IT TOOK 22 days for Glenn Singleman and his partner, Heather Swan, to climb the 6,604m (21,660 feet) to the summit of Meru Peak in the Indian Himalayas. But they descended in only two minutes by gliding in specially designed wing suits, to make the highest base jump in history.

After inching their way up 80-degree ice slopes, sometimes climbing only 50m a day, Dr Singleman and Ms Swan, from Sydney, launched themselves from the mountain’s vertical eastern face, reaching speeds of up to 124mph (200km/h) before opening their parachutes for the last 40 seconds of their descent.

Jimmy Freeman, one of their team members, said: “I saw them jump and they disappeared into cloud for a while. They were tiny. You could just make out something moving down the wall.” He said that 1 minute and 20 seconds after making the leap the pair opened their parachutes and after 2 minutes landed in a 4,850m landing zone.

Mr Freeman had also been due to make the leap, but after climbing for nine days in temperatures as low as minus 20C (-4F), he suffered serious altitude sickness. Rather than making a three-day trek back, he donned a parachute and paraglided down.

By making his jump Dr Singleman, who once described base jumping as “the fast track to enlightenment”, broke his own base-jumping world record of 6,258m, which he set in Pakistan in 1992. Ms Swan is a former businesswoman who had to overcome her fear of heights before taking up the sport.

Base is an acronym for building, antennae, span and earth — the platforms from which the jumpers leap. Jumps are frequently made illegally because authorities often deny permission to leap from structures, or cliffs in national parks — a situation that led Dr Singleman to call for an official practice site in Australia.

A base-jumping website lists 99 fatalities that have occurred in the sport since the early 1980s, when it became well known. It is derived from sky diving, in which participants leap from an aircraft and freefall before opening parachutes.

Wing suits, which are also used in sky diving, allow skilled jumpers to move forward at about 2.8 times the speed of descent. They not only prolong the flight but allow jumpers to manoeuvre. Dr Singleman and Ms Swan had made about 150 jumps using wing suits before breaking the world record.

Mr Freeman, who pioneered the use of wing suits in base jumping, said that he had tested the suits only from a height of 3,300m, and had been concerned about their performance at heights above 6,000m. “As I suspected the suits took a little longer than what [Singleman and Swan] were used to to start flying,” he said.

He said that the couple were “pretty reserved” when they landed. “After the effects of 22 days on the mountain, they were ready to go. They were really sunburnt, very skinny and looked exhausted.”

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