I met Sepp for the first time a couple of weeks ago around Brento. We got along really well right away, not only because of flying, but also because of our professional background, as we both own a business.
We also went to the new wingsuit tunnel together, he had around 12 hours of flight time in total. He was super motivated in wingsuit flying and had done a lot of jumps over the past years in Europe and South Africa, mostly pretty experienced stuff.
From what I had seen, his wingsuit flight performance, including the GPS data, looked quite good overall. In flight, he flew safely and kept his distance from the terrain. But sometimes he struggled with his exits. Sometimes he had a weak push or some tumbling with his legs for some reason. Many people, including me, had pointed this problem out to him several times. But he denied it and always said, “If I need a good push, I do a good push. I just feel more comfortable not pushing that hard.” I could imagine he was scared of slipping at the exit and preferred a “safe and stable” push rather than a hard push.
I respect that, because I also prefer to jump off a little head-high rather than push vertically against the rock and risk my foot slipping. Whatever.
Over the last few weeks, he sent me a lot of footage of pretty hard exits around Brento, where a solid push is absolutely necessary. He had been jumping every day for about a month or so. I told him, “Man, take a step back. You are jumping stuff that I would walk away from.” But he was definitely not someone who easily accepted advice, and I think he did not really want to hear criticism.
Anyway, he was super happy when we arranged to meet for the week to jump and paraglide in our region. So he drove all the way up from Brento, and we did a couple of jumps where we had to hike quite a lot. The weather was perfect every day. He was stoked and super motivated. We hiked until our feet were bloody and had a really cool time together.
The day it happened: It was the last day with good weather, the day before, I showed him all the data, information, and footage from the jumps on the mountain we had chosen so he could study everything. We went to bed early and had a good sleep. We chose this mountain because it is a south-facing wall, which meant that on that day the conditions were more than perfect for it. We also chose it because it involved less hiking than the others. Another factor was that there are two exit points on top, so we could choose between them if needed.
We reached the first exit in less than two hours. It was the harder exit. He looked to me like he was in good shape, but he said, “Today the hiking feels a bit harder for me than the last few days,” and we laughed. He seemed rather unusually chill to me.
When we opened this exit 1.5 years ago, we prepared it as much as possible. We fixed a climbing rope directly to the exit rock. I said to him, “Take your climbing harness and scramble down to the exit to have a look. You know the data. If you feel uncomfortable with it in any way, we can go to the easier one. It is not far.” He climbed down and said, “No, it’s okay.” He did not say a single word to me about not feeling good.
The ledge where you climb down is not comfortable. There are loose rocks, it is massively exposed, and only one person at a time can be there. You also need to push in the right direction. With a solid push, you clear the whole ledge. With a weak push, you might have some extra margin between the V-shaped ledge below, but the heading has to be very right. At the exit, only the rock where you jump off is good. It is solid rock where you can stand pretty well. Here is my video of the flight so you can see the circumstances of the jump.
Front View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmUy_qiMrNA
Back View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTNYKSB1eOI
I said to him, “If it is okay for you, I will jump first,” and he agreed. I also told him that he should watch me from above so he could see exactly which direction I pushed from and how hard I pushed. My exit and flight were perfect. The slight uplift gave me an excellent start.
On the ground, five minutes after I had stowed my parachute, I knew that something was wrong, because he usually did not wait long on top. I also want to point out that the valley is extremely quiet. When I was on the ground, I didn’t hear any sound or notice anything unusual, I also couldn’t see him at the exit point anymore. I think it must have happened during my flight or on canopy. That makes me wonder, because in the back-view footage you can see that he was still up there, clipped into the rope with his wingsuit open.
I tried to call him, but his phone was dead. After a while, I called alpine rescue. They arrived quickly and found him by helicopter straight below the wall, canopy open.
They did not find the camera. I don’t know if the suit was zipped up. In my opinion, there are three possibilities for what could have happened:
- He slipped at the exit, possibly because of the restricted movement in the wingsuit.
- He had a very weak or asymmetric push and impacted the first V-shaped ledge below.
- He jumped too head-high, ended up in a scorpion position, and impacted the talus. (I really can’t imagine that.)
He told me that he had at least -90 m / 40 m on every jump. I can hardly believe that he impacted the ledge below. He had done jumps with similar or even harder data. Lukas Loibl carried out an analysis of all his uploaded GPS tracks. Even with his worst track, he would have made it over the ledge.
We can unfortunately only speculate at this point, and we’ll only know once we’re able to find the camera. Sepp was very happy that week, and we enjoyed the time together a lot. We had deep conversations about our business and talked about future projects. Sepp was a solid wingsuit pilot, a successful businessman, an excellent paraglider and acro pilot with decades of experience, and he also had a hot-air balloon license.
I will miss him deeply. Fly free, Amigo. Johannes

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