DROPPED FROM A BALLOON.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XIII, Issue VIII, 25 August 1894, Page 178

DROPPED FROM A BALLOON.

Those who have been near to death by drowning have told how it feels to be drowned, while we have beard a man tell how he felt when hung. It has remained for an enterprising reporter to secure from a professional * balloonist ’ an account of the sensation of being dropped from a balloon. The * balloonist’ in question is a woman, and this is what she said :

* The sensations are diametrically opposite to the general idea that prevails among people who never made such attempts ; _ instead of feeling yourself lifted bodily and swiftly np into space, yon have a realistic sense of staying just exactly where yon were, and of the earth falling away and downward from you. This feeling continues just so long as your balloon continues to rise; when it comes to a standstill, you realize for the first time that you have moved upward, and, of course, the wonderful panorama spread out below you gives you instant advice of the immense altitude you have attained. The descent from such a tremendous height by the parachute is another thing, though it, too, involves something of the same sensation, reversed. You seem to see the earth ascending to meet you, but your progress downward is so gentle and so much more deliberate that you cannot but know you are going down. This fact is forcibly impressed on your mind when you cut loose from the balloon. The descent, then, until the parachute fills, is as sheer and sudden and direct as any unpremeditated fall you ever experienced, ranging in depth, according to the volume of wind, from twenty-five to one hundred feet, and this is the most unpleasant part of my business.. The same precaution of holding the breath is as imperatively necessary in this first fall as it is when you are submerged in the water, and in default of such precaution, you are equally liable to strangulation and death as in the water.’

In response to a question as to the longest jump she bad made in her career as an aeronaut, Mrs Homing said that in 1890, at Baker’s Beach, just inside the Golden Gate, at San Francisco, she made a perfectly successful jump from an altitude determined by mathematical instruments to be just a fraction oyer two and a half miles. She alighted in the bay, but being fully protected with a life-preserver (which she always dons when exhibiting near rivers, lakes, or other large bodies of water), she was all right when picked up by the boatmen who went instantly to her relief. Mrs Homing says, * The easiest place in which to land is a body of water or a ploughed field, but of the two I prefer the field.’