Frenchman ready for daredevil dive
Frenchman Michel Fournier begins his assault on four extraordinary world records this weekend. The retired army officer will attempt to make the highest ever parachute jump - from 40 kilometres up (131,200 feet). In so doing, he will fall further and faster than any jumper before him, reaching supersonic speeds between 1,200 and 1,600 kilometres per hour (between 745 and 1,000 mph).
Just to get into position to make the attempt he will need to break the world altitude record for a balloon flight. Fournier is now waiting for the right conditions for launch over Saskatchewan, Canada. "Michel is ready and he is feeling great," project spokeswoman Diane de Robianot told BBC News Online. "If the weather is good, he will go on Sunday - but we can't say yet if the conditions will be just right."
Special techniques
The 58-year-old Frenchman is calling it Le Grand Saut - The Super Jump. He has been working towards his goal for more than 10 years and will rely on state of the art technology to take him up safely and bring him down alive. A British launch team left London on Friday to prepare the enormous helium envelope that will take Fournier high into the stratosphere.
The canopy, designed and manufactured by the famous balloonist Don Cameron and his company in Bristol in the west of England, weighs three-quarters of a tonne and will swell to more than half a million cubic metres at its maximum altitude. "It's astonishing that anyone is prepared to do this," said Hannah Cameron of Cameron Balloons. "And it has presented a number of problems for us. For example, we couldn't glue the fabric of the balloon together because of the extreme cold up there. It would just come apart. We've had to use specialist welding techniques on the fabric", which Cameron describes as a plastic not unlike the material used to make freezer bags.
Update (9/21/02): According to the official website, the launch has been delayed until next May (you know, when Canadians actually begin to see snowmelt). Sigh. Something to look forward to, I suppose.
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