Zero to 180 km/h in 2.15 seconds. Up to 4.2G on the body. A vertical shot through the top of a 360-meter chimney in the Slovenian town of Trbovlje, straight into open sky.
That was the launch Fred Fugen and Dani Roman took on November 5, strapped one at a time, and then together, into a 60-meter human catapult installed inside Europe’s tallest chimney for the Red Bull Human Catapult project.
Fugen, a 47-year-old French BASE jumper and Soul Flyers member, and Roman, a 35-year-old Spanish wingsuit flyer, bring more than 32,000 parachute jumps between them. The chimney launch was still new ground: no human had ever been catapulted out of a chimney before.
A two-ton spring on top of a 360-meter stack
The catapult was engineered by Slovenian stunt-and-engineering outfit DD Squad and bolted into the top section of the Trbovlje chimney. The 60-meter multi-spring device weighs around two tons and runs on mechanical energy alone, firing its capsule up the inside of the stack and clearing the rim at full tilt. Peak acceleration puts the jumper under forces of up to 4.2G before the capsule stops and the flyer carries on upward.
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Roman described the sensation in blunt terms.
“It’s just ‘bam!’,” he told Red Bull. “You go from zero to 180kph in two or three seconds.”
Two records in one afternoon
Two Guinness World Records went on the books that day. Roman set the solo mark for greatest height by human catapult at 100.36 meters above release. In a second attempt the pair fired simultaneously from a dual rig, climbing 75.97 meters (Roman) and 75.75 meters (Fugen) above the launch point for a combined 151.72 meters, the greatest combined height ever recorded for a human catapult.
At peak, the flight carried the pair to 456.7 meters above the ground. Both deployed their parachutes on the way down and landed safely.
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“The reality of what happened here is crazy,” Fugen told Red Bull.
Water tests, Sass Pordoi, and a chimney rim
Development took roughly two and a half years, with DD Squad starting small. The team ran water tests and 6-meter prototypes before firing a 12-meter version at Sass Pordoi in the Italian Dolomites. The full 60-meter system then took around two months to assemble inside the Trbovlje chimney itself, piece by piece.
The project carried backing from Prada’s performance label Prada Linea Rossa, which supplied the technical clothing and eyewear the pair wore for the launches. Red Bull released the full launch video on November 9, four days after the record attempts.
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