Patrick DeGayardon was a partner at Pacific skydiving, and we'd come to Hawaii to film for Patrick Passe's new movie. On the first jump in the morning DeG had been flying the tandem-surf with Wendy while I played with them on my head. They had to pack the tandem so Patrick and I took the plane back up, to train in our wing suits for a later sequence in the film. Katarina had made a new version of the wings and my suit was flying much better than before. We had made more than 200 wing suit jumps together and this time were working on tactics of formation flight.

A few thousand jumps later he left a message on our machine asking Katarina if I wanted to film the wing suit project. I thought he'd called us by mistake. We travelled with him for the rest of the year and then it just carried on. There was always one more thing to go and do.

Everybody knows DeG. Old ladies, little children, they've all seen him flying on his surf like a cross between a stuntman and a cartoon superhero.

We flew away from the drop zone before making a carving left turn out over the beach. Our forward speed was high so we could fly over and under each other very close. Patrick was laughing and shouting to me, he was really happy. I hadn't made a mess of it this time and he was laughing and teasing me. It was a beautiful jump. We were both elated. We took a fingertip grip for an instant, which is hard when you are locked in the suit. We would be flying through the tandems now, so I peeled off to the right over the sea and Patrick, grinning, broke left to swoop over the drop zone and maybe fly by and shout to a tandem hanging under canopy.

I opened and got out of the suit so that I could fly my canopy. Patrick was gone.

I ran through the banana plantation straight to him. I knew that he had gone in, but this is Patrick, is he all right, how badly is he hurt? If I'm quick?

I had to check.
It had been instant.

Mick McGuire was already there and had seen everything from the ground. I held Patrick. I had to understand how this could happen to him. I looked at his rig. He had what he called a deflector on the bottom of the container which he had been using since the wind tunnel in Toulouse. The pilot chute had been difficult to reach in the pouch with the constraints of the wing suit so the previous night Patrick modified two deflectors, so that the pilot chute could be stowed in the deflector rather than in the BOC pocket. The deflectors were attached to the rigs by a zipper running close to your back and a piece of microline at the top. The mod was a good solution. He was improving his gear all the time.

When he reattached the deflector to the rig he passed the microline through a steering line, trapping it to the container. It was a mistake, the microline only has to pass through a quarter of an inch of the corner of the container. The other rig he had assembled was fine. From the outside everything would look OK.

The main had never come out of the bag. Patrick cut away, but the trapped steering line kept the bag and the pilot chute trailing behind him. He would not have had much time. He tried to pull the mess clear but that would not have been possible. He had to pull his reserve and the two pilot chutes entangled. The wings create a huge burble. The reserve was still in the freebag.

When you look down the avenue of giant banana plants you see the mountains at the end rise up into the clouds. Its a beautiful place, there's an engraved wooden cross almost hidden by garlands of Hawaiian flowers.

Patrick De Gayardon  - 'DeG'

• In 1989 he climbed to Everest base camp four, on the Nepal side. 7, 800m on foot without oxygen. Not bad for your first go at mountain climbing.
   
• He turned skysurfing from a stunt into a sport and gave many people the chance to be even more frightened than by CF.
   
• He developed a system so that you could fly a Stiletto behind a boat, looping and rolling like an aerobatic kite.
   
• He jumped from 12, 700m without oxygen.
   
• He jumped Angel Falls at absolutely the wrong time of year, so that the waterfall would look at its best for the film crew.
   
• He jumped from a helicopter, freefalling into El Soltano, a one thousand foot cave, in Mexico.
   
• A world champion many times, he still seemed to get more satisfaction from having beaten Patrick and Bruno Passe, on appeal, in his first ever 4-way competition. He would laugh uncontrollably every time I mentioned it.
   
• He made the longest base delay ever. 32 seconds, using his wings. That was the first of the many times he used a Stiletto for BASE jumps, as he'd lent his base rig to someone else so that they could jump too.
   
• He was ready for much longer delays this year. He got out of the Porter above Lac de Bourget, flew alongside and then got back in.
   
• He flew a snowboard from a cliff in Norway.
   
• He got my full attention when we had to fly through the mountains in Chamonix and track through the gap between Les Drus and L'Aiguille Vert, with the plane flying alongside us. He was no more than twenty metres above the rocks.
   
• He did the first CRW, Parapente and AFF in France.
   
• He hooked every canopy he flew, even the tandems.
   
• He had more than 11,000 jumps, more than 100 base jumps, more than 55 cutaways and had landed in a tree at least six times - though, as he was quick to stress, it wasn't the same tree!
   
• He walked away from at least three non survivable accidents.
    
• He was hilarious and a great cook.
    
• His handwriting was illegible and he was absolutely the last person you should let your Grandmother ride in a car with.
   
• He made us laugh. He made us laugh a lot.
   
• He had TVs the size of the Odeon's screen number three, twenty remote controls by his armchair and a HiFi that Pink Floyd could have gone on tour with.

People kept asking when he would try to land the wings and he would laugh. What he was actually trying to do was to take off. He was working with Katarina on a suit which he could use to slide down a mountain and then take off. He already had a prototype.