Word: piccards
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...Wednesday, it must be Cuba... The communist island said it would let the Breitling Orbiter 3 gas and hot air balloon pass over its airspace today en route to a world record. Bertrand Piccard of Switzerland and Britain's Brian Jones--the latest heirs of an aeronautical tradition that began in 1783 when a sheep, a duck and a rooster first went up in a Montgolfier balloon at Versailles France--are planning to land in North Africa on Saturday, and become the first men to circumnavigate the globe nonstop in a balloon. The Breitling, which headed south and then east...
...20th century, ballooning is back in vogue as a full-fledged sport. As the records have fallen, from the crossing of the Atlantic to the crossing of the Pacific, only one real challenge remains: circumnavigating the globe. It is a challenge whose call to people like Piccard and Jones is a reminder of how balloons have captured the human imagination from the very first days and allowed us to soar beyond our gravity-based lives...
...bathysphere came along that scientists could descend to any respectable depth. The Bathysphere eventually took Barton and zoologist William Beebe to a record 3,028 ft., off Bermuda. But it wasn't at all maneuverable: it could only go straight down and straight back up again. Swiss engineer Auguste Piccard solved the mobility problem with the first true submersible, a dirigible-like vessel called a bathyscaphe, which consisted of a spherical watertight cabin suspended below a buoyant gasoline-filled pontoon. (A submersible is simply a small, mobile undersea vessel used for science...
...Trieste, which took U.S. Navy Lieut. Don Walsh and Piccard's son Jacques into the Challenger Deep, was only the third bathyscaphe ever built, and unlike modern submersibles--which bristle with advanced underwater cameras, grabbers, collection baskets and manipulator arms--it carried nothing but its passengers. Its mission was to test whether humans could reach the abyss, the first step toward developing a fleet of manned submersibles. "At the time, people were still flying across the Atlantic in prop planes," recalls Walsh, now a consultant on underwater technology. "Criticizing the Trieste mission for not carrying cameras and other instruments...
...Flat light blurred visibility, and the man-made snow had been licked to unpredictable slickness by overnight freezing. Five of the first 15 racers fell or wobbled off course. Zurbriggen skied so cautiously that he was out of contention. The only racer who looked comfortable was France's Franck Piccard, who had never won a World Cup race although he had looked good earlier in the Games, taking a bronze in the downhill. His expression as the other racers failed seemed to ask, "What do I do now?" Carry the weight of a gold medal was the answer...