KL Tower BASE Jump 2011

Dates

KL Tower BASE Jump 2011 coincided with the 15th Anniversary of KL Tower. It took place from 29th September to 2nd October. The event was scaled back from the previous tour of several buildings to consist of only KL Tower. It included 4 days and 2 nights of BASE jumping off KL Tower.

88 BASE jumpers from 22 countries completed over 1800 BASE jumps during the event.

This year local Malaysian events management company CD Events were brought back in to organise the event as they did from 2001 to 2004.

Experienced BASE jumping organiser Gary Cunningham of Australian BASE Association were brought back in to organise the BASE jumping side of the event as he did from 2005 to 2007, and raise the event standards back up to an acceptable level.

There was still some way to go to bring the event back to the professional event it used to be.

Aziz Ahmad of Malaysian BASE Association still insisted on bringing beginner BASE jumpers to the event. He would give them little or no training and supervision and were left to learn by trying to copy what everyone else did. The substandard BASE jumpers that Aziz insisted on bringing into the event were always guaranteed to get hurt. Most of the local BASE jumpers suggested that his prime motivation was to make money from them through gear rental. One of the substandard jumpers Aziz brought in tumbled out of control on his first jump. Explained that when he did his first ever base jump there the year prior, his attempt at going flat and stable did not work so well, so now he decided on the second ever BASE Jump to attempt an aerial manoeuvre that is all other events base jumpers doing. He managed to get away without injury on the jump. But later on it was no surprise that he hit the tower. Somehow we come out of it relatively uninjured. Another substandard jumper who also had very limited skydiving experience and could not fly canopy well, also crashed in on first day. At the end of this event it was time to put an end to Aziz’s unacceptable practice of bringing substandard participants to the event that were guaranteed to get hurt just so we could make money out of them.

There was a large oversight at the start of the event with organisers failing to gain permission for use the main landing area. We were locked out of the landing area for the first 2 days of the event until the new KL Tower CEO stepped in to gain approval from the landing area owners.

For more information about KL Tower BASE Jump 2011 contact
Gary Cunningham at directorofbasejumping@kltowerjump.com