Some people call them stunts

The captain of the Red Bull Air Force is also essentially its creator. Jon Devore is one of the pioneers of free flying vertical flight—everyone used to just skydive on their bellies—and is also a legendary stuntman, aerial coordinator, and cameraman.

“I was lucky enough to be friends with a group of guys that met Red Bull in ’97, and they started mixing me into some of the yahoo-ness that was going on,” he says. “Red Bull was brand new in America at that time. They had only a couple of employees, and they were testing if the product would even work in the States.”

Devore signed as a Red Bull athlete in 1999. It was clear to him that the team could use a little more organization, so he adopted a “two-hat scenario” and took the lead.

“And as the demand for more shows and demos and things happened, I was able to kind of cherry-pick my friends slash the talented people that I knew that could step up and do the right job,” he says. Over the years, he built the Red Bull Air Force team we see today.

That team now consists of skydivers and wingsuiters, jump planes, aerobatic airplanes, and an aerobatic helicopter. A hallmark of Red Bull flying is dissimilar formation, and it’s a perishable skill. To get sharp, the Red Bull Air Force does what professional sports teams around the world do: They go to training camp.

Showstoppers

We’re at Warner Springs Gliderport (CL35) southeast of the LA basin. The ceilings are low, and the weather is depressingly frigid and stuck in the 40s. Outside the hangar, which is the base of operations for the week, a branded truck plays a mix of yacht rock and the Boss. Across from the hangar, an ellipse of RVs serves as the athletes’ temporary homes. A light drizzle falls with a bitter wind, and there’s a whole lot of sitting around going on. Some well-natured grumbling from Aaron Fitzgerald (“Wiiings Not Required,” July 2025 AOPA Pilot) reminds us that last year, camp was in the Bahamas.

This week, they’re operating under a movie filming permit that waives pretty much every normal regulation regarding separation and are working together on at least two newer projects for the 2026 airshow season. This is the team’s time to get comfy with each other again. Camp is also a time to try brand-new things.

Every cool, different thing you’ve seen Red Bull do live on social media or at an airshow began as a pitched athlete project, but as one athlete manager notes, “some people call them stunts.” The STOL landing at the Burj Khalifa was Bullseye Landing. Felix Baumgartner’s jump from space was Red Bull Stratos. Understandably, not every idea gets approved on the first try, “but as long as you’re passionate about it, it
usually full circles and comes around,” says Devore.

With the low ceilings, the aerobatic airplanes can’t do much—but the clouds are high enough to practice a new barnstorming-inspired act.

This is a new iteration of a previous project called Chutes and Ladders, and the new version is now Pick and Flick. The idea is this: A skydiver is driven under an airplane, hooks into a tether dangling from the airplane, and the airplane climbs out. The skydiver performs a low-level jump and lands back at show center. The concept is easy; pulling it off is something else.

Skydiver Jeff Provenzano is at the wheel of a blue Mustang convertible with Jon Devore in the passenger seat, and newly minted Red Bull pilot and longtime skydiver Luke Aikins piloting his family’s Cessna 180. Aikins takes off and comes around, and the testing begins. From the sidelines, you can’t tell if the skydiver is hooked into the 10-ish-foot rope dangling from the airplane or not (Aikins has a waiver for airplane external loads from the FAA). After a few trial runs where it seems like the stunt is about to happen, it finally does, to hoots and hollers from the ground, and Devore is plucked from the car, and away they go. The 180 plays its long prop music and climbs out with no problem. Aikins keeps the climb going over the field, and Devore releases, pulls his chute, and lands. From the time the Mustang started driving down the runway to Devore’s landing, it took about 2.5 minutes.

Devore was the day’s first, and now the rest of the crew wants a try. Aikins stays in the air and gets ready for more. He notes later that when he practiced at the home ’drome with his wife, Monica, driving, it was a lot easier.

Silver bullet

The following morning brings crisp blue skies. Today is influencer and media day, and the music is notably Styx-and-Springsteen free. Coachella-ready content creators and their entourages mingle with traditional media, and the Red Bull Air Force crew are wearing matching motocross-style jerseys with surnames on the back. Nearly everyone, predictably, has a Red Bull in hand.

Everyone is “on” today and the weather means go. Loads upon loads of skydivers hop into the Cessna Caravan. Fitzgerald is doing media rides in the BO 105. Kirby Chambliss walks without a shred of hurry to his Edge 540, taxis out through the small crowd, and gives us a show. The one-lane highway and only road out of here parallels the runway, and a small yet growing group of road trippers are pulled over and sitting on hoods of cars and roofs of RVs to watch the world-class flying.

Aikins has a new project that needs clear days like today—the Silver Bullet. Aikins is well known for his more than 23,000 jumps—one of which was without a parachute—but 2026 will be his first season as a Red Bull pilot. He has more than 7,000 hours in airplanes and a cool 200 in helicopters, and he’s proud to say he has lived his whole life on an airport. As far as he knows, he’s Red Bull’s only aerial sports double-athlete, and he’s rightfully proud of having just earned his pilot wiiings, which were presented to him via a branded headset. Whether hat, helmet, or headset, only official athletes may wear a Red Bull crown.

The Silver Bullet is an experimental 1967 Cessna 182K that has been in the Red Bull fleet for a while, and Aikins presents it like a kid with a mutt that he’s begging to keep and promises is well-behaved. Alternately bashful and confidently proud, he gives us a walkaround of the airplane, which looks standard from a distance besides the undercarriage’s speed brake/barn door. Its relative normalcy is a departure from Red Bull’s typically atypical aircraft.

“We wanted to make a Cessna aircraft be able to go the same speed as a skydiver,” says Aikins. “I enlisted Paulo Iscold, he’s a professor at Cal Poly Aerodynamics, has many world records in making airplanes go fast from Red Bull Air Race to glider world records and all kinds of things. And Paulo and I started talking about how we could make this plane go straight down at the speed of a skydiver. And he helped me come up with this speed brake and he built and designed it.”

A switch added to the basic panel controls the brake. An autopilot is programmed to hold the Silver Bullet in its two angles—45 degrees, and minus 97 degrees. The airplane, he says, can go “One-hundred forty miles an hour straight down for eternity.” Initially completing more than 200 test hours and dives, Aikins has continued to test it from his fly-in home airport in Washington state, and the number is closer to 400 now.

Anything that can be stripped out has been stripped out of the aircraft, but one thing was added. There’s a fishing rod in the back that helps keep tension off the brake; an innovation suggested by Aikins’ adolescent son, but other than that, the seats, and barebones panel, the airplane is hollow.

Aikins introduces his cousin Andy Farrington. Farrington’s one part of what makes the Silver Bullet special—the formation flying with wingsuiters. Why would they want the airplane to go the same speed as skydivers if they weren’t going to fly with skydivers right next to them?

Aikins walks us through how this all happens in the air: power idle, brake down. A red light (plus the obvious aerodynamic changes) confirms brake down. Confirm throttle out and then pull the mixture. Stopping the engine is a necessity. “If we have the throttle cracked at all, it spits oil out the overflow tube, the air breather tube, because it’s not an inverted oil system and all of that. So, we were worried about the prop maintaining its pitch because it’s not getting oil pressure and all that stuff. We found we had none of those problems.

“And then the plane just starts to roll over the hill. We hit a button that goes to dive. That runs the trim to a diving position that we’ve predetermined is the right spot.” From there, the autopilot activates, but it can also be flown manually.

It looks airworthy, feels airworthy, and the only thing left to do is hop in and go fly—in formation with wingsuiters and Chambliss, of course.

E-ticket ride

After a group picture, Aikins walks me over to the Silver Bullet for a safety briefing while I pretend I’m cool and our flight is normal. And for the first 20 minutes or so, it is. A normal takeoff, a normal climb. The door’s off, and the air is chilly as we climb to around 10,000 feet agl. The Caravan full of wingsuiters and Chambliss will easily outclimb us, so they wait a few minutes to take off.

We reach our target altitude, the Caravan gets in position, and Chambliss is somewhere behind us ready to join. Aikins talks through the process as he takes the power back, lowers the speed brake, and we tilt to a 45-degree angle toward the earth. It is shockingly gentle—gentler than some of my former students’ early stall recoveries—and we quickly stabilize.

I’m taking it all in when Aikins points outside the right door. The wingsuiters are here! And they really are incredibly close. Three on my side and on the other, and Aikins points out one more flying facing us in front and below us. At just the right moment, the Edge 540 whines around us in a smoke-on roll.

And then I think the most influenced, indoctrinated thing I’ve ever thought: “Wow, Red Bull really does give you wings.” The marketing works!

The Silver Bullet has the easy job, and flying is literally hands off. The wingsuiters make microcorrections before peeling off. They seemed close enough to touch.

I can see their little canopies open as Aikins recovers, and while we climb back up, Chambliss, not one to miss the fun, tucks under our right wing and says hi. With a few steps, I could walk out onto his wing, and it’s the smoothest, tightest, least stressful formation I’ve ever experienced. He breaks away, and we start the climb for the vertical dive. The air doesn’t feel cold at all now.

Now knowing what to expect, we start the vertical, minus 97-degree dive. Aikins advises me on where to hold on since we’ll be hanging on our seat belts, and as we push over and face the earth, I’m glad for the advice. I’m surprised again how gentle and stable it is—easier on the body than a spin, but of course, in a spin, you rapidly recover. The mental part of continued flight directly toward the ground is thrilling. I am as usual delighted that my mother does not know exactly what I’m doing today. I catch the hint of movement out of the corner of my eye; Chambliss tried to roll around us again, but even the Edge can’t take sustained vertical flight like that without overspeeding.

Aikins lets me push the “easy button” and the airplane starts to recover with a little help from him. The Silver Bullet turns back into a normal 182, and as happens with many of these adventures, I can’t stop smiling, laughing, or saying an excessive number of “dudes” and “cools” to describe in the moment what that epic flight was like. The whole Red Bull family is up, and to top off the fun, Fitzgerald forms up in the BO 105 to say hi before Aikins greases the landing, and we return to the normal world.

I’m nearly shaking with adrenaline, but all the athletes appear calm.. I guess that’s one problem with pushing the envelope. You must keep pushing it further to feel anything after a while.

Most of us fly in a box. A prescribed, FAA- and insurance-approved box that truthfully, most of us should stay in. But life outside that box is where Red Bull lives, and it’s thrilling to be part of it, even if for just a few days, in the land where “what if” becomes reality.

The fact that my fridge is now never without a can of Red Bull should come as no surprise.

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