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Commented on A Zeppelin. Wearing a top hat. Smoking a cigar.
I agree, the goggles cannot possibly be optional. (Charlie, can we please have full entries in the RSS feed instead of just the first paragraph?)...
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bellinghman commented on
A Zeppelin. Wearing a top hat. Smoking a cigar.
Not solo, though. It was also not the first airship, not by more than a decade, and it was after even Lindberg. Heck, the following year, there was even a scheduled service. I don't believe any airship ever did the trip solo - because there's fsck all point to it. Lindberg's achievement was remarkable primarily not for the distance covered, nor even for the flight time, but for the fact he had nobody else in the cockpit to help. It was therefore important as a feat of human endurance. That his name has somehow become associated with 'first across the...
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bellinghman commented on
A Zeppelin. Wearing a top hat. Smoking a cigar.
Solo balloon: Joe W. Kittinger, 1984. I'm not aware of a solo dirigible flight....
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bellinghman commented on
A Zeppelin. Wearing a top hat. Smoking a cigar.
But only a fortnight later, the next flight from that same airfield went to Germany. So if it was a non-stop distance record, it was a very short-lived one. And that time, a passenger was carried....
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bellinghman commented on
A Zeppelin. Wearing a top hat. Smoking a cigar.
The commercially sensible crossing for a long time involved landing at Gander to refuel. This was only superseded in the 1960s, once fuel-efficient long range jetliners came on the scene....
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bellinghman commented on
A Zeppelin. Wearing a top hat. Smoking a cigar.
I suspect that the then airline definition of 'commercially sensible' did not include falling out of the sky into the Atlantic as a result of running out of fuel. (Your assumption that the risk is "almost independent of how far it travels between take-offs" might have a teensy little flaw in it, in that respect.)...
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