Standing atop peaks around the world preparing to jump hundreds of feet down, Ian Flanders brought a calming presence with him. For Donald Schultz, that was a good thing.

BASE jumpers usually fall into two groups — hyper excited or hyper focused — and Flanders’ ability to be the latter was an asset, Schultz says. For the past five years, the friends had jumped off the north wall of Eiger Mountain in the Alps, in Moab, Utah, Southern California and Switzerland.

Flanders was always prepared, double checking gear and conditions, doing the research to ensure a safe jump.

“I don’t think he’d jump if he thought he was going to stub his toe, let alone get killed,” says Schultz. “He was one of those people who was check, check, check then do.”

Flanders’ death on Tuesday in a routine jump at an exhibition in Turkey comes as another loss in the BASE jumping community, one that has seen several top jumpers die in recent years. Legendary outdoor athlete, jumper and climber Dean Potter died following a jump with Yosemite in May along with Graham Hunt, a promising young athlete who often jumped in the park. A list maintained by BLiNC magazine, which tracks deaths in the sport back to 1981, counts seven deaths in the two months between. There are 264 overall.

BASE jumping is similar to skydiving except that the athletes jump off fixed objects — Buildings, Antenna towers, Spans and Earth make up the acronym.

Unlike skydiving, BASE jumpers carry one parachute and combined with the short distance to the landing, usually only hundreds

of feet compared to thousands, the margin of error narrows significantly.

Since 1981, the U.S. BASE Association has issued BASE numbers to jumpers who complete one off each of the four objects. They are awarded sequentially, and the organization has issued 1,949. That likely isn’t fully reflective of the number of jumpers because some might not complete all four jumps or just might not apply, says Rick Harrison, who handles the applications.

Video and news media reports from Turkey, where the jump was broadcast on live television, suggest Flanders’ legs got caught in his parachute.

While jumpers look for ways to mitigate a risk in a sport that is inherently dangerous, they hope the deaths in recent years will help to make the sport safer and drive out reckless thrill seekers.

“They’re not suicidal,” says Anson Fogel, a film director who worked with Flanders and was a friend. “Everybody has a deep interest in figuring out how to make the sport safer.

“It will happen, because it has to happen.”

FLANDERS DEVOTED TO JUMPING

Flanders, 28, had followed the normal progression to BASE jumping. Growing up in Southern California, he had been a diver in high school and a climber for most of his life. From there, he picked up skydiving, wingsuiting and BASE jumping, which he’d been doing for about seven or eight years, says Schultz, who is serving as the family’s spokesperson.

Like many of his peers, Flanders fulfilled his passion in BASE jumping. Until about a year ago, he had worked a 9-to-5 job as a sleep therapist but left it to pursue jumping, Schultz says.

Flanders and Matt Blank were almost inseparable, and they had spent the past few weeks traveling in Europe, where many jumpers go because the sport is effectively banned in national parks in the United States. In Instagram videos, Schultz could see Flanders pushing the limits of what had been done in a wingsuit. (The suits have canvas between the arms and legs that allow jumpers to glide, and jumpers use them jumping out of planes or off fixed objects.)

The day before he died, Flanders had been part of the first wingsuit jump in Turkish history.

“It was a personal challenge to see how good he could get,” Schultz says.

The jump that caused his death was routine, Shultz says. He compared it to a NASCAR driver surviving a race but crashing on the way home. While normal jumps can be 200 feet to 500 feet, Flanders was jumping from about 900 feet, giving him more time to execute the jump.

“He was doing this really, really difficult, pretty intense wingsuiting,” says Schultz, “and then on what should have been a gimme jump, tragedy strikes.”

Schultz says the video he’s seen and what he’s heard from Blank indicate Flanders hit the water at full speed. By Thursday, Flanders’ body was en route back to Los Angeles.

Fogel remembered Flanders as quieter than Blank, less interested in self-promotion than some others in the sport and a funny guy.

“He was not a show off,” says Fogel, a friend of Flanders’ who first hired him around five years ago to do stunts and jumps in a film.

“He had an acerbic wit, sometimes a caustic wit and (was) deeply respected in his community.”

BEING CAUTIOUS

That community finds itself in a place of introspection again following another high-profile death. The sport has also lost Mario Richard and Sean Leary, two respected jumpers who died in 2013, and Colombian Jhonathan Florez earlier this month.

Chris McNamara quit the sport in 2009, in part because it wasn’t as fun and because more people were dying. Alone, neither was a good enough reason but together it was enough for him to stop jumping. He still climbs walls.

He said the death of Shane McConkey in 2009 hit home. The friends had jumped together many times, and he considered McConkey careful in his approach to the sport.

“A lot of these guys are now going out of their way to think about the risk and be thoughtful about it and they’re very aware of how many of their friends are dying,” says McNamara, who wrote about his decision to leave the sport following Potter’s and Hunt’s deaths.

“And even after all that, they’re still dying.”

McNamara highlights the need to be conservative in each jump to help mitigate the risk. Pushing even a little too far when athletes are making decisions in fractions of seconds can be the difference between a successful jump and injury or death.

Jimmy Hopper, another ex-BASE jumper who recently retired from the sport, says he reached a plateau and would have had to continue to pushing it to enjoy it.

“At one time, I maybe toed the edge of the envelope with everyone else, but that time had come and gone,” he says. “I wasn’t willing to up the ante anymore.”

FUTURE OF THE SPORT

That was an assessment Schultz had to make as well, and he stopped BASE jumping a couple years ago. He and Flanders, who was in Schultz’s wedding in South Africa in December, discussed the cost-benefit analysis.

For Schultz, who continues wingsuit jumping from aircraft and often did that with Flanders, it was a question of risking injury. If he had another 200 jumps left in his life, did he want them to be 10-second BASE jumps or 3 minutes in a wingsuit?

“Ian would say, ‘Keep doing what you’re doing, keep doing what you love (and) make sure you’re safe at it,'” says Schultz.

McNamara says the sport is in the golden age of wingsuit BASE jumping. Over the past 15 years, the skill and equipment has changed so rapidly that jumpers are working out boundaries of what’s possible, and that keeps moving, he says.

He and Hopper say they think BASE jumping can follow the trajectory of more mainstream sports to some extent. Car racing and football were once plagued by a high number of deaths, but changes to equipment, regulation and skill have helped make them safer.

“Like mountaineering, it will never be safe by flying an airplane safety standards, but it’ll reach that point where to die takes really bad luck or negligence,” says McNamara. “Whereas right now, it’s just doing it enough that’s going to probably kill you.”