Gary Connery

Gary Connery (born 18 June 1969) He made his first parachute jump at age 23, as part of his army training. He has performed 880 skydives and 450 BASE jumps. He has jumped from locations such as the Eiffel Tower, Nelson's Column, the London Eye, London's Tower Bridge, and from inside the Millennium Dome.

Eiffel Tower Connery jumped through the centre of the Eiffel Tower on a rainy day with winds gusting at 25 mph (40 km/h).

Nelson's Column On 9 May 2003 Connery jumped off Nelson's Column at Trafalgar Square in Central London in what was described as a "death-defying protest stunt" which was organised by Act For Tibet, in support of the Dalai Lama. Connery admitted that the jump was "frightening".

World's first wingsuit landing without a parachute On 23 May 2012 Connery made his wingsuit jump from a helicopter flying at a height of over Ridge Wood in Buckinghamshire near his hometown of Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. Coming back from California (Perris Valley) in 2003, where he did his first wingsuit flight, he said: "that could be landed!" and he went for a week to do wingsuit flight training at Empuriabrava on the coast of Spain, the largest dropzone in Europe. Before the final attempt, he had made two test flights landing with a parachute. He had also trained for weeks in Italy and Switzerland in preparation for the jump. He had to obtain permission from the Civil Aviation Authority for the dive. The flight was filmed by Mark Sutton.

The landing was attended by about a hundred spectators. The landing rig, also known as the box rig,

Reaction Landing in a wingsuit without using a parachute had been one of Jeb Corliss's main objectives since 2010. Corliss and other top-level wingsuit jumpers had tried for years to design wingsuits similar to the one which Connery helped design and subsequently used for his record-setting leap.

In the beginning, Corliss thought that Connery's stunt was an April Fool's joke and that the stunt Connery was attempting was impossible.

Connery's landing was studied as an extreme example of the effectiveness of shock absorbing material. Rhett Allain, associate professor of Physics at Southeastern Louisiana University, has analysed Connery's flight in Wired magazine'''s science blog Dot Physics to determine the landing velocities which allowed Connery to remain uninjured. Connery received a nomination for the Epic TV Adventurer of The Year Award''. In preparation for the stunt, he met with Angela Kelly, the Queen's dresser so that she could make a replica of the Queen's dress for him and the Queen made her favourite black handbag available to make the stunt look more realistic.

Personal life Connery was married to Vivienne, a café owner in Henley-on-Thames, and they have one child. He had pushed her down the stairs in their home in Satwell, Oxfordshire in October 2020 after an argument about who should turn off the light. She suffered a shattered shoulder and a cut to her head. He was jailed for 18 months in August 2022 for the attack. The sentencing judge said of him: "It is abundantly clear... that you show absolutely no remorse for what happened and you do not seem to accept any fault."