On this day in 2016, Russian adventurer Fedor Konyukhov set a new FAI absolute world record for the fastest circumnavigation of the globe in a combined (hybrid) hot-air and helium gas balloon, after travelling almost 34,000km in 268 hours and 20 minutes.
Ninety years ago, on 27 May 1931, Swiss physicist and balloonist Auguste Piccard made history by becoming - together with his co-pilot Paul Kipfer - one of the first two humans to enter the stratosphere.
Safe within the pressurised cabin he invented, Piccard flew his enormous gas balloon to a height of 15,781m above the earth, setting an FAI world record in the process.
Today, the FAI commemorates his incredible feat, which was a major turning point for both aviation and space travel.
On 25 May 2011, German balloonist Wilhelm (Willi) Eimers set a new FAI world record for duration of a flight in a 250-400m3 gas balloon.
Eimers took off from Gladbeck in Germany and spent 23 hours, 18 minutes, and 30 seconds in the air before landing in Steinfurt, Germany.
The world record he set on that day 10 years ago still stands today.
It’s 60 years to the day since US Naval Lieutenant Commander Malcom D. Ross set two FAI ballooning world records by soaring to an altitude of 34,668m above the ground.
Accompanied by Lieutenant Commander Victor G. Prather, a medical officer from the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, Ross took off from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Antietam the Gulf of Mexico on the morning of May 4, 1961.
