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balloons.ge
Starting Member
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 Posted - 24 July 2007 : 11:00:30
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On 22 January, 1927, ballooning enthusiast Vladimir Garakanidze set off from Moscow in a homemade 300 m3 Charliere balloon. His intention was to fly to the town of Gorky. Not a long journey, the pilot counted on landing before nightfall. The balloon did not have a gondola. Ropes were tied to its covering, and a wooden board was attached to the ropes, so the end result was something akin to a child's swing. Garakanidze climbed on and took off jauntily into the sky in temperatures dipping as low as minus 17 degrees Celsius. He did not arrive at his destination that evening, or the next day. On 24 January, search parties set off along the flight route to look for the balloonist's frozen body, but to no avail.
News of what happened to Garakanidze did not surface until a week later. It transpired that the pilot had been caught in a strong air current that took him in an entirely different direction. He sat on his board for three days, hungry and frozen, clinging for dear life to the ropes. The balloon bobbed around and gyrated like crazy in the wind, whereby the entire flight took place in a thick fog. It ended in the Severodvinsk region 702 km away!
Our fellow countryman explained to the astonished people of the remote woodland village he ended up in that he was from Moscow, had descended from the sky is very cold and very hungry. Garakanidze reached the nearest railroad station, where there was a telegraph office, by sled four days later. He took his balloon with him, neatly rolled up and without a mark or tear on it. The Moscow newspaper Izvestia wrote on this account: "Yesterday, it was brought to our attention that Comrade Garakanidze set a world record in amateur ballooning with his flight.
Vladimir Garakanidze's record was not a shot in the blue. He went on to become a well-known balloonist, made many record flights in hot air balloons, and even landed on the top of Mount Elbrus. Another important fact in his biography is that one of Garakanidze's students was a young man by the name of Sergei Korolev, who later became the father of Soviet cosmonautics.
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balloon flight 1927, 702 km flight on a board !
