Wearing NASA spacesuits and flying along the crest of the Andes, pilot Steve Fossett and co-pilot Einar Enevoldson took their ‘Perlan’ high performance research glider on the world’s first stratrospheric glider flight yesterday – surfing the Andean ‘mountain wave’ to a height of 50,699 feet (15,453 m) – while breaking the previous record by 1,662 ft (507m)
That’s an astounding record to have broken, most comercial airliners cruse in around 33,000 feet and they have thrust. The glider had but the heat from the ground to give it energy to make it up so high. In fact…
During the course of the flight (primarily within a 60 mile radius of El Calafate near the border of Argentina and Chile), the American pair found themselves flying well above commercial air traffic – a fact received with bemusement by pilots of passenger jets under the same air traffic control. Steve Fossett recalled: “I couldn’t understand the Chilean controller describing us in Spanish to the airline pilot – but I understood the answer by the pilot: ‘Wow’.”
Wow is right! If you were asked to choose a role model Steve Fossett would be a good choice. For more info on this amazing man take a look at his write up on Wikipedia.
[via Flight Nest]
New world glider altitude record set by Fossett and Enevoldson in Argentina
Not all that long ago, like a month, I bought my wife an iPod Nano 2 GB. Both of us have PCs as our primary computers. I have a Mac but its a heavily upgraded blue and white G3 (now a G4 500 MHz thank you!) so I never expected to use the Nano on it. The Nano was un boxed (nice packaging) and instructions were read. It was charged over night and the next day she used it. The first day she only got three hours of life before it was saying ‘feed me!’. I figured that it needed to be run all the way down and the charged to set the battery life chip in it but the next time she used it it had the same life span. Weird. Ok, we took it back and exchanged it for a different one. We did the same thing with the same results. Three hours of use and then flat. Not finding any info on the web about this i decided to give it a shot on the old Mac. I hooked it up and it did it’s thing. I’ll say this, if you have a Mac the Nano integrates much better with it than the a PC. Not all that amazing but I figure I’d mention it because after I did that I was able to run it for 10 hours before it did an auto shut off. The music was played at 70% volume through the stock headphones with the same music as my wife had originally loaded on it. Did being attached to a Mac somehow jolt the energy management settings into life? Just weird luck? Has anyone else had this problem? Could this be a good reason to return it once again and just wait for the new 
I love the idea of a toy bank that gives you a visual analogy of how much you’ve been saving. Even if the bank is set to use 500 yen (about $5US) it would still work if you fed it dollar coins or even quarters.
