A Southern California BASE jumper was killed in a parachute accident while he was filming a documentary on the perils of the high-adrenaline extreme sport in Turkey, according to New York Daily News.
As soon as 37-year-old Ian Flanders pulled his chute chord, the parachute lines tangled around his legs and and he plummeted into a ravine along the Karasu River. Flanders fell to his death from a height of 900 feet above the Karanlik canyon in eastern Turkey and the incident was caught on camera by a TV station during a nature sports festival, according to USA Today.
"The BASE jumping and, especially the wingsuit community, is facing a real epidemic right now. Wingsuiters are dying at a rate unheard of in any other sport. It seems like not a month goes by without a well-known base jumper or wing-suit flyer dying these days," editor of Outside magazine, Grayson Schaffer said, CBS News reported.
"At the time of his death, Flanders was actually working on a documentary about all of the deaths that have been happening in the BASE world, and... it's just an incredible tragedy that he would die this way," Schaffer said.
Flanders becomes the 264th recorded BASE jumper to die. The tragedy takes place two months after extreme athletes Dean Potter and Graham Hunt plunged to their death in a base-jumping accident in Yosemite National Park, as HNGN previously reported.
