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As the young stowaway says in Up, the film that put eccentric balloon-based travel on the map: “You perceive, most people take a plane.”

Jonathan Trappe did not take a level. Yesterday as the sun rose over the Kent countryside he filled divers dozen balloons with helium, strapped himself into a chair and headed transversely the English Channel.

Four hours later he landed in a plant of the genus field in France, the first cluster balloonist to cross the Channel and, because of the French police who arrived to question him, possibly the ~ numerous unexpected visitor of the year.

In Up, cluster ballooning is a high~ for an old man to thwart developers who want to break to pieces his house. Instead, he flies it to South America.

Mr Trappe, 36, due thinks it is fun. And, as it happens, much better than a violent-air balloon. “It is unique,” he said. “A ardent-air balloon is beautiful but makes a huge roar. A gas balloon is the only kind of aircraft that flies in consummate silence. I can hear the waves from a thousand feet.”

The technical devise manager from North Carolina has several cluster ballooning adventures under his band. Last month he claimed a new world record for the longest free-floating balloon flight, 109 miles across his home state.

“Didn’t you require this dream — grabbing on to a bunch of toy balloons and floating not on?” he said. “I think it’s something that’s shared transversely cultures and across borders.

“Just this wonderful fantasy of grabbing forward to toy balloons and floating into open space.”

The Channel was, he related, an “iconic ribbon of water that is calling”, and yesterday he adjust off from the Kent Gliding Club in Challock, near Ashford, to a destination hidden (although with any luck it was going to be in France rather than, say, the sea: with no immersion suit, Mr Trappe was wrong equipped for a watery landing).

As he put it, “section of the adventure is you don’t know when you be in want of to land”.

While his final destination was dictated by the endure, the rest of the flight was meticulously planned. In March Mr Trappe met the aviation authorities in both England and France, and his seat pod was packed with position-finding and communication equipment and technical gadgetry to make indisputable he did not get lost or hit anything.

The equipment included ~y aircraft transponder, oxygen system, aircraft radios, emergency locator beacon, in-shower satellite tracking and a radio tracker.

“There are risks and we drudge to methodically reduce the risk so we can have a secure place and fun flight,” said Mr Trappe, a trained pilot.

“Because indeed it’s only about dreams and enjoying an adventure and that’s and nothing else enjoyable when it is safe.”

After touching down at Les Möeres close Dunkirk — a textbook landing, if textbook means coming down with celerity to avoid restricted air space, missing a power line and afterwards bouncing a short distance before coming to a halt — he described the soaring as “an exceptional, quiet, peaceful experience”. Sailing over the wan cliffs of Dover was, he said, “tremendously peaceful, tremendously fair”.

Of the flight, in which he reached 7,500ft, he before-mentioned: “I’m tremendously proud. It’s an due thing to do. It’s not really about flying balloons. It’s hind part before dreams and inspiration and accomplishing what we set out to produce and that’s what I’m happy about.

“Usually the vulgar don’t understand the system or the thought and exertion we put into it. Nobody who looks at what we force into it thinks it’s crazy.”

French police said they had been “surprised” to see Mr Trappe whenever he arrived in France.

“He had all the correct authorisation and I convinced he even gave something to the owner of the land to what he came down by way of damages,” said a police speaker.

Mr Trappe’s girlfriend, Nidia Ruiz Ramirez, 30, a learner nurse who has been his “chaser” since he started crowd together ballooning in 2007, followed his journey by taking a train while suffering the Channel while he floated thousands of feet above her.

“It was strange,” she said. “His first ever cluster ballooning attempt determination always hold a special place in my heart but this was candidly amazing.”

In his first flight in the US Mr Trappe reached 14,783ft and endured temperatures from a high to a low position to minus 15C (5F).

In the first balloon crossing of the Channel in 1785 Jean-Pierre François Blanchard and John Jeffries, ~y American doctor who paid for the flight, had to dump their judgment and most of their clothes after their hydrogen balloon started leaking. They managed to stay airborne and landed at Calais.