Free Fall

What place on Earth would allow you to freefall the longest by jumping off it? What about using a squirrel suit?

—Dhash Shrivathsa

The largest purely vertical drop on Earth is the face of Canada's Mount Thor, which is shaped like this:

To make things a little less gruesome, let's put a pit at the bottom of the cliff filled with something fluffy, like cotton candy, to safely break your fall. (Would this work? Hmm ...)

A human falling with arms and legs outstretched has a terminal velocity in the neighborhood of 55 meters per second. It takes a few hundred meters to get up to speed, so it would take you a little over 26 seconds to fall the full distance.

How long is that?

It's long enough to finish the first level of the original Super Mario.^[1]

Sprint's ring cycle—the time the phone rings before going to voicemail—is 23 seconds.^[2] (For those keeping score, Wagner's is 2,350 times longer.)

This means that if someone called your phone, and it started ringing the moment you jumped, it would go to voicemail three seconds before you reached the bottom.

On the other hand, if you jumped off Ireland's 210-meter Cliffs of Moher, you would only be able to fall for about eight seconds—nine, if you jumped upward.

That's not very long, but according to River Tam, it would be enough time to drain all the blood from your body given adequate vacuuming systems. (So much for making things less gruesome.)

But you don't have to drop vertically.

Even without any special equipment, a skilled skydiver—once they get up to full speed—can glide at almost a 45-degree angle.^[3] By gliding away from the base of the cliff, you could conceivably extend your fall substantially.

It's hard to say exactly how far; it all depends on your clothes. As a comment on a BASE jumping records wiki puts it,

The record for longest [fall time] without a wingsuit is hard to find since the line between jeans and wingsuits has blurred since the introduction of more advanced tracking apparel.

Which brings us to wingsuits.

Wingsuits are what you get when you take the average of parachute pants and parachutes.

One wingsuit operator posted tracking data from a series of jumps.^[4] It shows that in a glide, a wingsuit can lose altitude as slowly as 18 meters per second.

Even ignoring horizontal travel, that would stretch out our fall to over a minute. That's long enough for a chess game. It's also long enough to sing the first verse of—appropriately enough—REM's It's the End of the World as We Know It followed by—less appropriately—the rap breakdown from the end of the Spice Girls' Wannabe.

When we include horizontal glides, the times get even longer.

There are a lot of mountains that could probably support very long wingsuit flights. For example, Nanga Parbat, a mountain in Pakistan, has a drop of more than three kilometers at a fairly steep angle.^[5] (Surprisingly, a wingsuit still works fine at those altitudes,^[6] though the jumper needs oxygen and glides a little faster than normal.)

So far, the record for longest wingsuit BASE jump is held by Dean Potter, who jumped from the Eiger—a mountain in Switzerland—and flew for three minutes and twenty seconds.^[7]

Joey Chestnut and Takeru Kobayashi are the world's top competitive eaters.

If we can find a way for them to operate wingsuits while eating at full speed, and they jumped from the Eiger, they could—in theory—finish as many as 45 hot dogs between them before reaching the ground ...

... making them the joint holders of what just might be the strangest world record of all time.