Big Sky Diver

On Aug. 4, 1984, B.J. Worth was lying on the top level of the Eiffel Tower, sound asleep.  

Around his prone form, production assistants scurried around trying to fix a jammed video camera set to record an action sequence for the James Bond film, “A View to Kill,” starring Roger Moore in the eponymous role as 007. 

It’s one of the franchise’s classic high-stakes chase scenes — following the murder of a colleague in a restaurant, Bond races up the stairs of the historic landmark in pursuit of an assassin named May Day, who leaps off the structure to make her escape.  

The stunt had been a dream of Worth’s, who concocted the idea during a Parisian lunch with Moore and the film’s director several years prior. 

“I was incredibly naïve, thinking it was normal to be having lunch with some of the biggest people in Hollywood,” Worth recalled recently from a coffeeshop in his hometown of Whitefish. “I said, ‘I know you guys don’t take ideas for stunts, but if you ever want me jumping off the Eiffel Tower, I would love to do that for you.’” 

Worth’s first brush with Hollywood came during production of the Bond film “Moonraker” in 1979, when Worth, then 27, doubled as an airplane pilot who fights Bond in freefall during the film’s pre-title sequence. The Eiffel Tower jump five years later marked his third time working on a Bond film and remains one of the most high-profile chase scenes filmed for the big screen during that era.  

For an emerging aerial stuntman like Worth, it wasn’t an ideal moment to fall asleep on the job; but to hear Worth tell it, he was just doing what he was told.

Just before Worth was set to make his jump, one of the four high-speed cameras capturing the moment jammed and Worth was told to relax while the crew reset the equipment.

“My adrenaline had been pumping getting ready to jump and when we paused, my body just crashed,” Worth said. “I didn’t want to come down from my position, so I just laid down where I was and promptly fell asleep. I was snoring away until the assistant director woke me up and reminded me that we had a movie to shoot.”

With the cameras ready, Worth took his position on the end of a rigged-up diving board perched a thousand feet above Paris. 

“Action!” Worth took three steps down the diving board and leapt into the air. 

“I know of at least six others who have jumped off the Eiffel Tower,” Worth said. “But I’m the only one who has ever done it with permission.” 

The crew had a single take to execute the jump from the tower as well as the landing on top of a nearby river boat. To prepare, Worth spent the summer in Whitefish completing 22 practice jumps from a hot air balloon hovering 3,000 feet above the Flathead Valley.

Between blasts of fire when the air around the balloon was still, Worth would step up to the lip of the basket, take a deep breath and step into open space. 

“You have to trust what you’re doing when you do a balloon jump or a BASE jump, because there’s no wind assisting you to get stable,” Worth said. “I’d step off the hot air balloon and I’d freefall for three seconds. Now, if you try to count three seconds while you’re in the air, you will never count slow enough. I learned to measure it by the sound in my ears. You can hear the intensity pick up as you’re falling, and I kept practicing until I got to the point where I could nail the timing every time.”

In Paris, high-speed cameras set to capture Worth’s freefall from the Eiffel Tower would render three seconds plummeting through space into a nine-second sequence in the movie.

The tower’s steel girders whizzed past as Worth, clad in May Day’s all-black costume, gazed out over the Parisian dawn. 

He fell, listening to the air in his ears.

One-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand. 

The parachute opened 450 feet above the ground and Worth piloted his way to land on a glass-topped boat on the Seine River, where the film’s chase sequence continues (“Follow that parachute!”). 

It was the touchstone by which all aerial stunts would soon be judged, and it cemented Worth’s status as the premier aerial stunt coordinator in Hollywood for years to come, a run that included work stunt-doubling for multiple Bond villains and three separate 007 agents — Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan — across seven films spanning nearly two decades. 

Now 71, Worth has spent more than 50 years on the leading edge of the skydiving world, with his silver-screen highlight reel capturing a mere snippet of a career in human flight that Worth has pursued since he was a kid. 

Worth first saw a man fly in Oklahoma. 

He was attending an air show that featured an exhibition by the U.S. Army Parachute Team, the Golden Knights. A string of soldiers exited an aircraft high above the field where a 14-year-old Worth was seated and deployed their standard-issue brown parachutes. 

“I was probably 50 feet away from this giant X in the ground that was their target, and the first guy came down and landed almost dead center,” Worth said. “I remember every detail of his jump, down to the big, rubber-soled boots he wore to cushion his landing. I looked up at the sky and back at him and I just couldn’t believe what I’d seen. This guy was 10 feet tall to me.”

Worth was desperate to take flight himself. He decided to attend the University of Montana, breaking with three generations of family who matriculated to Dartmouth, an unpopular decision that came easy to Worth when he noticed the long list of extracurricular activities offered to Griz students, including the opportunity to join a skydiving club. 

When Worth stepped off the bus in Missoula, he headed straight to the University Center, where the skydiving club had set up a table to attract new jumpers. 

“They said it cost 50 bucks, and I’d be jumping the next weekend,” he recalled. “I didn’t have the money then, but when my parents gave me money for my schoolbooks the next semester, I hid it in a pair of socks and then signed up to skydive.”

During the 1960s, skydiving was undergoing a transformation from a military activity to a recreational pursuit. Much in the same way that U.S. ski areas were founded by soldiers returning from service in the 10th Mountain Division during World War II, many college and recreational skydiving clubs benefited from the expertise and enthusiasm of former military paratroopers, who wanted to bring sport jumping to the civilian world.

For a small college in Missoula, UM’s skydiving club was extremely active, owing in part to its proximity to the national Missoula Smokejumper Base and training center. The club was equipped with an active roster of instructors with both smoke jumping and paratrooping backgrounds, as well as their own plane. 

Worth’s first days with the skydiving club were spent learning how to pack the then-standard 28-foot-wide military parachutes. Newcomers packed five chutes, using the last one on their first jump. 

Despite claiming a lifetime of poor memory, Worth’s first jump is emblazoned in his mind. 

“There’s such a sensory overload when you’re up in the air in a nice little airplane and then have to open up the door and climb outside it,” he said. “I got out there, the jump master slapped my back, I jumped and managed to do everything right.”

He arched his back, arms splayed out, and fell towards the earth as his parachute blossomed out above him. 

Minutes later he touched down in the landing zone in several feet of snow. 

That evening, celebrating eight new initiates’ first jumps, one of the instructors told Worth he’d pulled off his first jump perfectly and was a natural at the sport. 

“Growing up, I was horrible at basketball because I was too short. I wasn’t big enough for football. I sucked at tennis. But all of a sudden, this Superman-like sport came naturally to me,” Worth said. “I was so excited that I kept going and kept jumping.”

“It wasn’t until a year or so later that I realized they told everybody the same thing after their first jump, because the new jumpers were the ones buying beers for the instructors.”

That first spring, Worth made 28 jumps, despite breaking his ankle on his 11th attempt. The next year he devoted himself fully to the sport and accumulated more than 500 jumps during his college career. Often, he would land in the middle of the UM campus and spot one of his professors watching him from the window of a class he was skipping. 

“I was completely hooked. I was the guy calling people at six in the morning on a Saturday after a night at the bars trying to convince them to go up in the air with me even though it was raining,” Worth said. “I was overly enthusiastic, but I was very motivated.”

Worth began to think beyond Missoula and started jumping with bigger university clubs and groups around the country, many of whom were experimenting with more intricate forms of skydiving, like jumping as groups and creating multi-person formations in the air. 

By the time he graduated, Worth had become entrenched in competitive skydiving, believing that the future of the sport lay in athletes’ ability to perform multiple formations in sequence while in freefall, while also pushing the limits to create larger formations. 

“I’m not overstating at all when I say that Worth changed the sport of skydiving, period,” said Polson’s Blaine Wright, a retired skydiver who learned to jump in Missoula a few years after Worth. “He was the pride of Missoula, so of course I knew of him from the local scene; but he was also the most influential person on the advancement of the sport since the 1970s, and for decades I’m sure he was the most famous skydiver in the world.”

Worth’s first groundbreaking innovation came when he pitched the sport’s international governing body, Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), a new set of rules for competitive skydiving for four-way and eight-way sequential formation skydiving (FS) events. The FS discipline remains the most popular form of skydiving competition, and it continues to function under the same rules developed by Worth in the 1970s. 

“At the time, everybody believed this idea of making multiple formations in freefall was so outside the box that they could never do it,” Worth said. “The sport was still in its fledgling stages and most people just had no concept of what was possible.”

Worth was helping shape the sport in real time and went on to captain the three FAI world championship teams in the new disciplines. Even as he perfected the technique for small group competitions, however, Worth was always thinking about upping the ante. 

“I always thought you could add more people and push the boundaries further,” Worth said. He took part in the world’s first 100-way formation in 1989 and built up from there. 

Wright, the retired Polson skydiver, jumped on seven large-formation, world-record skydives involving hundreds of linked individuals, the last four of which were organized by Worth and his wife Bobbie, a stalwart partner in many of his enterprises.

“When you think about what has to go into planning a jump with hundreds of people, plus pilots, photographers, national governments and the military, there aren’t many people who can organize that,” Wright said. “Worth’s leadership style has no ego and can bring together all the right people to makes these things happen. There’s a lot of big egos and free spirits in skydiving and it’s like herding cats, but Worth is just masterful at what he does.”

In 2006, 107 seconds after exiting five C-130 Hercules aircraft flown by the Royal Thai Air Force at an elevation of 26,500 feet, an assemblage of the globe’s top parachutists from nearly 40 countries created an interconnected 400-person formation that held for just over four seconds. That FAI world record, which still stands today, was the culmination of Worth’s career coordinating teams of expert skydivers, crafting relationships with the Kingdom of Thailand, and mastering the nuances of flight. 

“It’s not something that could happen again today,” Worth said.

In 1976, a producer on that era’s Bond films scripted a scene in which Agent 007 is pushed from an aircraft without a parachute and must wrestle with a villain in freefall to survive. The producer contacted Worth and videographer Rande DeLuca, who had worked with Worth to film an early skydiving feature called “Wings,” to determine if the stunt was possible. 

Worth was living in Montana again when he received the call and flew to Los Angeles to begin working on the sequence, for which his team designed a hidden parachute that could be worn under a custom jacket with Velcro seams. Worth practiced the scene and nailed the screen test with the directors.  

“That was my first introduction to Hollywood. Talk about naïve,” Worth said. “I kept suggesting ways we could add more to the stunt, and they just loved it. I assumed it was going to be a one-off deal and never thought I’d do another Bond film. But it was just surreal. The directors brought us back and gave us the benefit of the doubt that we could execute their visions. In each film we are really doing every stunt you see.”

In the pre-title sequence for “Moonraker,” Worth appears as the stunt double for the turncoat pilot who fights with Roger Moore’s Agent Bond in freefall, exiting the screen without a chute in sight. 

Worth returned to work on six more Bond films as an aerial stunt coordinator and stunt double, appearing in many of the franchise’s most memorable scenes. 

In “Octopussy,” Worth plays henchman Gobinda during a fight against Bond, a sequence choreographed and staged atop an airborne D-18 aircraft during which Gobinda falls parachute-less to Earth (Worth also coordinated the plane’s midair rollover with Bond hanging on). In “The Living Daylights,” he doubled for Timothy Dalton’s Bond during a fight scene on a cargo net dangling from the tailgate of a C-130, while also taking part in the precision parachute landings that animate the movie’s opening sequence. In “License to Kill,” Worth made a jump from a helicopter, landing amid a wedding celebration in full swing. In “Goldeneye,” he doubled for Pierce Brosnan’s Bond, riding a motorcycle off a cliff before folding himself into a hawk-like dive to intercept a plane in freefall. And in “Tomorrow Never Dies,” he again doubled for Brosnan during a high-altitude Para-SCUBA insertion into the Pacific Ocean. 

“The Bond group is a family and I’m so proud that my team got to be part of that family for many years,” Worth said. 

The resume detailing Worth’s aerial career is barely contained across four typed pages, with each line meriting a deeper explanation. But one unifying theme of Worth’s biggest accomplishments has been popularizing skydiving in the mainstream. 

“Worth was in the magazines, so every skydiver in the country knew who he was,” Wright, the retired skydiver from Polson, said. “But with what he did with the James Bond movies, doing stunts on live TV, he really gave the masses a chance to see what the sport was about.”

For a brief period in the 1990s, Worth organized an event at Big Mountain called “blade running,” where parachutists jumped from a helicopter, aimed for Inspiration Ridge and piloted down a slalom-style course at 60 miles per hour, skimming feet over the snow. The event turned skydiving into a spectator sport, captivating everyone on the mountain, according to Wright, who took part for several years. (Whitefish Mountain Resort does not condone any form of parachuting on its property.)

Worth was also the mastermind behind the highest profile freefall ever accomplished, a feat that took place before a global audience during the opening ceremony of the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, South Korea. 

For years, Worth had been attempting to integrate a skydiving exhibition into the Olympics, with the ultimate goal of including it as an Olympic sport. A plan to jump during the Lake Placid games in 1980 was scrapped due to poor weather, and it took another eight years before Worth received the go-ahead to plan a stunt for Seoul. 

One hundred thousand spectators watched the exhibition jump, featuring 30 national and world-champion skydivers. Facing the same pressure as any Olympic athlete called to perform on a single day, the jumpers exited a Chinook helicopter and formed the five colored interlocking Olympic rings, holding the formation in the skies above Seoul for 22 seconds before landing inside the stadium. The feat was broadcast live to an estimated 1.6 billion viewers, including a live video feed of the freefall. 

Wright says the Olympic Rings skydive was the most coveted jump that’s ever been performed, one which the International Skydiving Hall of Fame characterized as having “permanently altered” the public perception of the sport. 

“It ended up working perfectly,” Worth said. “It was just a classic jump and remains one of the top moments of my life.”

Before flying took over his life, Worth planned to pursue a career in zoology, which he studied while at UM. As his professional skydiving career slowed, Worth began to drift back to his early interest in animals, alighting on a fascination with birding and utilizing his talent for video and photography to capture raptors in flight. 

It’s a hobby that continues to animate his interest in aerial acrobatics today.

Each autumn in northwest Montana, Worth takes part in the annual citizen science Hawk Watch project, perched on the ridgeline of the Swan Mountains, just north of Mount Aeneas. With an owl decoy deployed 50 feet away, he whiles away the hours behind his binoculars and telephoto lens, tracking incoming raptors winging along the ridgeline. 

Last fall, during a lull between the excitement of sightings, Worth explained to anyone willing to listen why the hawks and falcons and eagles have selected this precise route, zipping along the rugged contours of the mountains as part of an annual migration south; he described the art and utility of flight in an intimate manner that can only come from firsthand experience. 

“The shape of the wings, that’s similar to the shape we try to put ourselves in while skydiving,” he said as a sharp-shinned hawk soared down the ridgeline. “I know where the thermals are in this valley and what the air currents do, and I can appreciate how they ride across these walls of wind for miles.”

Even while grounded, Worth is akin to air. 

Due to an injury to his shoulder, Worth hasn’t opened a parachute since 2023. While he hopes to take to the skies again, he knows that, unless he has full control over his body and can safely jump, he’ll follow his credo and know when to say no. 

“I’m an optimist by nature, because if you’re a skydiver you have to be,” he said recently. “But if this means I never jump again, I had a great run of it. I don’t have a single regret from my life of flying.” 

That isn’t to say he won’t miss the open skies. 

“Very few people have had the experience of guiding themselves through space in the same way an eagle does,” he said. “It’s the closest thing we as humans can get to personal flight.”