Good thing the parachute opened! (Getty Images/Alex Wong)

OXON HILL, Md. — Red Bull paid a man to jump from the top floor of the 19-story Gaylord National Hotel and Convention Center and parachute through its atrium. Why? Promoting its annual Flugtag air show later this year, for which this resort complex off Interstate 295 will be one of the host cities.

“That was pretty simple,” the jumper, Miles Daisher, said a few minutes after landing. Leaping from above the top floor of hotel rooms (decorated by a Red Bull banner, of course), Daisher spent about a half-second in free-fall before deploying a parachute (Red Bull-branded, obviously), and navigating over the lobby, through a fountain, and finally onto a landing pad (marked, of course, with the Red Bull logo) in front of a row of news cameras and reporters gullible to turn up for such a stunt.

Daisher makes his living as BASE jumper—plummeting from buildings, antennae, bridge spans, and earth—often in publicity for the syrupy, palpitation-inducing energy drink. Today was his 3,300th career jump, he said. He seemed more amped up because of the location—a hotel on the outskirts of D.C.—than the milestone.

“It was a dream come true,” Daisher, 43, said. Or maybe it was the two Red Bulls he admitted to drinking before making the 230-foot dive.

Daisher lives with his wife, Nikki, and their three small children in Twin Falls, Idaho, near a bridge that he uses for training jumps. Nikki Daisher said her husband jumps off the bridge up to 10 times on an ordinary day.

“I trust his visions and his judgment,” she said. “He’s trained really hard.”

Only, in the case of the Gaylord National, Miles Daisher didn’t get to make an on-site training run. To plan the stunt, Red Bull had to put up some considerable insurance money to indemnify the hotel from the unlikely—but not implausible—chance that Daisher would blow the jump and drop to catastrophic injury, or worse, in front of hundreds of spectators. Richard Morse, the hotel’s general manager, would not specify how much, puts he the figure at more than $1 million. Still, he says he was confident about the endeavor.

“Miles is their No. 1 jumper,” Morse recalled of his conversations with Red Bull. But what if instead if Daisher, Red Bull had offered the third-best stuntman in its promotions stable?

“We only deal with No. 1 jumpers,” Morse said.

Daisher trained by simulating the hotel’s internal structure under his training bridge in Idaho, and made enough practice jumps so that by the time he did a walkthrough of the Gaylord, he was somewhat familiar with its architecture. “Judging” today’s jump were two groups of equally silly promotional types: Four of the Washington Nationals’ Racing Presidents (Skinny Taft was in absentia); and the winners of Red Bull’s air show last year in Philadelphia, three young men dressed up in nautical jackets, captains hats, and aviator sunglasses, supplemented with enough cans of Red Bull to power a small war fleet.

Morse said after the jump he was most relieved when Daisher’s parachute deployed, a very early moment in the 13-second leap. “I was concerned overall about our brand,” he said, probably not wanting to find himself of the possible situation of explaining to his bosses Gaylord Hotels’ association with indoor BASE jumps gone awry.

As for the jumper, Daisher said he was pretty serene about the whole affair. “I think my brain shut down a little bit like slow-motion football,” he said about his glide down the atrium. “I kind of feel like I was melting a bit.”

A reporter then asked Daisher, who was holding one of his kids, what he thought right as he jumped.

“Fuck it, I’m going for it.”