London native finds Las Vegas perfect for skydiving

By Andrea Domanick

Sunday, Feb. 15, 2015 | 2 a.m.

In his more than three decades and 18,000 jumps as a professional skydiver, Eddie Carroll has soared into sports stadiums, movie premieres and Stonehenge.

But of all the places his career has taken him, it’s the view of the Las Vegas Strip from 15,000 feet up that Carroll knows best.

As owner of Las Vegas Extreme Skydiving, Carroll gives thousands of local and visiting thrillseekers the rush of a lifetime with his tandem skydiving program on the south end of the Strip.

The 50-year-old London native set up shop here in 2003, and Extreme Skydiving now is one of the leading recreational skydiving companies in the country, executing about 16,000 jumps per year.

Carroll and his team take full advantage of Las Vegas’ dry, temperate climate, which allows for close to 340 days of skydiving annually. The valley’s year-round flow of tourists and adventurous local crowd have made the region something of a skydiving haven.

Still, Carroll says the company’s success has everything to do with caution.

“If I even have an inkling the weather might turn, we don’t go,” he said. “It doesn’t take too much to turn a beautiful day into a dangerous situation.”

As a result, Extreme Skydiving has a perfect safety record, with no major injuries or deaths in its 11 years of business.

“Out of everything I’ve learned, the most important lesson is learning when not to go,” Carroll said.

Carroll’s passion for jumping out of planes emerged when he joined the British Army at 16 and trained in freeform parachuting, the British term for skydiving. He took to it quickly, and his talent led him to join the 101st Parachute Regiment. He later joined the famed Red Devils Parachute Regiment and after early retirement from the British Army, spent several years in the Middle East providing military training, including to Saudi Arabia’s Special Forces.

While he’d long considered moving to Las Vegas for its prime jumping climate, it wasn’t until the early 2000s that Carroll decided to take the leap, move here and launch his own recreational skydiving business. Over the next decade, the business grew from a two-person operation anchored by a small but hearty Cesna to a seven-person company that takes up to 14 people at a time on anywhere from 30 to 80 jumps per week.

Carroll also has become a go-to guy for filming aerial jumps for television and movies. His work has been featured in “Mission: Impossible”, “Bear Grylls: Desert Survival” and “The Amazing Race.”

Carroll has made a point of giving back to the community as well, with fundraising jumps to raise money for the Las Vegas Marathon and the Las Vegas Santa Run — he recently parachuted into Town Square in a Santa suit — and by donating skydiving experiences to Wounded Warriors, the Make-A-Wish Foundation and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

From wearing costumes to jumping naked, there’s little Carroll won’t do to accommodate, as long as it is safe. And while he won’t ever force a person to jump, he does try to change people’s minds if they get cold feet. For Carroll, sharing the feeling and thrill of flight with others is the passion that drives his work.

“There’s just nothing like it,” he said. “All my senses seem to be alert and alive, both when I’m in the air and after I’ve landed. I think every human wants to fly like a bird. I just get to do it everyday.”