One thing’s for sure: Katie Hansen doesn’t fit into a six-hundred-word space. No way. Her list of hyphenations feels almost hyperbolic. It’s hard to condense 15 years of skydiving, BASE jumping, freeflying, wingsuiting, swooping, speed flying and tunnel flying into a few little paragraphs.
Since we have all that ground to cover and we only have your attention for the briefest of moments, let’s highlight our favorite thing about Katie. Drumroll, please: She’s a Cookie athlete! (We’re biased. We know.)
All three of the best jumps that Katie Hansen has ever done have been in her Cookie G3. Two of them, in fact, were at Crosskeys’ 4th of July boogie.
“I did some of the most insane XRW two ways I have ever done,” Katie enthuses. “The first one was with Iain Jensen. I was popping up over the canopy, then transitioning onto my back as I came to his other side, and then [Iain] would barrel roll over me. Then I would pop up on my back, transition over to my belly on the other side of him and then he would barrel roll back over me. We went into this head-down carve where I was in-face, head-down carving as he was carving his canopy. It was so fluid. And all of this while the sun was setting.”
Need a visual aid? Here you go.
“The second one also went down that weekend,” she adds, grinning. “I got to dock on a Caravan while I was flying my wingsuit.”
“I’d never flown relative with the plane before,” she explains. “The pilot [Crosskeys DZO John “Pico” Mazure] is insanely talented. A Caravan is not the easiest plane to do this kind of stuff with.”
“Everything was super smooth. There was a little bit of thermic activity where the wing was bouncing around a little bit, so it kept me from trying to dock on it for a while. But then I went in, touched the wing, giggled and was flying right next to it until break-off at 5,000 feet. When I landed, and I was jumping up and down. I touched it! It was badass.”
The third super-landmark jump that Katie and her G3 did together was a little further back from last weekend, but it has imprinted deeply on her long memory in the sport. It was when she competed in the Red Bull Aces competition--as Katie puts it, “just going balls to the wall as fast as you can in your racing suit, ripping around gates suspended on helicopters.” Unreal.
“There is so much more going on than the actual jump; the physical flying,” Katie notes. “It’s the fact that you’re wearing GPS, and smoke. You’re straining to hear the ‘go’ alarm in the din of that Huey. It’s like being in the set position on the racing blocks before the gun goes off. You’re working with being fully amped while you’re just trying to breathe calmly, suppress your reactions and think about what you need to do and the line you need to fly....but it’s hard to even spot the gates.”
“It’s such a privilege to do,” she adds, “and when you’re locked on what you need to fly by and you’re going as fast as you can, the gates flow by and you go for the next one. It is just fun; the purest form of fun.”
Katie, if you ever manage to bottle that feeling for us mere mortals, we’d be forever grateful.
Cookie is proud to support Katie Hansen’s epic airsports adventures.
Katie's COOKIE
1. Cookie Helmet Model: G3
2. Helmet Color: A custom-painted one and a lime green one
3. Favorite Sticker? #FuckGuru
4. Best jump the helmet has been on? Just told you all about ‘em!
5. Special logo on the aluminum plate? 2015 Vertical World Record
6. Time You Were Happy That You Were Wearing Your Helmet: Midair collision getting blindsided racing at Red Bull ACES. I was happy I was wearing a full face because the visor dispersed some of that impact. If I had been wearing an open face, I would have smashed the bones in my face.