Flight Altitude Record
This listing of flight altitude records are the records set for the highest aeronautical flights conducted in the atmosphere, set since the age of ballooning.
Some, but not all of the records were certified by the non-profit international aviation organization, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI). One reason for a lack of 'official' certification was that the flight occurred prior to the creation of the FAI.
For clarity, the 'Fixed-wing aircraft' table is sorted by FAI-designated categories as determined by whether the record-creating aircraft left the ground by its own power (category: 'Altitude'), or whether it was first carried aloft by a carrier-aircraft prior to its record setting event (category: 'Altitude gain', or formally "Altitude Gain, Aeroplane Launched from a Carrier Aircraft"). Other sub-categories describe the airframe, and more importantly, the powerplant type (since rocket-powered aircraft can have greater altitude abilities than those with air-breathing engines).
An essential requirement for the creation of an 'official' altitude record is the employment of FAI-certified observers present during the record-setting flight. Thus several records noted are unofficial due to the lack of such observers.
These aviation-related lists are incomplete; you can help by expanding them with more items referenced to reliable sources.
Read more about Flight Altitude Record: Balloons, Gliders, Fixed-wing Aircraft, Rotorcraft, Paper Airplanes, Cannon Rounds
Famous quotes containing the words flight, altitude and/or record:
“The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out.... Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its “great intellects.””
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of human history.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)