I’ve flown in big jets, small planes, and helicopters. I enjoyed none of it. Today, I took my first flight in a balloon, well actually under the balloon, and I doubt it will be my last. Though the heat from the propane flames curled my hair, I lived through the experience. Ballooning has improved greatly since the French inventors began experimenting with it. At first, balloons were made out of paper and a wood fire was lit underneath to make it all rise…needless to say, the inventors were no fools and they refused to ride in it themselves, but they did force some convicts to be used for the purpose. Heck, if you’re on death row, I guess it’s not a big deal. Unfortunately, the convicts crashed and the peasants attacked and killed them thinking they were invaders. Still, it was a victory for the modern science of flight. The story goes that the later flights were prepared for such eventualities and brought along bottles of wine to offer the armed populace. if there was a crash landing. I was pleased to see that the purveyors of my balloon ride today respected that tradition. Unfortunately, we consumed all the bottles, and there was none left on landing to fend off armed defenders of the South side of Sedona, so we threw the walnut banana muffins at them. Later in history, balloons were still made of paper, and the fire was actually built in the gondola so they could extend the length of their flights. This tended to be a bad idea, and crash landings due to suddenly having no balloon left above the gondola were frequent, However, they had fortunately switched to using chickens and pigs to pilot the balloons, so the loss of life was marginally less impactful to the scientific community, the prison population (which was getting dangerously low) and mankind as a whole. I believe all this factored in to the use of a monkey to pilot the first space ship we tossed out into the Earth’s orbit…never to be heard of again, due to the fact that it too, was made of paper.
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Greg
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