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12 September 2003

Starting order

At the General briefing we were told the start is almost certainly going to be tomorrow. The weather forecasts for tomorrow evening are ... a clear sky, wind from the north-east, possibly turning to the west later on.

Tomorrow at noon there will be another meteo briefing and by 13:00h the first balloons must be ready to be filled. The filling will happen in groups of 4 balloons; Philippe and Ronny are in the first group, Bob and Benoît have to be ready to start filling their balloon by 14:00h.

Why this division in groups? They are using liquid helium. The advantage of this is that only one tanker is needed to fill the 17 balloons. On the other hand, however, the gas has to pass an evaporator and therefore has to run continuously. So a very coordinated filling scheme has to be followed.

The take-offs are planned from 21:00h onwards and normally each team has 2 tracking-divices on board to make it possible to follow the balloons via internet.

And then - finally - the starting order:

01. Krebs / Vollenweider
02. Villey-Desmeserets / Buron Pilâtre
03. De Cock / Van Havere
04. Akerstedt / Balkedal
05. Sullivan / Levin
06. Folkes / Butter
07. Stürzlinger / Fürstner
08. Eimers / Landsmann
09. Stoll / Najer
10. Leÿs / Leÿs
11. Berben / Siméons
12. Vitanza / Padelt
13. Wagner / Scherzer
14. Schmöhl / Göhrmann
15. Frieden / Zeberli
16. Abruzzo / Johnson
17. Brachtendorf / Huthmacher

Indeed, as you can see the Polish are not present...

To be continued...

Luc

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