Balloon (aeronautics)
Many balloons have a basket, gondola, or capsule suspended beneath the main envelope for carrying people or equipment (including cameras and telescopes, and flight-control mechanisms).
As the entire balloon is less dense than its surroundings, it rises, taking along with it a basket, attached underneath, which carries passengers or payload.
In the 1950s, the convenience and low cost of bottled gas burners led to a revival of hot air ballooning for sport and leisure.
A man-carrying balloon using the light gas hydrogen for buoyancy was made by Professor Jacques Charles and flown less than a month after the Montgolfier flight, on 1 December 1783.
Light gas balloons are predominant in scientific applications, as they are capable of reaching much higher altitudes for much longer periods of time.
A superpressure balloon, in contrast, has a tough and inelastic envelope that is filled with light gas to pressure higher than that of the external atmosphere, and then sealed.
In fact, in typical operation an Earth-based superpressure balloon mission is ended by a command from ground control to open the envelope, rather than by natural leakage of gas.
These balloons can fly over 100,000 feet (30.5 km) into the air, and are designed to burst at a set altitude where the parachute will deploy to safely carry the payload back to earth.
The lower one held hot air and could be quickly heated or cooled to provide the varying lift for good altitude control.
It wasn't until the 1980s that technology was developed to allow safe operation of the Rozier type, for example by using non-flammable helium as the lifting gas, and several designs have successfully undertaken long-distance flights.
[13] In 1709 the Brazilian-Portuguese cleric Bartolomeu de Gusmão made a balloon filled with heated air rise inside a room in Lisbon.
On August 8, 1709, in Lisbon, Gusmão managed to lift a small balloon made of paper with hot air about four meters in front of king John V and the Portuguese court[14][15][16][17][18][19] He also claimed to have built a balloon named Passarola (Big bird) and attempted to lift himself from Saint George Castle in Lisbon, landing about one kilometre away.
The pilots, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent d'Arlandes, covered about 5.5 miles (8.9 km) in 25 minutes.
Their hydrogen-filled balloon flew to almost 2,000 feet (600 m), stayed aloft for over 2 hours and covered a distance of 27 miles (43 km), landing in the small town of Nesles-la-Vallée.
A public demonstration occurred in Brugherio a few days later, on 13 March 1784, when the vehicle flew to a height of 1,537 metres (5,043 ft) and a distance of 8 kilometres (5.0 mi).
[21] On 28 March Andreani received a standing ovation at La Scala, and later a medal from Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor.
De Rozier, together with Joseph Proust, took part in a further flight on 23 June 1784, in a modified version of the Montgolfiers' first balloon christened La Marie-Antoinette after the Queen.
The balloon flew north at an altitude of approximately 3,000 metres, above the clouds, travelling 52 km in 45 minutes before cold and turbulence forced them to descend past Luzarches, between Coye et Orry-la-Ville, near the Chantilly forest.
The French military observation balloon L'Intrépide of 1795 is the oldest preserved aircraft in Europe; it is on display in the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum in Vienna.
It was given a significant boost when Charles Green discovered that readily-available coal gas, then coming into urban use, gave half the lifting power of hydrogen, which had to be specially manufactured.
[28] Hydrogen-filled balloons were widely used during World War I (1914–1918) to detect enemy troop movements and to direct artillery fire.
The Aeronaut Badge was established by the United States Army in World War I to denote service members who were qualified balloon pilots.
They float hundreds of kilometers across the border carrying news from the outside world, illegal radios, foreign currency and gifts of personal hygiene supplies.
Hot air balloons used in sport flying are sometimes made in special designs to advertise a company or product, such as the Chubb fire extinguisher illustrated.
PAGEOS was launched in 1966 for worldwide satellite triangulation, allowing for greater precision in the calculation of different locations on the planet's surface.
On 19 October 1910, Alan Hawley and Augustus Post landed in the wilderness of Quebec, Canada after traveling for 48 hours and 1887.6 kilometers (1,173 mi) from St. Louis during the Gordon Bennett International Balloon Race, setting a distance record that held for more than 20 years.
In 1976, Ed Yost set 13 aviation world's records for distance traveled and amount of time aloft in his attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean —solo— by balloon (3.938 km, 107:37 h).
[a] The current record altitude for a manned balloon was set at 41,419.0 m (135,889.108 ft) by Alan Eustace on 24 October 2014 as part of the StratEx Space Dive project.
In 2015, the two pilots Leonid Tiukhtyaev and Troy Bradley arrived safely in Baja California, Mexico after a journey of 10,711 km.
The two men, originally from Russia and the United States of America respectively, started in Japan and flew with a helium balloon over the Pacific.
