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The
first passengers in a hot air balloon flight were a
sheep, a duck and a rooster, launched by the brothers
Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier on the 19th September
1783. The first recorded flight in a hot air balloon of
some 22 minutes was made by the Marquis d’Arlandes and
Mr. Pilatre de Rosier in Paris on the 21 st November of
that same year. We’ve come a long way since then, but
the principle is the same.
Balloons
are aircraft and, as such, both craft and certified
pilots are governed, as with all aircraft and pilots, by
Civil Aviation Regulations. Piloting a balloon takes
skill, yet the controls are quite simple. The pilots’
knowledge of the area and the prevailing daily
variations aloft in the layers of wind currents are used
to steer a 1 hour not-too-exact course, usually in a
westerly direction from the launch site near Marrakech,
to move calmly and gracefully over the ground, in
accordance with the air mass flow, some 800 to 1000m to
the north-east of Marrakech, over oases and secluded
Berber villages, the terraced irrigated fields of the
Oueds Tinsift and Nfis of the Al Hawuz Plain to drift
alongside the northern Jbilet hill. You can see for
miles and miles, lulled to the music of silence, the
awesome Western High Atlas Mountains to the south as a
constant wonder. In free air balloon flights, the
sensation of vertigo simply does not exist. It is as if
you are suspended in the wind, with the heavens as your
reference point.
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