Quote:

Your life does not suck.

History:

“If you’re not progressing, you’re falling behind, right?” asks Red Bull Air Force member Luke Aikins. The question is purely rhetorical – with two decades of experience in skydiving, Luke’s primary aim is to keep growing his talent, and to bring out the talent in others.

Already a seasoned veteran of the Pro Swooping Tour, as well as a popular skydiving instructor, in 2008 Luke wrote a new chapter in his career with a win at the Red Bull Blade Raid at Crystal Mountain. A radical event that combines the power of flying a canopy with the finesse of carving snow, the Red Bull Blade Raid sends contenders roughly two thousand feet down a vertical slope with skis on their feet and high-speed parachutes on their backs. As the velocity increases, the chute lifts, and suddenly the racer isn’t skiing around the obstacles on the mountain – he’s flying around them, at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour. “It’s the culmination of years of experience in both skydiving and skiing,” Luke acknowledges

When Luke was born in 1973, he became the newest member of a skydiving dynasty. “My gramp skydived till he was 86, and my dad, my sister, my brothers, my cousins… we all got into it,” he says. Luke was beyond excited when he made his first solo skydive at 16. By the time he launched his first B.A.S.E. jump, he had completed about 8,000 skydives; yet the new experience got him excited all over again, and he keeps the adrenaline flowing to this day with adventures like setting three world records – two for canopy formation and one for freefalling. Currently, Luke’s skydives total about 12,500 (with the highest starting from 26,000 feet!), and his B.A.S.E. jump tally has reached the century mark. On the coaching end, his students have included everyone from NASCAR’s Brian Vickers to members of the Navy Seals. Luke’s all-time favorite student, however, is his wife, Monica, who has now joined him on the staff of Kapowsin Air Sports. In reference to his own conditioning, Luke comments, “The best training is to jump as much as I can. It helps that I fly airplanes and do a lot of things that require split-second decisionmaking.” The athlete is currently getting ready to attack a new goal: “I’m working on a project to make one skydive in each of twenty-four states in a twenty-four-hour period,” Luke explains. “It should be quite a feat!”