The forensic doctors found serious lesions in the spine, on the body of Felix Baumgartner, after it collapsed with a motorized paragliding inside a swimming pool from a tourist complex in Italy.
Felix Baumgartner Photo: Getty Images
The autopsy is about to shed light on the cause of death on the afternoon of Thursday, July 17, in the town of Porto Sant’elpidio, in the province of Fermo.
At this moment, it remains to be seen whether Baumgartner’s death was caused by these lesions in the spine or if he had a heart attack during the flight, reports ANSA.
The autopsy is underway at the Legal Medicine Department of the Ferm Hospital.
Investigators suspect that a video camera attached to Baumgartner’s paragliding would have hit the propellers, causing a damage. They try to access the room to reconstruct the accident chronology.
The first conclusions after the inspection of the flight apparatus seem to exclude a technical malfunction. The engine still worked, although in minimal power, when the collapsed aircraft was discovered, and the propeller did not present traces of damage, to support the hypothesis that a room mounted on Motodeltaplan caused the collapse.
According to Corriere della Sera, the GoPro camera was found intact, near the inanimate body, and the propeller was protected by a special grid that prevented such incidents. The hypothesis that a chamber clamping cable would have been detached and interfered with the engine mechanism is less probable from the new data.
The eyewitnesses heard said that Baumgartner did not make any movement to suggest that he had tried to regain control of the flight apparatus. He did not flutter his hands or feet, as he would have a person in difficulty.
The parachute would have been completely opened, according to those who attended the tragedy.
The 56-year-old Austrian athlete was on a vacation with his girlfriend, Mihaela Rădulescu, when the incident was produced. He fell and crashed into a wooden structure, near a swimming pool of a tourist complex.
Baumgartner was regularly on the front page of newspapers with his stunts. He became famous in 2012, when he jumped from the stratosphere to a height of 39 kilometers, breaking several records in this process.
