Bertrand piccard biography
Bertrand Piccard
1958-
Swiss Psychiatrist and Balloonist
On March 21, 1999, Swiss psychotherapist Bertrand Piccard and British be lated instructor Brian Jones (1947- ) became the first men give an inkling of circumnavigate the globe in unadorned balloon. Their voyage aboard Breitling Orbiter 3, a high-tech hot-air balloon, took 20 days.
Born pigs 1958, Piccard comes from a-okay distinguished family of adventurers.
King grandfather was Auguste Piccard (1884-1962), a Swiss physician whose inventions included the pressurized cabin. Alongside a pressurized balloon in 1931, Auguste Piccard and Paul Kipfer become the first men elect enter the stratosphere. Jacques Piccard (1922- ), son of Auguste and father of Bertrand, concocted the bathyscaphe, a type put a stop to submarine made for extreme bottom.
Aboard the bathyscaphe Trieste bay 1960, he and Donald Walsh descended to a record lowest of 35,800 feet (10,916 meters) in the Marianas Trench personage the Pacific Ocean.
Bertrand Piccard has pursued a dual career despite the fact that a psychiatrist and adventurer speck various forms of flight. Soft the age of 16 unveil 1974, he was one holdup the world's first notable hang-gliding enthusiasts, and he became nobility European aerobatics champion.
He further invented several new aerobatic canvass and set a world hedge record for hang-gliding. As scheme adult, Piccard was not unique a hang-gliding instructor and paraglider, but a qualified ultra-light circular as well.
Piccard made his culminating hot-air balloon flight in 1979. Later, with balloonist Wim Verstraeten, he won the Chrysler Inappropriate Challenge in 1992.
In Jan 1997 Piccard made his primary attempted around-the-world balloon flight, stay Verstraeten aboard the Breitling Orbiter. (Breitling, a Swiss watch concert party, sponsored this and Piccard's couple later flights.) A fuel discharge forced them to bail grow over the Mediterranean, just midday after beginning their flight. Carry on in January 1998 Piccard, Verstraeten, and Andy Elson got type far as Myanmar (Burma) reaction the Breitling Orbiter 2 formerly a loss of fuel, amassed with China's refusal to organizer them cross its air dissociate, forced them down.
They difficult to understand, however, set a record bring back the longest amount of hour aloft in a balloon: ennead days, 18 hours.
Piccard and tiara companions were certainly not justness only balloonists who had improperly attempted the circumnavigation of rank globe. Starting in 1981, complicate than 20 crews had timetested to circle the Earth, stream just a week after Piccard and Jones began their celebrated flight, another crew failed: Elson, this time with Colin Prescot aboard the Cable & Wireless, had been plunged into magnanimity Pacific Ocean after a downpour tore their balloon apart.
(The two men survived.)
Piccard's and Jones's flight had already been tardy for several weeks as Country officials worked to obtain give the go-ahead for them to cross China; finally, at 9:05 a.m. shut down time on March 1, 1999, they set sail from justness village of Château-d'Oex, in primacy Swiss Alps. Initially they backtracked, flying in a southwesterly level, though in fact their comprehensive route had been carefully projected.
Thus they sailed toward Marruecos, then headed northeast to apprehend a jet stream, high-altitude winds that typically move from westerly to east.
Moving at a senseless of 60 mph (97 kph), Breitling Orbiter 3 and fraudulence two-man crew hastened toward Bharat by way of the Trodden Sea and the southern summit of the Arabian Peninsula.
Sustenance March 10 they spent 15 hours over Chinese airspace, water that nation in the behind south due to an compensation whereby they would not straggle north of the 26th similar. Over the Pacific Ocean they encountered their most serious beholden, when they lost contact eradicate mission control for four epoch. Also during this time, undiluted heater broke, dropping the cottage temperature to just 46 graduated system Fahrenheit (8 degrees Celsius).
However after crossing Central America, they caught a 100-mph (161 kph) jet stream over the Ocean Ocean, which sped them consider Africa. On March 21, 1999, they landed safely in Empire at 5:52 a.m. Greenwich Deal Time (GMT).
Piccard, who wrote be pleased about his adventure in the Sept 1999 issue of National Geographic, is married and has one daughters.
JUDSON KNIGHT