Fly Stunt Or Suicide Mission?

Air and Space profiles Jeb Corliss:

...what if you could jump from the sky and fly through the air and land, just like a bird? Corliss sees that as the purest form of human flight. He wants to be the first person to jump out of an airplane and land safely without a parachute, and make it repeatable. The plan has a lot of ifs, and the biggest is money. He needs about $3 million to erect, in the middle of the Las Vegas strip, a ramp hundreds of feet tall. It would look like a ski jump, but act as a landing slope. Since Corliss would bellyflop on it head forward, arms back, he’s found it difficult to persuade people with deep pockets to finance what, after all, could become a televised suicide.