Highest

The Red Army balloon Stratostat, U. S. R. R. shot up from Moscow's airdrome one windless morning last week with a neatness that contrasted happily with eight previously bungled attempts. Up, up it sailed until it became a tiny silver bubble, then a pinpoint hanging in the sky. After about two hours the ground station received a radio flash from the Stratostat: it had passed Piccard's world record of 10 mi., was still climbing! Another three hours, and the U. S. S. R. had pulled itself up to 11.8 mi., was ready to come down. The descent went as smoothly as the ascent, the U. S. S. R. landing lightly in a meadow about 60 mi. from Moscow. Fully half the 80,000 population of Kolomna, carefully primed by Dictator Stalin's propagandists to witness a great scientific conquest by their nation, poured across the Moscow River to greet the aeronauts. Pilot George Prokofiev mounted the gondola, harangued the crowd with a lecture in which he credited the flight's success entirely to the Proletarian Revolution and the Communist Party. His companions, Ernest Birnbaum and Constantin Godunov, declared the balloon's scientific apparatus had worked perfectly. They found the sky at 11 mi. altitude a deep, soft violet ; they had been unable to detect the earth's curvature.

P: A civilian pilot named Gustave Le Moine last week took an airplane up from Yillacoublay Airfield, military airdrome near Paris. Two hours later he came down with a new world record for airplane altitude: 45,264 ft. (Old record: Capt. Cyril F. Uwins' 43,976 ft.).

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