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Don't know if it helps, but using Fonstad's Atlas of Middle-earth, which is noted for its accuracy, the distance from the Hallows to the Minas Tirith 'Precipice Viewpoint' is approx 3 miles & involves a climb (as has been noted) from the fifth to the seventh levels. This being impossible one must suspect that it is not actually Denethor who is seen falling but one of his guards.
It seems that the most logical conclusion is that Denethor was grabbed by one of his guards just outside the Hallows, who attempted to extinguish the flames. Said guard, tragically, caught fire himself & in his panic left the dying Steward & fled looking for help. He in turn ran into another guard who attempted to put him out & suffered the same fate as his colleague. This event was repeated a number of times & left all Denethor's personal guard dead along the three miles distance. A kind of horrific 'relay', where the flames were passed along from guard to guard.
This tragic event was commemorated in later years by the famous 'Minas Tirith Relay Run' involving a flaming baton being passed by runners starting at Rath Dinen & culminating in the igniting of a Dummy at the edge of the 'Precipice Viewpoint' being set alight & catapulted off the edge, to fall into the great Courtyard before the gates at the First Level.
'The Fall of the 100th Guard Festival' as it came to be known was originally celebrated every ten years at midnight on the anniversary of Denethor's death & became so famous throughout Middle-earth that travellers of all races would come from across the length & breadth of Middle-earth to witness the spectacle, crowding the streets & spending lots of money.
Unfortunately, the popularity (& the resulting cash benefit for the city) lead first of all to the festival being increased to once in five years, then annually & finally to every Saturday night. Drunkenness & general rowdyness increased to the point that locals began to complain about the 'yobs invading our lovely city & making a nuissance of themselves' & many visitors who couldn't wait for the official event would sneak up to the Viewpoint & throw their own home made dummies off the top. This resulted in two main problems which eventually lead to the event being cancelled - first, flaming dummies would pile up in the courtyard, making access into the city a difficult thing, & secondly, the Burns Unit of the Houses of Healing found they couldn't cope with the numbers of locals & visitors who fund themselves on the receiving end of a flaming dummy hitting them from 5,000 feet. It became a bit of a sick joke among some of the locals, who began making & selling tunics emblazoned with the legend 'I went to Minas Tirith for the 'The Fall of the 100th Guard Festival' & all I got was these lousy third degree burns'. An attempt to make Dwarf sized tunics emblazoned with 'I was a burned Dwarf' failed miserably & lead to the violent murders of a number of tunic vendors at the hands of angry dwarves.
In the end it was decided that for the public good the event would cease & the 'official' version of events was declared to be that Denethor had burned to death in Rath Dinen, no guards had perished in flames & that none of the above had actually happened. Tourism in Gondor suffered but the locals bore it stoically (apart from the tunic printers, who raised a riot on hearing the official declaration of the end of the festival & attacked the local Civil Servants, dragging them from their offices (coincidentally on the Fifth level) all along the route to the edge of the Viewpoint, setting many of them on fire & hurling them off the edge, in a desperate attempt to start up another 'tradition'. The rioters claimed that this was a spontaneous outburst of anger, but the discovery of a batch of tunics emprinted with the legend '1st Weekly 'Fall of the Flaming Civil Servants' (who weren't set on fire & pushed over the edge by the Tunic Printers Guild of Minas Tirith & anyone who says they did it are liars because we were all somewhere else doing other stuff & it was most probably the pressure of the job which lead to a mass sucide on their part) Commemoration Festival' was seen as proof positive that the whole thing had been planned.
Initially there was a demand by the survivng colleagues of the dead Civil Servants that the Tunic Printers should suffer the same fate as their own colleagues & be dragged up to the Viewpoint & ignited & catapulted from the edge (they were working on their own tunic designs but took so long to come up with a legend they could all agree on, submitting various versions, in triplicate, to their immediate & senior managers, bringing in third party consultants to 'think outside the box', advertising managers to choose the most effective colours & fonts for the lettering, that in the end nothing came of it, & the whole thing faded into blessed obscurity & everyone went back to what they had done before the whole thing had gotten so far out of hand.
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