Historedia
Episode 3 of 3

First untethered hot air balloon flight

When
21 November 1783
Where
Garden of the Château de la Muette, Bois de Boulogne
Part of
First Untethered Hot Air Balloon Flight

De Rozier and d'Arlandes flew a Montgolfier hot air balloon from the Château de la Muette garden on 21 November 1783, before the king.

After several tethered tests to gain experience of controlling the balloon, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent, marquis d'Arlandes, made the first untethered flight in a Montgolfier hot air balloon on 21 November 1783. They took off from the garden of the Château de la Muette in the Bois de Boulogne, in the presence of King Louis XVI. One account gives the departure time as 1:54 p.m., another as around 2 p.m. Both sources describe the flight as the first crewed free balloon flight and the first confirmed human flight of any kind.

Sources

  1. François Laurent d'Arlandes Wikipedia, revision of 2025-10-16
  2. Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier Wikipedia, revision of 2026-06-04

Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.