Matt Wiltshire and Ed Chapman
The Long Jump 2012 After carefully watching the weather charts for over two weeks it appeared that a slot was opening up for Friday the 19th. A quick text to Ed confirmed a co-pilot. Ed spent the afternoon running various trajectories which showed that Exeter would be a reasonable place to go from, flying to the north and hoping to clear Birmingham airspace to the East. The Thursday was very busy collecting equipment, re-fuelling tanks, sorting a launch site and loading the basket. A check of the met and NOTAMS in the evening confirmed the flight for the morning. We set off from Bristol around 5:30 AM and arrived in one of Charlie Street’s very wet launch sites approximately 1 mile north east of Exeter airport. A quick call to ATC confirmed that they were happy for us to launch and so we began to unload the Exeter Airport heavy basket and set up our equipment. At 8:20 we lifted off into the murky sky loaded with 6 full 60’s and began our climb to 6,500ft. After losing the land breeze around 800ft our track changed to 040 and then swiftly swung left to 010, this track kept us below an airway with an average of 10 knots and a poor track straight towards the north Devon coast which would mean a long water crossing straight into Cardiff if we could of got there! The next two hours were spent painfully staring at the GPS desperately trying to squeeze a few more degrees by creeping the balloon up and down, foot by foot until eventually we decided to call it a day and landed in a small village a few miles west of Taunton. Not happy with 2 hours and 40 minutes, and a poor distance of only around 20 NM, we drove back to Bristol to re-fuel the balloon and decided that we would have another attempt the next day from Somerset. So Saturday morning we went through the same drill, made sure we had all the kit kitchen sink etc, there wasn’t a sink but there was a dog. We left Bristol at 5.30 AM and headed down the M5 to Isle Abbotts just outside Yeovil and a dry field (the only dry field on the Somerset levels the rest was under water!) We took off at 8:30 AM and climbed quickly up to 10,000ft we only spent about 10 minutes up there and then dropped down to between 8,000ft and 8,500ft as the track and speed were better. We passed directly over Glastonbury and had a cracking view of the Tor. Ed squinted looking for Worthy Farm and the Pyramid Stage, checking out where the best place would be to pitch his tent in June. Captain Chapman overhead Glastonbury