The last three weeks of December were particularly interesting and the presence of Philippe Athuil, a top French pilot residing in the United States, made it possible to break eleven American records and one world record, the speed on out-and-return 1.000km at nearly 215 km/h on December 12th. All flights are downloadable from the OLC. Most American records broken by Philippe were previously held by Jim Payne. Jim was also with us in Bariloche as the pilot of Dennis Tito for training purpose within the Perlan project, with a DG 1001M. I was personally very much impressed by these two personalities, on one hand a multimillionaire Californian, 72, who didn’t hesitate to spend 20 million US$ to buy the first space tourist ticket for one flight of 7 days and 54 revolutions around our planet in a Soyouz space ship, who now finances a project to go freezing his buttocks in a glider at 27.000 m and who wants to be the first to go to Mars, and on the other hand an ex fighter pilot, jet pilot, active test pilot in activity, glider pilot of the highest level and exemplary professionalism. Follow on http://perlanproject.org/ as well as the conference held in Bariloche December 6th http://perlanproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Perlan-Arg-Espanol.pdf .
