Channel flight - GAS

Tracker HERE.

When Benoit Pelard returned to France after the Gordon Bennett, he wanted to sleep for a week.
BUT... he had been dreaming of commemorating Marvingt's flight for 2 years and his son woke him up and said "Papa - the weather's perfect!"

So on thursday night, he took off in his gas balloon from Nancy in France and landed in Kent on friday afternoon.... 1 mile from my Mum !!!!!

She went out and found him. he gave her a big bag of sweets. She gave him a kiss.

In 1901 Mademoiselle Marvingt had her first ride in a balloon. Over the
years her interest in and affection for balloon flight grew, and while
...she continued to amass awards in nearly every field of athletic
endeavor, she knew in 1901 that "my greatest adventure, my biggest
achievement will come in a balloon." She was right. At 11 a.m. on
October 26, 1909 in Nancy, surrounded by a huge crowd, Mile. Marvingt
and an aeronaut named Emile Gamier stepped into the basket of a
hydrogen-filled balloon. They disappeared through the clouds to begin
the first attempt by a woman to cross the English Channel by balloon.

"The balloon held 900 cubic meters of hydrogen," she recalls. "It was called
The Shooting Star and was the very last word in balloons. I'll never
forget the trip as long as I live."

The Marvingt-Garnier balloon was virtually unnavigable. When The
Shooting Star took off from Nancy a rope connected to the ground tilted
the gasbag and released pounds of precious hydrogen.
The balloon sailed north from Nancy at an altitude of 1,000 feet over the German border, past the Krupp factories at Essen,
past dazzled schoolchildren and peasants. Because of the hydrogen lost
at take-off, the balloon wouldn't rise higher than 1,200 feet. Near Essen the wind shifted suddenly and carried the craft northwest over Holland toward Amsterdam. "We were in the clouds most of the time," said Mademoiselle Marvingt, "but we thought after we reached Amsterdam
that the most dangerous part of the trip was over. We knew we were
losing altitude, but we knew that the Channel winds would sweep us over
to England before nightfall."
The wind did carry the balloon off the Continent and over the
Channel. But the temperature dropped to below freezing, and the basket
began to rise and fall dangerously close to the waves. Before Marvingt
and Gamier were five miles offshore they found themselves in the middle
of a snowstorm.
Marie threw out the last of the ballast, but still the balloon
wouldn't rise more than 100 feet above the waves, often dipping until
the basket actually was in the water.
Night came, and the balloon continued bobbing into the choppy
Channel. "My overcoat and wool stockings were no help," Marvingt said.
"I was freezing. Besides that, we couldn't tell which way we were
heading."
After battling the storm for five hours, the balloon suddenly
lifted and rose through the clouds. Two miles distant Marie saw a light.
It was the English coast. The balloon started to lose altitude and was
headed toward the cliffs on the coast when an updraft caught it and
lifted the pair over the top.
"It was still dark," Marie said. "We let out most of the
hydrogen and put down in a pasture half a mile from the coast [near
Southwold]. We barely had the energy to climb out of the basket. The
next day we took a train to London, where we were treated as heroes."