Scotland s aviation history celebrated through new RAF website and trail LARGE crowds gathered as an aeronaut ascended in a hydrogen balloon from the garden of George Heriot’s School in Edinburgh on October 5, 1785. Italian Vincenzo Lunardi flew over the Firth of Forth and landed at Coaltown of Callange in the Parish of Ceres, in Fife, and had travelled 46 miles. A commemorative plaque marks the site to this day. In a report from the time by Scots Magazine, it said: “The beauty and grandeur of the spectacle could only be exceeded by the cool, intrepid manner in which the adventurer conducted himself; and indeed he seemed infinitely more at ease than the greater part of his spectators.”