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open basket above the clouds. That is just an experience known to few.”
Julian Nott ascended rapidly.
On January 25, 1974, he and an adventurous real-estate developer named Felix
Pole soared to 45,836 feet, breaking Nott’s own record, which then stood at 36,000 feet.
Groundbreaking seems like the wrong word to use when describing a mission that takes a
balloon higher than a typical commercial jet cruises, but that particular climb was marked by
innovations that pushed possibilities even farther into the stratosphere.
The balloon, the Daffodil II, was the largest of its type and used lightweight nylon
materials. The gondola employed honeycomb panels and was reinforced with carbon fiber –
composite materials providing lightweight strength of construction. But the biggest innovation
was the pressurized cabin Nott designed and built for the flight. It was a first for a hot-air
balloon. He and Pole took off from Lake Bhopal, in Central India, and landed 100 miles away.
“We showed that small computers and especially lightweight cloth materials and elegant
design, clever design, let quite a small group of people do things that had previously been
impossible,” says Nott.
A former Marine
cum
real-estate salesman and lifelong outdoor enthusiast from Denver
by the name of Chauncey Dunn would break Nott’s record just five years later.
Dunn took an open-gondola balloon dubbed “Bear Cat” to 53,206 feet above
Indianola, Iowa.
Inspired by the challenge, Nott soon began preparations to recapture the
record. Thirteen months later, in October 1980, he took off from Longmont,
Colorado, and made it to 55,134 feet in just over an hour before descending.
This flight was significant because Nott employed a pressurized suit inside
a pressurized cabin of his design. “Redundancy, in the engineering sense of
having two ways of doing everything, is my favorite word,” says Nott.
The Smithsonian Institution recently acquired the pressurized cabin Nott built for that
flight and has it on permanent display in its National Air and Space Museum collection in
honor of Nott’s many contributions to hot-air ballooning.
“I am thrilled about it,” says Nott, now a naturalized U.S. citizen. “Don’t tell the queen,
but even with meeting the queen, being in the Smithsonian as far as I’m concerned is the most
important recognition my stuff’s ever received.”
THE PUMPKIN BALLOON
N
ot one to rest on his laurels, Nott was soon innovating a whole new type of
balloon that would help solve an issue that had long limited ballooning’s modern
applications: lifespan.
For example, one of the challenges with using balloons for near-space research or in
collecting, say, climate data over time has been a balloon’s relatively short life. Typically, hot-air
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winter
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spr ing
UP
&
OUT
Julian Nott’s flight in a hot-air balloon made of locally made
fabric and powered by an open fire, while not proving that
the geoglyphs in Peru that can only be seen from above were
made by prehistoric Nazca Indians, illustrated that they could
have flown, using technology available at the time.