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A coming event promises to be
one of the milestones in the decades-long history of RE/MAX ballooning. The
three-day RE/MAX Balloon Celebration will open Inventing Flight's historic 2003
Centennial of Flight festivities in Dayton, Ohio, hometown of aviation pioneers
Orville and Wilbur Wright.
The Dayton event organizer,
Inventing Flight, named RE/MAX a founding sponsor of the Centennial
Celebration. The 17-day event is a tribute to the Wright Brothers' epoch-making
flight and the first 100 years of aviation. Former senator and astronaut John
Glenn is Inventing Flight's Secretary General of the Centennial Celebration.
RE/MAX will lead off the
events with the RE/MAX Balloon Celebration, July 4-6, 2003, at the United States
Air Force Museum, the oldest and largest military aviation museum in the world.
Because balloons predated powered aircraft by more than a century, the RE/MAX
extravaganza will be a fitting prologue to Inventing Flight's recognition of
modern aviation.
Balloon activities will begin
Friday with a July 4 balloon glow, accompanied by a fireworks display hosted by
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
More than 150 hot air balloons
will gather for Saturday and Sunday morning mass ascensions. Among both
commercial and special-shape balloons will be red, white and blue balloons from
the RE/MAX Balloon Fleet.
Throughout the weekend, about
20 gas balloons will launch in an invitation-only "race" to Kitty Hawk, N.C.,
site of the Wright Brothers' first powered flight, Dec. 17, 1903.
Known worldwide for its hot
air balloon logo and "Above the Crowd!®" slogan, RE/MAX became involved with
ballooning in 1978, when the first RE/MAX
Balloon flew in the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta. Since then, the network's
fleet has grown to nearly 90 hot air balloons, the largest balloon fleet in the
world.
RE/MAX International has held
its own hot air balloon festival and sponsored the 1999 RE/MAX
Cup National Gas Balloon Race. In 1998-99, Team RE/MAX
Ballooning launched an unsuccessful but historic expedition to be the first
to fly around the world in a stratospheric balloon.
Veteran balloonist Dave
Liniger, Chairman and Co-founder of RE/MAX International, has selected
celebrated aviator and balloonist Joe Kittinger as his co-host of the RE/MAX
Balloon Celebration. Best known of Kittinger's many aeronautical achievements is
his record parachute jump of 102,800 feet, made from a balloon he piloted
himself.
RE/MAX® Balloon Celebration Agenda
Inventing Flight: Dayton 2003
The United States Air Force Museum
The Wright Brothers
"How We Made the First Flight," by Orville Wright
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