The BBC and several other news orgs report that Indian textile magnate Vijaypat Singhania (who seems to be a contemporary of Howard Hughes) will attempt in November to set a new hot air balloon altitude record:

The record breaking attempt will take place in November in the western Indian city of Mumbai (Bombay).

Mr Singhania, 66, will have to fly in a pressurised capsule in sub-zero temperatures to achieve a feat that he describes as MI 70K (Mission Impossible 70,000).

The 1.6 million cubic feet capacity balloon, which is being built in UK, is as tall as a 30-storey-building, according to the organisers.

The flight could take up to five hours – three hours to go up, and two hours to come down.

Officials from Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI), which ratifies aviation records, will be present.

“Vijay is going for the biggest feat – this is the heavy weight championship of hot air ballooning,” UK-based adventurer, Brian Milton, who is coordinating the flight told the BBC news site.

Now for my fellow aviation geeks out there, I have a bit more. As impressive an attempt as this will be, it pales by comparison to other high altitude feats. Singhania will be in a pressurized capsule (he’d die within seconds otherwise) but a century ago, similar feats were attempted sans pressurized cabin:

From 1873 the French Society for Aerial Navigation organised several high altitude balloon flights. The flights were to have a scientific purpose and it was also hoped to best Glaisher’s altitude records. The regular pilot was Théodore Sivel and he was assisted by an engineer named Joseph Crocé-Spinelli. On 23 and 24 March 1875 they made a lengthy flight of 22 hours from Paris to Bordeaux, carrying passengers including the Tissandier brothers, Gaston and Albert, who were later to construct the first electrically powered dirigible. The balloon was named the Zenith.

On 15 April 1875, Sivel, Crocé-Spinelli and Gaston Tissandier again took off in the Zenith for another high altitude flight. Although they were not ill-prepared, the aviators were to find that the air is an unforgiving medium. Sivel and Crocé-Spinelli had considered the problem of oxygen starvation, and taken advice from Dr Paul Bert, the Professor of Physiology at Paris. Bert was the leading authority on hypoxia. They had sat in his decompression apparatus at a simulated 20,000 ft. and observed the “disagreeable effects of decompression and the favourable influence of superoxygenated air…. .” As a result, bags of oxygen-air mixture were carried on the Zenith, to be breathed from intermittently. A hose ran from each bag, through a wash bottle to clean the gas. But, tragically, only Tissandier returned alive. His companions had died of asphyxiation (hypoxia). It was a cruel irony that they should have died within arms reach of apparatus that could have saved them.

I too have undergone high altitude training within a decompression chamber set to 20,000 ft. After 3 minutes you can’t do basic math as well and find it difficult to complete a connect-the-dots drawing. As long as we are on the topic of high altitude records and ballooning, I always like to point this one out:

In the 1950s, the U.S. Air Force took on the issue of hazards faced by flight crews bailing out from high-flying aircraft. As part of the research, Project Excelsior used a gondola-toting balloon to carry a pilot high into the stratosphere. From the end of 1959 into mid-1960, Captain Joseph Kittinger took three leaps of faith. He counted on himself, medical experts, protective gear, and a newly devised parachute system to ensure a safe and controlled descent to the ground.

On August 16, 1960, Kittinger jumped his last Excelsior jump, doing so from an air-thin height of 102,800 feet (31,334 meters). From that nearly 20 miles altitude, his tumble toward terra firma took some 4 minutes and 36 seconds. Exceeding the speed of sound during the fall, Kittinger used a small stabilizing chute before a larger, main parachute opened in the denser atmosphere. He safely touched down in barren New Mexico desert, 13 minutes 45 seconds after he vaulted into the void.

The jump set records that still stand today, among them, the highest parachute jump, the longest freefall, and the fastest speed ever attained by a human through the atmosphere. Somewhat in contention is Kittinger’s use of the small parachute for stabilization during his record-setting fall. Roger Eugene Andreyev, a Russian, is touted as holding the world’s free fall record of 80,325 feet (24,483 meters), made on November 1, 1962.

Now that took some balls! Incidentally, during the Coldwar U.S. jumpers trained on precision skydives that would allow them to deliver a nuclear bomb strapped to their backs to a target. Now THAT is a smart bomb.