Infinity to wingsuit jump: David Tejeiro joins two sports in one maneuver!

The youngest of the “Malaguita” brothers started flying paragliders when he was 8, in the footsteps of his elder brothers Javi and Manu and encouraged by his father. Today he is an outstanding acro pilot, and he also shares with his brothers the enthusiasm of paramotoring with the most radical maneuvers. For a few years, he has also been practicing sky diving, base jump and wingsuit jumping. Last July, he was able, for the first time ever, to join the paragliding acro maneuver known as infinity– which consists of linked tumblings, in other words, making the wing go under the pilot’s vertical as if skipping a rope with it-, with a leap into the void, to then glide in descent with his wingsuit, to finally deploy his chute and land. Watch it here:

Though it may look easy on the video, this maneuver offers the additional complication of having to command the paraglider while wearing a closed wingsuit ready to fly during the infinity tumblings, which means very limited arm movement. To achieve it, David invested the last 4 years of his life training hard in sky diving and wingsuit flying. The outcome was the fusion of these disciplines by pushing the limits a bit further.

In David’s own words to us:

“I did the flight in Orgaña, climbed about 1000 meters, the usual height there, went forward and in the middle of the valley, considering the drift I was going to have with the paraglider, I connected the wingsuit, because in order to make the infinity tumbling I needed to be completely ready so that when I disconnected myself from the paraglider with the quick release links, I only had to control the suit and fly it.

I was very scared because no one had done this in a wingsuit, since it is very difficult to grab the brakes of the paraglider with a closed wingsuit on. I flew in the wingsuit a couple of hours earlier but wasn’t very comfortable and I knew it was going to be even harder because of the greater separation between the wingsuit and the links, so I had to land at the take-off in Orgaña, with great difficulty since it was noon, to rearrange it”.

“From the beginning with sky diving, my goal was to fly wingsuits and perform extreme aerobatics with it. Accomplishing this maneuver has taken me four years, I had to reach a certain level and fly many hours to be able to fly one of the best suits in the world. I trained hard to acquire full suit control. And though when you see a wingsuit flying it appears to be easy, the slightest wrong movement at the speed of 200 km/h that we can reach is too quick and you can easily lose control releasing the chute beforehand.

After thousands of hours spent under a paraglider/paramotor, the acro part didn’t worry me, but adding the wingsuit incorporated a special concern regarding the forces involved on the quick release links, which were unknown to me. These ones were specially made for this maneuver, we used the liberation of 3 loops that we have in sky diving”, explains the youngest of the Malaguitas. He accomplished this feat flying an AirG Emilie 17m paraglider, but was later signed by Windtech and is now commanding a Loop 2.

David isn’t the only pilot who has achieved combining maneuvers of two different, yet close air sports. A decade ago, the late acro French pilot Antoine Montant became the first pilot to release himself from his paraglider, to free fall and land with a parachute. After him, several others have combined jumps from paragliders and even tandem gliders during acro maneuvers, including Horacio Llorens and Dani Roman’s latest feat, from infinity to rodeo… but that´s another story we’ll be telling you in a separate piece of news.

Davi Tejeiro is the first pilot to jump in a wingsuit from his paraglider during an infinity tumbling. Surely more will follow with even more audacious maneuvers because, as we all know, only the sky is the limit.

+Info: https://davidtejeiro.com/

*Follow David on Facebook: www.facebook.com/DavidMalaguitaOficial