This is the definition of death-defying. Actually getting out and surviving this sport is only half the job. If your work is not captured on video, it’s like it didn’t happen at all.
I used to work as an attorney for insurance companies. These videos make me wonder the extent to which insurers specifically try to exclude activities this dangerous.
I think it's as dangerous as Formula One. Both require long hours of training (and supportive physical training) plus meticulous preparations. Everything happens at the edge of the possible. But with all that extra training and experience, I expect a formula one driver to have a much larger margin of control on the normal road than me, and posing less of a risk.
For an insurance company I'd draw the line between what's legal and what not. Obviously, people who expressly go into the illegal to get their kicks, also venture into the uninsured.
Anyway, anyone can have an unexpected heart failure, at which point all bets are off. I've seen that happen at a dive site. Two very experienced buddies go for a dive and one of them dies under water of a heart attack. He had passed his last physical check without a problem. For all I know he could have been at the wheel of a car on the road or sky diving or on the couch watching telly.
Barnacle goslings aren't fed by their parents. The chicks just walk off the edge of the nests and fall, sometimes 300 feet to the ground where the survivors forage for food.
One in two chicks survive their first attempts at feeding. I saw the video the other night on Animal Planet's "Most Extreme" where the barnacle geese were rated No. 1. The program interlaced film of falling chicks with base jumpers but, didn't show any casualties. The narrator said as many as 16 people die yearly while base jumping.
At Google Video you can watch Jeremy Clarkson's <a href="http://video.google.com/videosearch?rls=en-us&q=jeremy+clarkson,+speed&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&um=1&sa=N&tab=wv&oi=property_suggestions&resnum=0&ct=property-revision&cd=1#" rel="nofollow">Speed. Episode 1 goes into the biological and evolutionary stuff. Very interesting. Episode 3 seems to have fallen off somewhere along the road, but there is enough interesting stuff there.
Here's another one of those spell-binding base-jumping videos. Note the guy who flies just over the road toward the end. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttz5oPpF1Js