Who was the first person to ride in a hot air balloon?
In 1710 in Lisbon, Bartolomeu de Gusmão made a balloon named Passarola (English: Big bird) and attempted to lift himself from Saint George Castle in Lisbon, but only managed to harmlessly fall about one kilometre away. According to the Portuguese speaking community, this was the first man ever to fly in human history. However, this claim is not generally recognized by aviation historians outside the Portuguese speaking community, in particular the FAI.
Can anyone think of reasons to put me at ease about my first plane flight?!?
I am 26 and have developed some pretty strong mental fears of flying. I was only up in the air once in my lifetime in a hot air balloon when I was little and cried the whole time. Since then I have a strong fear of heights. My flight is next week to HAWAII so its actually several connecting flights there and back…im TERRIFIED…please help!
Your odds of dying in a plane crash are about 1 in 14,000,000. Your odds of dying in a car crash on your way to the airport are way higher. Really, once you get to the airport, you should breathe a sigh of relief that you didn’t die on the highway. But most of us don’t do that of course, because a) we’re used to being in cars all the time, and b) when we’re in a car we feel in control. Still, though, just going by logic, one should be less afraid of the flight than of the drive to the airport.
That sounded really nerdy, sorry. Another suggestion is to learn about how aircraft work – what the flaps, slats, elevators, ailerons, rudder, etc. do, and how everything has a backup and most of the backups have backups. These engineers really know what they’re doing, and you’re quite safe. I don’t know how one would really go about doing this, but it might also help to familiarize yourself with all the little noises that an airplane makes normally (landing gear going up and down, landing gear doors opening and closing, flaps extending/retracting, engine RPMs changing, someone flushing one of the airplane’s toilets, etc).
Maybe also learn about the aviation equivalent to “the rules of the road”, i.e. that cruising aircraft must maintain a horizontal separation of at least 8 miles from other aircraft at the same altitude, and a vertical separation of at least 1000 feet from other “layers” of traffic. It’s not like there are other aircraft swarming all around you – I tend to look out the window about half the time, and I almost never see another plane while we’re cruising.
Good luck – I went to Hawaii (the big island) for the first time in January, and absolutely loved it!
I was thinking of getting something like this for my mum birthday are they scary and was it worth the money?also do you feel safe in these as i can be scared of heights. xxxx
Last year i bought a champagne balloon ride for my boyfriend for £150 each ticket, If you or your mum are very scared of heights then don’t do it. , the ride itself lasted for about 45 Min’s to an hour, but we had to help put the balloon up and back down it was all part of the package that was paid for, so in all 3 hours. The views you get are unbelievable, you do did feel safe, It is worth every penny,
The take off of the first hot air balloon. Historical reconstitution. Brissac-Quincé, France.
As we look back at mankind’s attempts to create the perfect Vertical Take Off and Landing aircraft, we see almost an unlimited number of radical concepts, designs and departures from the typical aircraft models we are use to. It has been a goal of aerospace engineers through the ages to develop the ideal compromise design which can go from vertical take off with a heavy load and then proceed to forward high rates of speed and/or performance.
Many of these designs go back prior to World War II. During World War II in Germany and the United States and after the war in he US, several hundreds of designs were looked at and at least 100 legitimate attempts. Some were X-planes, some were helicopter hybrids and others were like nothing you have ever seen before; are you sure that thing will fly? Then innovators, scientists and even the fringe began to dream of flying cars and to this day the race is on to produce one which is cheap enough to build and safe enough for your family.
Recently as material sciences hyperspace the past period technological advances we see hope that we will be able to build VTOL aircraft using some of these new materials, which are 10 times as strong and a fifth of the weight. For instance consider Nano Tube Sheets, which will be 50 times stronger than steel and an unbelievable savings in weight. Even with the newest composites some of which are one-third the weight of aluminum and three times the strength, there is great potential.
I propose that we take all the archives of designs previous tried or for which we have plans for and spend 2 Billion Dollars in building one-third and one-fight scaled models using the latest advanced materials of each and every one of these concepts. I propose this money be spent in Universities where aerospace design is taught and that prizes be given out for those who can produce and fly models from the long list of past period designs or those who come up with entirely new concepts.
Although this may seem like a lot of money, I believe it will accomplish many things. First it will help the military in the future of their Unmanned Aerial Vehicle roadmap planning. Second it will help the Air Force Research Lab in keeping us bleeding edge. Third I feel NASA can use this knowledge to develop better robotic assistants for exploration and space colony uses, not mention Earth Sciences. Forth it will usher in a new level of robotics for those High School students now graduating who are moving into the field of robotics due to the push for contests at that level. Fifth if will help DARPA, DHS and FEMA with their efforts to keep us ahead of the pack, protect our security and help us deal with Mother Nature.
Any smart businessperson will tell you that the money you spend in Research and Development is money in the bank for the future. And since so much has already been done in the past and so many designs, which might have failed but did not have the use of proper power plants or modern materials, we need to be looking both forward and backwards and delete the barrier of time. Think on this.
“Lance Winslow” – Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; http://www.WorldThinkTank.net/. Lance is an online writer in retirement.
St.Louis Forest Park Hot Air Balloon Race 2009 -PART 3/3-
