Austrian extreme sports pioneer Felix Baumgartner, famed for a record-breaking 2012 skydive from the edge of space, has died in a paragliding accident in central Italy, local police said.

Baumgartner, who was 56, lost control of his motorised paraglider while flying over Porto Sant’Elpidio in Italy’s central Marche region on Thursday and fell to the ground near the swimming pool of a hotel. The reasons for the accident were unclear.

Porto Sant’Elpidio’s mayor, Massimiliano Ciarpella, said reports suggested he may have suffered a sudden medical issue midair, and offered the town’s condolences for the death of “a symbol of courage and passion for extreme flights”.

The Austrian, who was known as “Fearless Felix”, made headlines around the world in October 2012 when – wearing a specially made suit – he jumped from a balloon 38km (24 miles) above Earth, becoming the first skydiver to break the sound barrier, typically measured at more than 1,110km/h (690mph).

He made the historic jump over Roswell, New Mexico, reaching a peak speed of more than 1,343km/h, during a nine-minute descent on the 65th anniversary of legendary American pilot Chuck Yeager’s flight shattering the sound barrier on 14 October 1947.

At one point, Baumgartner went into a potentially dangerous flat spin while still supersonic, spinning for 13 seconds, his crew later said.

“When I was standing there on top of the world, you become so humble,” he said after landing in the eastern New Mexico desert. “You do not think about of breaking records any more, you do not think of about gaining scientific data. The only thing you want is to come back alive.”

Baumgartner, a former Austrian military parachutist, made thousands of daredevil jumps from planes, bridges, skyscrapers and famed landmarks around the world, including the Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil.

The self-styled “God of the Skies” started parachuting as a teenager before taking up the extreme sport of Base jumping. Other feats included skydiving across the English Channel and parachuting off the Petronas Towers in Malaysia.

In recent years, he had performed with the Flying Bulls as a helicopter stunt pilot in shows across Europe.

In Austria he was also known for courting controversy with views that included expressing support for dictatorship as a system of government.

Baumgartner was fined €1,500 after he punched a Greek truck driver in the face during a 2010 altercation that broke out in a traffic jam near Salzburg.

Baumgartner said after his record-breaking jump in 2012 that travelling faster than sound was “hard to describe because you don’t feel it”.

“Sometimes we have to get really high to see how small we are.”

With Reuters and the Associated Press