On Thursday, 16th January 2025, at Dolphin Beach in Cape Town, extreme big-air kitesurfer Lasse Walker performed a world-first stunt by jumping with a kite in the water over a low-flying aircraft with world-wide-known aerobatic and stunt pilot Łukasz Czepiela at the controls.
Lasse Walker, a native of Noordwijk in Western Netherlands, grew up on the Dutch coast where he had an opportunity to watch the performances of local kitesurfing legends, Ruben Lenten and Kevin Langeree. Those observations, with time, made him realise that kitesurfing was the sport he wanted to pursue in the future.
Walker started his professional kitesurfing career in 2015 and soon became a star of events such as the Red Bull Megaloop. The Dutchman is known for his jumps over some unexpected obstacles, such as a freighter ship, a pier, or a whale.
The Polish aerobatic pilot Łukasz Czepiela became interested in aviation at the age of six, when his father took him to an air show in his home town of Rzeszów. Since then, he began to gradually pursue his dream of flying.
As a member of the Polish National Aerobatic Team, Czepiela took part in several domestic and international competitions and achieved many successes. In the earlier years of his flying career, Czepiela was also a member of the British Honda Dream Team and the Polish Żelazny Aerobatic Group (Grupa Akrobacyjna Żelazny).
Between 2014 and 2019, he was the only Polish pilot to compete in Red Bull Air Race and won the 2018 and 2019 World Championship title in Challenger Class of that well-known air racing series.
Nowadays, Łukasz Czepiela is a world-renowned aerobatic and stunt pilot, although on a daily basis he is a captain at WizzAir airlines, piloting an Airbus A320. In recent years – as the aerobatic and stunt pilot – Czepiela has accomplished some remarkable feats in aviation history, such as landing an aeroplane on a historic pier in Sopot, on the Polish Baltic coast, and then on a helipad at the top of the Burj Al Arab Jumeirah skyscraper in Dubai.
It took Lasse Walker and Łukasz Czepiela two years to make sure that their latest, joint stunt would be carried out safely and with success.
‘I was flying back from America, and we had headwinds during the flight, and I actually came up with the idea: if a slow plane is now flying against the wind, I can jump over it.’ – said Walker, revealing how the idea for this unique challenge was born.
‘The last few years we’ve been preparing, one of the key things for me was that I can jump over Luke consistently so I’ve done thousands of jumps with height measurement devices and drones to prove that I can always clear the gap.’ – he added.
For the stunt to succeed, the kitesurfer and pilot needed perfect timing. Czepiela had to keep his aeroplane steady at a very low altitude and speed, while dealing with wind gusts of more than 50 km/h. Walker, on the other hand, had to make a jump at the right height and distance, as well as at the perfect moment to match his position with that of the aircraft below him.
‘It’s about two years now since the bullseye landing. One of the things that allowed me to land the aircraft on the helipad was the slow flight, so I have an all-in-all experience of four years of slow flying and that helped me to prepare for this project as well.’ – explained Łukasz Czepiela.
On Thursday, 16th January, the weather conditions near the shoreline at Cape Town’s Dolphin Beach turned out to be ideal. On that day, Walker jumped 15 metres above the water with his kite and, accompanied by cheers from the beach, soared over Czepiela’s aeroplane in a flawless demonstration of timing and skills.
‘We had the perfect kicker and timing. Luke was flying low, I jumped over, did the loop with my kite, and looked straight down into the cockpit. Everything came together.’ – commented Walker, who grabbed the perfect outlet wave to jump high enough so as not to hit the propeller of the aeroplane.
‘You’re trying not to stall it and the aircraft is not very manoeuvrable. Then I look to the front, and there’s a dude on the water with a kite above him. He pulls and flies over the plane. It was very surreal.’ – explained Czepiela, who flew brilliantly directly into a tricky headwind.
Cover photo: Sebastian Marko / © Red Bull Content Pool. Information from the Red Bull company press release were used.
