If one thing is for certain, it is that every year in January, the Schlegels and some other model balloonists come to Gosau at the Dachstein, to freeze certain parts of the body at temperatures around 15°C below zero - and, of course, to fly their model balloons at best weather!
That is, just as inevitable as this traditional pilgrimage to the Austria Alpentrophy
is the fact that the weather there is simply great :-)
Our cat and the blue elephant really seem to enjoy that ;-)
And there is yet another thing that's kind of a tradition at Gosau: Maiden flights of new model balloons. In 1996, it was our penguin, in 2000 it was the Michelin Mascot of Peter Heinzel, and this year, Alexander Schmiauke introduced his new sewed panda bear which he had made together with his brother Andreas.
What makes the panda bear even more special is the fact that it is probably the first model balloon entirely developed with a CAD system. Whilst we had designed our penguin completely by hand and on paper, the Schmiaukes simply had to plot the gore templates.
The model balloon zoo is growing and growing!
With a height of ten meters
(32.8 ft) the panda is just as tall as the penguin, but has a lot more hot air
inside his belly: The black and white envelope has a volume of about 3530 cu ft (100 m³).
What we all didn't know before: This year, the WWF was also present at the Austria Alpentrophy with an own balloon. The "World Wildlife Found" with the panda logo supported the event with the motto "Wealth of the Alps - let's save it together."
Again, we used our D-MINI model balloon to carry our video camera, which brought us some aerial images of our cat.
We also caught Martin Eutermoser's little blue elephant on camera!
Thanks for some of the photos go to the Schmiaukes, and for this cool picture at the left, to Gottfried Koller, one of the organizers of the Austria Alpentrophy.