It had been a long wait, after the 2020 edition of the Coupe A\u00e9ronautique Gordon Bennett had been postponed to 2021.<\/p>\n
Due to the possibility of another postponement or even a cancellation, motivations were not too high to pull off a big one, so we kept our preparations and publicity to the absolute minimum. Which proved quite relaxing, actually! ;-)<\/p>\n
Our expectations were low as well, but that’s also a good thing, because you leave a lot of space for positive surprises. And so, we really enjoyed all the build-up of the event, from check-in to general briefing, opening ceremony to inflation. Everything went super smooth and we really were in for a great flight!<\/p>\n
Which it definitely was… for the first 20 hours at least. Later, different reasons led to a relatively sudden but safe landing… we were just not 100 percent sure our strategy would definitely work out as planned (which was the same strategy as the winning team’s, by the way). Well… we learn with every flight, don’t we!<\/p>\nngg_shortcode_0_placeholder\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It had been a long wait, after the 2020 edition of the Coupe A\u00e9ronautique Gordon Bennett had been postponed to 2021. Due to the possibility of another postponement or even a cancellation, motivations were not too high to pull off a big one, so we kept our preparations and publicity to the absolute minimum. Which<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8147,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[19,8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alifeofballooning.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8148"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alifeofballooning.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alifeofballooning.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alifeofballooning.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alifeofballooning.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8148"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.alifeofballooning.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8150,"href":"https:\/\/www.alifeofballooning.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8148\/revisions\/8150"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alifeofballooning.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alifeofballooning.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alifeofballooning.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alifeofballooning.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}