Flying well into the stratosphere to set a record for the highest manned flight takes guts. Doing it in a glider takes skilled engineers, pilots, and atmospheric scientists, elusive weather conditions, a heap of luck, and yes, guts. After 20-odd years of hard work, the team behind the Perlan Project thinks it finally has everything in place to make it happen. And it just set another record on the way to making it happen.
NASA test pilot Einar Enevoldson first dreamed of soaring 85,000 feet above Earth in 1992. He figured he could ride "stratospheric mountain waves"—wind currents that shoot straight up after hitting a mountain range—to fly higher than even the mighty Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance plane.
Enevoldson and Steve Fossett, who set a slew of aviation and sailing records before his disappearance and death in 2007, soared at 50,720 feet in 2006 with the first iteration of the Perlan glider. That set a record for a manned glider, but Enevoldson hoped to go higher still. He and his team of two dozen volunteers, funded by Airbus, is back with a bigger, better glider, and hopes to beat the Blackbird's record of 85,069 feet.
On September 3, pilots Jim Payne and Morgan Sandercock flew the glider to 52,172, a new world record for gliders.1 They did so high above Argentina's Patagonia region, where the peaks of the Andes and hurricane strength winds provide optimal conditions to beat their benchmark of 51,000 feet. “We can get to 40 or 50,000 feet in other parts of the world, but we can’t get to the edge of space, except for here and maybe over Scandinavia,” says project CEO Ed Warnock.
It may sound almost impossible to achieve such heights without propulsion, but apart from a tow off the ground, Perlan II manages it. The white glider, which weighs just 1,100 pounds when empty, uses an albatross-like wingspan of 84 feet to maintain lift. It requires a fair amount of skill to pull this off, though—gliders descend at about 100 feet a minute if they don't have sufficient lift to maintain flight, so the pilot must find rising columns of air. “It’s not uncommon in good mountain wave areas for air to rise 2,000 to 3,000 feet a minute, so at low altitudes you can rise pretty fast,” says chief pilot Jim Payne.
The two-seat cockpit is pressurized, freeing the pilots from bulky, cumbersome suits. You don't find much oxygen at that altitude, so the pilots breath from bottles with rebreathers. The video above provides a glimpse of what it's like soaring at that altitude.
Naturally, flying that high comes with risks. Atmospheric pressure is just 2 percent that of sea level, so if a seal breaks or the cabin loses pressure, the pilots will be exposed to near-vacuum conditions. And at extreme altitudes, atmospheric waves can break like white water, tossing the lightweight glider around violently. It does have a parachute at the back for emergencies.
Ed Warnock, CEO of the project, admits that balloons and other aircraft have reached greater altitudes, but argues that airplanes flying at such heights use engines and afterburners to achieve a parabolic flight pattern. “We’re going to be able to fly level and maintain our altitude at 90,000 feet,” he says. Pretty impressive for an aircraft that can't make its own power.
As for why, well, science, for one. You can obtain cleaner air samples at altitude in a plane that isn’t pumping out exhaust, and that's good for climate research. But mostly, the Perlan team wants to do it out of a love of aviation, science, and adventure. In other words, because it can.
1Story updated at 9:15 ET on September 5, 2017 to include news of the September 3 record flight.
