Bill and I flew very close to each other for the entire flight. I think the most distance we ever had between us was 5 miles. There was some pretty good steering and speed control with just a little bit of altitude change. We were able to stay together and after covering 173 miles we landed 30 seconds and 100 yards apart.
The temperature at launch was 10 degrees, at altitude it was 5 degrees F. for most of the flight. My new thermal suit and my survival boots kept me quite warm. I even flew without gloves for a portion of the flight. Wrapping the basket in plastic really retains a lot of heat, and stops wind from blowing through. The temperature inside the basket was 20 degrees or so.
The winds aloft data and forecasts were perfect. We flew exactly as fast as the wind was forecasted to be at almost every altitude. The problem we had was a low cloud cover for the first half of the flight. This kept us below 8,500 feet for the first 1.5 hours of the flight. The speeds at this altitude were 38 to 48 mph. When were able to climb higher (As the cloud deck went up), our speeds improved to 86 miles per hour at 10,000 feet. If we had been able to fly higher sooner, we would have been able to make it to Louisville as planned.
At one point we were traveling at 9,000 feet, in excess of 50mph and we were close enough to yell to each other.
We put 740 miles on the van. This included our drive to central Illinois, chase, and return trip to Louisville after the flight. I had a wonderful crew for the flight. Wayne Gerding, Sue Greene, Jessie Derek Browning, and Larry Ott were with us all day long. Also a group of Illinois balloon pilots and crew were very helpful in finding us a launch site and helping with the inflation. Thanks, Larry Estep, and Dean Carlton along with all the others.
Click here to see all of the pictures of this flight in our Facebook album.
Here is the flight data:
View Long jump flight 22 January in a larger map
