Gordon Bennett Cup (ballooning)
The Gordon Bennett Cup ( French Coupe aéronautique Gordon Bennett ) is the oldest annual international balloon sport event for gas balloons . The initiator was the American James Gordon Bennett junior , the publisher of the New York Herald . Up to three balloon teams per nation are allowed. The team that has reached the greatest distance from the starting point on landing wins. The home country of the winners is the venue for the next but one race.
history
Photo by Edvin Levick
The first competition was held on September 30, 1906 in Paris and won by the American Frank Purdy Lahm (1877-1963), who, together with his co-pilot Henry Hersey , reached the north-east coast of England after more than 640 km.
In 1907 the competition was first held in St. Louis, United States. The German balloon Pommern won with the balloon pilot Oskar Erbslöh and the American meteorologist Henry Helm Clayton , whose journey only ended at Asbury Park on the Atlantic . The lead over the French balloon Isle de France was only 11 km. In 1908, when the race started in Berlin, the Swiss team achieved a record driving time of 73 hours, which lasted until 1995. In 1910 the longest driving distance from St. Louis was 1,887 km. The balloon landed north of Quebec, Canada. The two pilots Alan Ramsay Hawley and Augustus Post then needed four days on foot to reach an inhabited area, Captain Hugo von Abercron and August Blankertz , who came in third behind Hans Gericke with a distance of 1,720 km, were whole Lost in the Canadian woods for ten days. Her balloon Düsseldorf was only found by Inuit three months later .
After the interruption caused by the First World War , the competition was held annually, but after the Second World War it was not resumed until 1983 under the auspices of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale .
If a country wins the cup three times in a row, it becomes its property. This was achieved for the first time in 1924 by the Belgian team, then twice by the United States (1928 and 1932) and in 1935 by Poland. After the competitions were restarted in 1983, thanks to Josef Starkbaum, the trophy went twice to Austria (1987 and 1990) and in 2003 to France. It is customary for the winner to donate a new trophy for the following year.
Incidents
On September 12, 1995, an incident occurred when three balloons participating in the competition entered the airspace of Belarus. Although plans for the trip were in place and the organizers of the race had already informed the Belarusian government about the race in May, the Belarusian Air Force shot down one of the balloons that had flown into the closed airspace around an airfield with a Mi-24W helicopter the two American citizens Alan Fraenckel, 55, and John Stuart-Jervis, 68, who started for the Virgin Islands , were killed. It remains unclear why the two balloonists did not try to inform Belarus directly or via the competition management via radio, although the logbook of the two shows that they had noticed the border crossing. Another contributing factor to the accident was that, on the days of the race, the organizers applied for clearance from the Belarusian aviation authority, but this request did not contain any data on the course and time of the border crossing. As a result, the BCOAT classified this request as invalid, gave no clearance and it was not entered in the flight plan. Why the organizers did not notice this and reacted accordingly remains unexplained. The helicopter crew considered the balloon nacelle to be empty. The autopsy of those killed (both stimulants were detected) and the flight data obtained confirm the death by impact on the ground and suggest that after three days of flight at altitudes above 2000 m and little sleep they were either unconscious, deeply asleep or due to the exhaustion could no longer respond adequately to the helicopter. One of the other two balloons was forced to land and the third was able to land safely two hours later due to deteriorating weather conditions. The balloonists were fined and released for entering Belarus without a valid visa. To date, the Belarusian government has not issued any further comments.
In 2010 the race ended tragically. The USA-2 balloon with Richard Abruzzo and Carol Rymer Davis , the 2004 winners, got caught in a thunderstorm over the Adriatic Sea on 29 September . The balloon crashed about 12 miles from the coast at 80 km / h. The search by the Italian and Croatian coast guards was abandoned on October 4th without any results. It was not until December 6, 2010 that the balloon basket with the two bodies was found by fishermen.
winner
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Individual evidence
- ↑ O. Erbslöh, The German Gordon Bennett Victory 1907 in: Bröckelmann (Ed.), Wir Luftschiffer , Ullstein, Berlin and Vienna 1909, pp. 105–116
- ↑ Significant European Aviation Events 1896–1914 on Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines , accessed May 3, 2019.
- ^ 5th Coupe Aéronautique Gordon Bennett - St. Louis (USA) 1910 , Fédération Aéronautique Internationale
- ^ Accident Prevention July 1996 - Flight Safety Foundation , Volume 53, No. 7, July 1996
- ↑ Tom Hamilton: Tragedy in Belarus ( Memento from August 17, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Country information Belarus of the United States Department of State (English) ( Memento of November 14, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), accessed December 8, 2007
- ↑ Fishermen find bodies of missing balloonists. WELT ONLINE , December 6, 2010, accessed December 8, 2010 .
Web links
- Official website
- Gordon Bennett Cup on the website of the World Air Sports Federation FAI (English)