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comment by wasoxygen
wasoxygen  ·  745 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: I fell 15,000 feet and lived

Two more stories in Jarhead Adventures.





NikolaiFyodorov  ·  741 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Thanks for sharing. Those were good reads.

wasoxygen  ·  740 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Sure, thanks for posting this great story.

I’ve been searching all my archives for an article I saved about Steve Fossett’s unsuccessful attempt to balloon solo around the world. I copied the file from hard drive to hard drive for years but couldn’t find it in any of my e-mail accounts or cloud drives. Finally it turned up ten levels deep in an old webserver backup.

It’s too long to fit in a comment, but maybe someone can find a copy online or I’ll find a way to post it somewhere.

    I'm going to have to do some debriefing as to what really

    happened. I was flying at an altitude above the thunderstorm

    line, which was clearing the tops of the thunderstorm. But I

    suspect there was some interaction with the tops of the

    thunderstorm and the jet stream where I was flying, which

    was at 29,000 feet, and I started a descent. At first the

    descent was at 500 feet a minute, and then I reversed it by

    turning on the burners and climbing back up. But then I was

    already under the influence of the thunderstorm and started a

    descent of 1,500 feet a minute. I used the burners more and I

    flew back up at an extreme rate of 1,500 feet a minute. And I

    believe at that point the balloon ruptured. So I started a

    descent, and I don't know how fast the descent was because

    my variometer has a maximum rate on it of 2,500 feet a

    minute and it was pegged at 2,500 feet a minute for my entire

    descent down from 29,000 feet to the surface.