BALLOON'S WILD TRIP

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 656, 7 May 1929, Page 2

BALLOON'S WILD TRIP

GERMANS BLOWN ACROSS NORTH SLA

END IN ABERDEENSHIRE What was intended to be a short demonstration trip in a balloon—begs, jat 9 a.m. on Sunday near Leipzig., ! ended at 4 o’clock two days later, q, a Scottish mountain side, i The deflating mechanism failed 1 the three men m the balloon were car. l ied by a 50-niile-an-hour gale acro» s the North Sea, unable to control their } craft. A tree in Aberdeenshire ended the.;, ' adventures. j Herr Rohr, one of the balloonists, l told a graphic story of their joarner ! to the "Sunday News." | "The weather was extremely coy ; when we set out,” he said, •the-e being about 10 degrees of frost. "Suddenly a great wind sprang nPi and we were driven in a northerly direction over the Hartz Mountains.' "We tried to land by pulling the deflator strings, bu the mechanism jammed and we found our attempt fruitless. “We were swept out to sea by the gale and when near the coast of Eng. land we were again blown out to see' “We kept north until we saw the lights of a fairly large town which we later learned was Aberdeen. We were then swept inland, the wind getting very intense. “Through the darkness ahead we could see §no\v -covered hills, and the peril of crashing came forcibly to our minds. “We threw out all our ballast; still we did not rise. We threw over our cameras, our instruments, everything we could cut loose; still we could not rise above the hills. We bumped. “The wind was too stormy for a grapnel to be used and for a distance of several miles our progress was marked by a series of humps against hillsides and trees until about 4 o’clock, when the basket caught in a tree. “The basket toppled over, practically uprooting the tree, and we fell out.” In the forced landing Herr Pheilecke hurt his ankle. It was still dark; all were numb with cold and shaken by the fall. Nevertheless they set out to seek shelter, ploughing across fields and scaling walls, the two friends assisting the injured mau. They finally reached a farmhouse and were taken to Torphins.