Newsmakers: How AJ Hackett's dreams of falling became a reality

Most New Zealanders know of AJ Hackett.

He's the fearless "crazy" one who’s been throwing tourists of bridges and buildings since the mid-1980s.

It's a challenge that we seem to both loathe and love all in the same breath.

Most wouldn’t argue with the claim on the AJ Hackett website, that the Kawarau Bridge site in Queenstown was the first, commercial bungy operation helped to cement Queenstown’s reputation as the adventure capital of the world.

It was a concept AJ and has mates had first started testing out on a bridge in Auckland’s North Shore, using weights and rope to work out formula of throwing oneself from a height and telling the tale.

"So I jumped off and it was just an instant hit," Hackett remembers of is first ever jump. “It was 'like this is amazing', we just laughed for the rest of the day and smiling and asked 'where’s the next bridge?'”

That started a mission of finding out just how high you can jump from and led to a rather mad-cap adventrue on the other side of the world.

Hackett tells the story over Zoom. He’s in France where this all kicked off in the late 1980s.

“We drove past the Eiffel Tower and I thought, 'wow, that’s really beautiful, I’ve got to jump from it, you know, I need to'."

I’m not sure many of us would have the same urge on seeing one of the world’s most famous landmarks. But it inspired something in Hackett.

For the next few months, Hackett would case out the Eiffel Tower like a bank robber — understanding how it worked, what time security operated, identifying where someone might jump from.

The second stage was practising the jump from the same height.

"I went down to the the Eiffel Tower and basically dropped a piece of rope from the spot where I want to drop from and when it was on the ground.. tied a knot on the little bit of string and took that back to the bridge and that was my measuring stick so I would test jump until I arrived at the end of that line."

He felt technically ready and wasn’t worried about safety. But getting up and into the famed tower with a massive amount of equiment – the bungy rope was alone was 25m long and weighed 25kg — called for some ingenuity.

“My future wife was part of this group and a couple of her girlfriends and they were very beautiful young women and the strategy was to distract the guards.

"So they engaged with the guys there and distracted them perfectly whilst another couple of the team just put umbrellas in front of cameras."

And just like that, AJ and his team were up the Eiffel Tower near closing time. "We split all of the gear up, so one of the women is pretending to be pregnant, then everyone else just has bits of gear and we all went in different directions because we didn’t want to look too obvious."

It's hard to believe now, but as the sun set on the tower.. Hackett was up in its rafters, hoping to make history.

Morning came and AJ rigged up all his gear and dropped his "old bit of string down to the bottom, just to make sure it was at the right spot".

Then it was time to go, well, after a drink of Champagne, of course.

"Once I’ve decided everytihng’s perfect then we just start the countdown. It’s 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and I always jump on zero.

"After I’m in the air, then I just completely relax and focus on what I’m doing because there was a little technical bit to that jump where I jump out from the side and drop vertically through the middle so I wouldn’t bounce back up and hit part of the tower."

He joked that was important to get right, but there was one little glitch when he couldn’t grab another bottle of Champagne fromf a friend. "She was meant to run out at the perfect time and hand me the bottle as I arrived at the bottom and then I’d open it and have a drink upside down. As it turned out, the timing wasn’t quite right, she arrived just a little bit late and I didn’t arrive close enough to the ground anyway”

One thing he knew would happen after the jump would be a run in with French police. He was arrested and marched to a wagon, talking smoothly to a cameraman as he’s being taken away, saying he thinks the jump "will be an inspiration to the world".

"As it turns out it was," he laughed.

"I think the inspiration really was man's age-old vision of flying and just doing silly stuff."

News of the jump bounced all around the world but Hackett didn’t think about trying to run a commerical operation for a few months after.

After all these years, he said he still loved to jump.

"You get this sort of weightless thing at the top of the rebound and that's when its sort of elation happens and it just feels a wonderful you know, people scream, cry you know want to do it again. You know like they hate you forever for making them. It's just... it's cool."