September 14

Joseph Kittinger[i] is a man whose career is peppered with more than his fair share of firsts, a number of them involving balloons[ii]. As an officer in the United States air force, he was assigned to the Aerospace Medical Research Laboratories at the Wright-Patterson air force base in Dayton, Ohio. On August 16, 1960, as part of his assignment, he was required to make a parachute jump from the gondola of a balloon that had risen to an altitude of 102,800 feet. His free fall took longer than four and a half minutes during which he reached a speed of 714 miles per hour. On September 14, 1989, he began what would become the first solo transatlantic crossing in a balloon. He reached Europe on the 18th.
[i] Today Kittinger is, I kid you not, Vice President of Flight Operations for Rosie O'Grady's Flying Circus.
[ii] On December 13 and 14 in 1960, Kittinger and William C. White, participants in the Air Force’s Project Stargazer, rode a balloon to a height of 82,000 feet and remained there for eighteen hours making a series of observations