering skill with wingsuit experience to push the limits of what is possible.

“What he’s trying to achieve is beyond epic,” says Australian wingsuit instructor Scott Paterson. Most wingsuit base jumps are normally done from exit points on mountains up to 4,000 metres in altitude and only “a handful” of people have ever jumped from higher, he says. “To add a flying element into a big mountain like that is a rare thing. There’s not many people on this planet that have that experience.”

Humans have always dreamt of flying. Leonardo da Vinci sketched a wooden-framed parachute in the 15th century. Croatian polymath Fausto Veranzio then designed a canopy based on the drawings and may have even tested his invention in the early 1600s by jumping from the bell tower of St Mark’s Basilica in Venice.

However, the first recorded public jump using a parachute capable of slowing a man’s fall from altitude is credited to Frenchman André-Jacques Garnerin, who detached his canvas canopy from a hydrogen balloon 1,000 metres above Paris in 1797.

On the walk into base camp, Howell and his team passed a memorial to the current record holder

Base jumping is parachuting from a fixed point rather than an aircraft. The acronym stands for the types of object jumpers may leap from: Buildings, Antennas, bridges, known as Spans, and the Earth itself, meaning cliffs or other geological features.

While early parachutists had jumped from objects in training, the modern sport of base jumping is generally dated to 1978 when a skydiver named Carl Boenish organised four jumpers to leap from El Capitan, a giant granite rock wall in California’s Yosemite National Park. He later coined the acronym.

Wingsuit base jumping is a further progression in which a nylon suit consisting of two arm wings and a leg wing generates sufficient air resistance to give the jumper some control over their descent, enabling them to fly forward, slicing through the air like a human missile. The first modern wingsuit was developed in the early 1990s by French skydiver Patrick de Gayardon, who died testing a prototype during a skydive in Hawaii in 1998. The first mass-produced wingsuit was released a year later.

The fabric wings enable experienced base jumpers to swoop low over the landscape — so-called proximity flying — achieving a much greater sensation of speed than conventional skydivers. Among the most celebrated demonstrations of the technique was a 2015 flight in the Swiss Alps completed by the Italian Uli Emanuele, in which he plunged through a hole in rocky outcrop that was only 2.6 metres wide.

Sadly the growing popularity of proximity flying over the past 20 years has been accompanied by increasing numbers of fatalities. Between 1981 and 2002, 60 people died base jumping, according to the Base Fatality List, an unofficial record of deaths maintained by the community. Since 2002, when the first wingsuit fatality was recorded, deaths have risen sharply. In 2016, the most deadly year to date, 37 people died, including 24 using wingsuits — among them Emanuele, who died after crashing in the Dolomites. Days later another wingsuit pilot was killed in Switzerland while live-streaming his jump on Facebook.

In a stark illustration of the risks, many of the casualties have been among the most experienced wingsuit pilots in the sport. People like Dean Potter, the US climber and former record holder for the longest base jump, and Russia’s Valery Rozov, who holds the record for the highest base jump, which Howell hopes to beat.

Rozov set that record in 2016, jumping from 7,700 metres on Cho Oyu, the world’s sixth highest peak. He died on his second jump from Ama Dablam, a smaller Himalayan mountain, in 2017, crashing before he could open his parachute.

Howell has never been one to back away from a challenge. When he was 13, his father, a former member of the British army’s parachute regiment, challenged him to walk across the roof of their three-storey farmhouse, from one chimney to the other. After leaving school Howell joined the Royal Marines and completed one of the unit’s last tours in Afghanistan. Later he undertook mountain leader training, becoming a specialist in reconnaissance, mountain warfare and cold weather survival. He left the military four years ago to pursue climbing and wingsuit base jumping full time.

Now based in Switzerland, Howell has racked up more than 1,100 base jumps, including the first ever wingsuit base jump in the UK, from the 1,032-metre Lord Berkeley’s Seat in Scotland. Last year, he made the first ever wingsuit jump from Argentina’s Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Americas. In video footage of the jump, Howell shuffles to the edge of a narrow rock pillar at 6,000 metres above sea level. He counts down, “two, one, see ya!”, bends his knees, and calmly pushes off, plunging into the air beneath his feet. The camera attached to his helmet swivels round and his face is framed in the centre of the shot as the vertical cliff races past at terrifying speed.

While base jumping can appear to outsiders as reckless and adrenaline-fuelled, Howell says his approach to the sport is anything but that.

“If my heart’s racing then it’s not for me,” he explains. “If, in the back of my mind, I’m thinking my pack job is not right, my rigging is not right, the technicality of the jump is not right, then I need to look into it to see what I can mitigate.

“I’ve got a lot of friends that have died in the mountains, wingsuiting, climbing, and in the community we all think, ‘oh it will never happen to me’,” he continues. “I do consider myself a different type of wingsuit base jumper to most, or to a lot of people on the fatality list. I don’t spend my whole wingsuiting career doing proximity flying, which is how a lot of people die.”

For the Lhotse jump Howell’s preparations have included a helicopter recce of the mountain in November, three-dimensional mapping of the south face and detailed calculations of his likely free fall and glide ratios. 

He estimates that the first section of the cliff under the likely exit point is about 200-metres high, followed by a small ledge, another 200-metre vertical section and then a steep snow field. That should allow his wingsuit up to 450 metres to pressurise — a distance known as the start arc. On Aconcagua his start arc was 300 metres; at sea level it is normally about 200 metres. “I’ve got a huge initial vertical part of the cliff that will give me a large margin for error,” he says.

On the walk into base camp, Howell and his team, including his wife Ewa, passed a memorial to Rozov, the current record holder, in a small memorial garden in the shadow of the mountain where he died.

Rozov had been an inspiring figure for Howell — the pair had met on a couple of occasions — but Howell says he would not have done the jump from Ama Dablam that proved fatal. The conditions on the day were challenging and the exit “very technical”, meaning the start arc was comparatively short, leaving little margin for error. “That sort of jump that he did, isn’t for me,” Howell says.

Ewa, 38, is also a wingsuit base jumper. The couple met at a skydiving centre in Madrid 10 years ago, where she was his wingsuit coach.

“This is something that when you start doing it and you master it, really cannot be compared or replaced by anything else,” she tells me from Geneva. “You are defying the laws of gravity and flying with your own body.”

For the Aconcagua jump last year, Ewa was just metres away when her husband stepped off. This time she won’t be there, having had to return to work last week — fittingly at the International Air Transport Association — leaving Howell in Nepal, waiting for the right weather window.

Sometimes base jumpers, particularly those with sponsors and online audiences to satisfy, can let that external pressure influence their decision-making and continue with jumps even when the conditions are not right. That is not Howell, she says. “His decision making is impeccable.”

I speak to Howell again from base camp on May 4 after he has returned from four days acclimatising higher up the mountain, but on May 9 he is forced to push back the plan due to a hacking cough. The team is now targeting an attempt around May 18.

When he finally sets off for the summit he will climb with mountain guide Jon Gupta, lead Sherpa Siddhi and climbing Sherpas Pemba and Tendi. The route up Lhotse follows the main route up Everest before separating above 7,000 metres. Just below the summit, the Sherpas will fix ropes away from the normal route and towards the exit point for the jump, a traverse of about 500 metres. Gupta and the Sherpas will then accompany Howell along the ropes and may need to assist him to abseil into position.

“That terrain has never been done, it’s a complete unknown,” says Gupta, who has climbed Lhotse twice before. All of this will occur above 8,000 metres — the notorious “death zone”.

If the weather conditions are right, Howell will then remove one of the two down suits he will wear for the climb and put on the ultralight wingsuit, specifically modified for the jump. He will take off his oxygen mask and shuffle to the edge, struggling to breathe in the thin air. He will then peer down the south face for the first time. 

“With the exit points for base jumping, you can do as much of the scouting, Google-imaging and terrain profiling as you like, but you will really only know if it’s possible or not once you’re there,” says Ewa.

If anything looks uncertain, he will turn around, Howell says. If not, he will say “three, two, one . . .“ and jump.