Birdman glides across the Channel

An extreme sports fanatic has become the first man to cross the English Channel by unpowered flight.

Felix Baumgartner jumped from a plane about 30,000ft above Dover and glided 22 miles across the Channel in a 10-minute flight wearing a specially-adapted suit with a wing-like carbon fibre fin attached to his back.

In freezing air temperatures, the 34-year-old Austrian began the flight at a speed of about 220 miles per hour before slowing to around 135 miles an hour.

Baumgartner made a crunching parachute landing at Cap Blanc-Nez, near Calais, in France.

Within minutes of touching down he was smiling and posing for photographers.

"It was pretty cold up there," he told Sky News. "I still can't feel anything. But I made it, which is great."

He said cloud cover meant he could not see where he was going and had to follow his two planes across the Channel.

"For the last 2,000m I could see the other side and I knew I was going to make it," he said.

Baumgartner was equipped with cameras as well as highly-advanced data monitoring technology to ensure that he could be tracked during his journey.

His new wing had a span of 1.8 metres - making it 10 centimetres bigger than his previous one with which he won a race against an aeroplane some weeks ago in the United States.

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