AERONAUTICS: Seven Miles Up

Sadi Lecointe, French airman, has been 923 feet 6 inches farther from Earth than anyone that ever lived on Earth. After elaborate training preparations (TIME, July 23) he broke Lieutenant Macready’s (U. S. A.) world’s altitude flying record above Villacoublay, France.

Macready’s mark was 34,509.5 feet. Lecointe rose 35,432 feet (6.773 miles). Mt. Everest, Earth’s highest peak, measures 29,002 feet. In 1901 two Germans ascended 34,500 feet in a balloon, a standing record.

Lecointe climbed for an hour and twenty minutes in a Nieuport-Delace plane with Hispano motor 454. It took him 35 minutes to coast back to Earth. He wore electric-heated fur clothing, breathed from an oxygen bottle above 5,000 meters, used benzol fuel for the first 6,000 meters and above that gasoline. His thermometer broke at 40° below zero, Fahrenheit, and a broken oxygen bottle robbed him of one or two thousand meters more. He said: “If the weather’s fair I may try it again.”