Look, most of us have done something dumb after a few drinks. Maybe you jumped off a roof into a pool or tried to shotgun a beer while standing on a picnic table. What Spanish BASE jumper Dani Roman and French legend Fred Fugen just did in Slovenia is in a completely different league of “I cannot believe this is real.”
On November 5, they climbed inside Europe’s tallest chimney, a 360-meter (roughly 1,180-foot) industrial beast in Trbovlje that used to belch smoke from a power station, and let a 60-meter human catapult fire them straight up into the sky. The contraption, built by a Slovenian stunt crew called DD Squad, is basically the world’s biggest “how hard can we launch a person” machine. Two tons of springs and pure engineering chaos accelerated them from a dead stop to 180 km/h (about 112 mph) in 2.15 seconds. That’s Formula 1 territory, except Formula 1 drivers aren’t being launched vertically out of a smokestack.
The video is pure chaos in the best way. You see the capsule setup with the Red Bull branding, the view looking down the massive chimney, the launch, the moment they exit and keep climbing, and then the freefall before the chutes come out. One of the landing shots has a guy under a Red Bull parachute yelling something that sounds a lot like pure joy or mild trauma. Hard to tell the difference at that speed.
They didn’t just do it for the clip. Roman, on a solo launch, set the Guinness World Record for greatest height by human catapult by gaining another 100.36 meters after leaving the capsule. Then the two of them launched together and stacked a second record for the greatest combined height by human catapult (151.72 meters total between them). At the peak they were roughly 456 meters above the ground—about 1,500 feet—before gravity remembered it existed and they started falling.
This wasn’t some weekend project either. The team spent two and a half years developing the idea, testing smaller versions over water and cliffs, then spent two months installing the full 60-meter system inside the chimney. The engineers even slept up there one night during the build. From a pure “what the hell are we doing with our lives” perspective, that’s commitment.
Red Bull’s fingerprints are all over it (as usual when something involves extreme sports and cameras), and there was even some Prada Linea Rossa involvement because apparently even human cannonballs need technical gear that looks good in the stills. The whole thing is peak “we have the budget and the insurance, so why not?” energy.
Most people would take one look at that chimney and think, “Cool structure, let’s not climb inside it and get launched out of the top.” Roman and Fugen looked at it and thought, “Yeah, that works.” They set the records, landed safely, and gave the rest of us another video to watch on loop while we sit on the couch. Absolute lunatics. Respect.
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