idiggory, King of Bards wrote:
The wiki entry has to be wrong. They were hoping to beat the previous free fall record for longest time, but he pulled forty-something seconds before that. There's no way he was at 5k feet. He JUMPED from 120-something K. He fell for something like 2 minutes 30 seconds if I'm remembering the event correctly (and this is ALL off of memory, so my numbers could be horribly wrong). But his peak velocity was somewhere around 800 feet per second. 115k/800 = 144 seconds, or 2 minutes 24 seconds. And that's at PEAK velocity.
So unless my numbers are way off, which they certainly may be, then no. He most certainly didn't pull his chute at 5k feet.
I was watching the stream and the commentator announced that Felix was 5.000 feet above ground a moment after he released his parachute.
According to FAI (Fédération Aéronautique Internationale), he jumped at 128.100 feet and released the parachute 119.845 feet later, which would put him at roughly 8.200 feet when he released it. That's not 5.000 feet, but it's still short the 10.000+ feet they were aiming for. Considering you can't release a parachute one feet above ground, I'd say it was pretty ambitious of them to think that he could fall for another minute before opening it.
Math is hard!