AND WHERE WAS PASSEPARTOUT? :

After spending millions, Fosset finally got a lot of hot air : Floating around the world was pointless, self-indulgent, and dumb (Jonathan Lewis, July 10 2002, Sydney Morning Herald)

Let's look a little more closely at what Steve Fossett has done.

He's circumnavigated the globe, which, let's face it, is hardly a groundbreaking achievement. After all, the first circumnavigation of the globe took place between 1519 and 1522 when Ferdinand Magellan led an expedition that sailed around the world. Magellan was killed en route when he managed to start a religious war in the Philippines, which is something that Fossett has managed to avoid doing. (We can be thankful for small mercies.)

Second, he has achieved this earth-shattering breakthrough in a hot-air balloon. Now, hot-air balloons are not exactly new technology either. The Montgolfier brothers were the first to successfully fly a hot-air balloon and they managed that way back in 1783.

So what Steve Fossett has done, in effect, is use 219-year-old technology to do something that was first done 480 years ago, an analogous situation to, say, contracting bubonic plague while listening to a Mozart opera. This would lead me to think that perhaps there's a reason why Steve Fossett has become the first to do what he's done, and the reason is that it's a really stupid thing to do.

Personally, I'd rather he'd gone to the opera. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 9, 2002 11:32 AM