Tough Little Camera Captures Its Own Accidental Fall From Plane

On its own, the video above is horribly filmed and some of the most difficult-to-watch footage you’ll ever see, but what it shows makes it fascinating. It’s a point-of-view look at what it’s like to fall 12,500 feet without a parachute… and survive. Skydiver Lucas Damm was jumping out of a plane over British Columbia recently when his helmet-mounted GoPro camera smacked against the plane door and fell out of its holder. The camera, still rolling, fell the entire way down and miraculously escaped without any damage.

In the description of the 8-minute-long YouTube video, Damm writes,

bumped my head on the door frame on exit unclasping the latch on the box. The camera popped out on exit at 12,500 and fell straight down onto the landing area at the DZ and was recovered by a fellow skydiver. It even caught our landings. Not one scratch on the body or lens. Still can’t believe that I got it back and that it is totally fine. A buddy the same day who is one of our camera flyers had the same thing happen but with his SLR….not the same result. I’m definitely a gopro fan for life these little guys are bomb proof

As with the seagull-turned-Go-Pro-filmmaker story we shared a couple of days ago, this story is bound to generate cries of “viral marketing” and “fake”. Damm, however, insists that the whole thing was completely the result of lady luck, and that he wasn’t even aware of what had happened until after landing on the ground. It was a fellow skydiver who spotted and recovered the fallen camera.

If you decide to watch the video, be warned that the bulk of it simply shows the camera spinning out of control as it falls to Earth.

(via HuffPost and Boing Boing)

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