The race was on. It had started just before the first edition of Quest for Adventure was published in 1981, with an attempt by Maxie Anderson and Don Ida who set out from Luxor in Egypt and travelled 2,800 miles before being forced to land near the village of Murchpur in India, after their canopy had sprung a leak. The circumnavigation was only completed in the spring of 1999, eighteen years later. Arguably this was the last of the great firsts, a challenge on the same scale as the first ascent of Everest or reaching the Poles.
The very concept of ballooning, of trusting one’s life to a huge bag of gas or hot air and the vagaries of the winds, has a romance unequalled by any other adventurous activity. True, technology was to play an important part in eventual success, in the design of balloon and capsule, and with the use of satellite met. reports and communications. However, the final arbiter remained the pattern of the winds and the balloonists’ ability to read them, and their only steering aid was to gain or lose height to try to catch the wind direction they sought.
The people involved were also interesting in their different ways. It is undoubtedly a rich person’s sport – Anderson, Abruzzo, Branson and Fossett all fall into that bracket. But wealth was not an essential, as shown by the team who finally succeeded – Bertrand Piccard, a Swiss psychiatrist, and Brian Jones, an ex-Warrant Officer in the Royal Air Force.
As with all human advances it was an evolutionary process with each group learning from the experience of their predecessors. After Double Eagle, flown by Max Anderson, Ben Abruzzo and Larry Newman, made the first balloon crossing of the Atlantic, Abruzzo and Newman began to consider the greater challenge of the Pacific, crossing it with Ron Clark and Rocky Aoki in November 1981. They set out from Japan in a huge helium balloon on 9 November to land, four days later, on a wooded mountainside near Covello, California.
Up to this time all the long record-breaking flights had been made by helium balloons and although hot-air balloonists were also stretching their limits they were still a long way behind in terms of performance. In 1980 their record distance was still only 480 miles. It was in 1986 that Per Lindstrand, a balloonist from Sweden, phoned Richard Branson, who had just captured the Blue Riband for his speed boat crossing of the Atlantic, to suggest he undertook an even greater challenge, the first crossing of the Atlantic in a hot-air balloon. This would mean flying five times further than anyone had flown a hot-air balloon before and staying in the air three times longer.
Lindstrand, who had been a fighter pilot in the Swedish Air Force, had stumbled across ballooning as a result of a ski accident that left him with a leg in plaster and grounded from flying. He bet his fellow officers that, if he couldn’t walk in the next month, he’d fly across the airfield. To win the bet he stitched together some surplus parachute canopies, welded a frame and some burners and put together his first hot-air balloon, which he duly flew over the airfield. It triggered a career both as a balloonist and balloon manufacturer, based initially in Ireland then moving to Oswestry in England. He was planning to build the biggest hot-air balloon ever to carry all the fuel needed for the burners and then to fly at 30,000 feet to use the jet stream to blast them across the Atlantic.
Branson was intrigued, commenting:
‘As I studied Per’s proposal, I realised with amazement that this vast balloon, a huge ungainly thing which would swallow the Royal Albert Hall without showing a bulge, was actually intended to cross the Atlantic Ocean in far less time than our Atlantic Challenger boat with its 4,000-horsepower engine. Per reckoned on a flying time of under two days, with an average speed of ninety knots compared with the boat’s speed of just under forty knots. It would be like driving along in the fast lane of the motorway only to be overtaken by the Royal Albert Hall travelling twice as fast.’
Branson invited Per to come and see him, confessed to finding it difficult to understand all the technical details of Per’s plan, but asked him whether he had any children. On learning that he did, Branson stood up shook him by the hand and told him, ‘I’ll come, but I’d better learn how to fly one of these things first’.
It was to be the start of a long partnership. Richard Branson is undoubtedly an adventurer. An entrepreneurial and innovative businessman, happy to take risks with scant regard for convention, he is certainly the most colourful and arguably the most engaging of all the post-war entrepreneurs. He came from a close-knit, loving and reasonably comfortably off family background but had a difficult schooling because of his dyslexia. His start as a college dropout selling cut-price tapes led to the founding of his company, Virgin Records. This was followed by his expansion into so many different fields, most famously Virgin Atlantic Airways, that led to his David and Goliath battle with British Airways. He undoubtedly enjoys his high profile, as a showman delighting in the razzmatazz of show business, and is happy to use his wealth to pursue adventurous projects that attract him. These are of the record-breaking kind: winning the Blue Riband on the Atlantic and being first to cross the Atlantic in a hot-air balloon. They were also adventures that he could take part in at a low skill level and ones that would offer a positive commercial advantage. What better advertising hoarding could you get than a giant balloon?
On the Atlantic crossing Chay Blyth had been skipper; now Per Lindstrand was in charge. Branson did his best to get fit and learn the basics but this was within the frame of a demanding business life of meetings, deals and financial crises. The miracle was that he had the energy and drive to pursue these external adventures and even get his balloon licence after a week’s intensive course in Spain.
All too often there seems to be an element of the unexpected, almost chaos, in everything to do with ballooning. Perhaps, in part, it is the nature of the sport itself, of trusting this canopy of heated air to the whims of the weather. At take off the balloon, still anchored to the ground like a gigantic Gulliver tied down by Lilliputians, is vulnerable to every breath of wind. Every return to earth is a crash landing, once again hostage to the force of the wind.
The take off in Maine, on 1 July 1987, was no exception. The wind was building up as Branson and Lindstrand climbed aboard. Inside the womb-like capsule, they were unaware that in the launch one of the tethering cables had caught round two of their propane fuel tanks and had torn them off as the balloon bucked in the wind. Freed of the weight, the balloon tore even harder at the remaining cables and shot into the sky trailing a couple of cables with bags holding 400 pounds of sand still attached.
Like it or not, their voyage had started. Per had to climb out on to the gondola to cut the bags free as they soared into the sky towards the jet stream. Soon they were being carried along at over 100 miles per hour, towards the dawn. Except for one storm their journey was fast and furious all the way across the Atlantic, reaching speeds of a 160 miles per hour, although in the gondola there was little sensation of movement. They were borne along in the racing mass of air.
It took them just twenty-nine hours to cross the Atlantic to the coast of Northern Ireland. The challenge then was to land safely and the very speed of their crossing posed a problem for they still had three full tanks of fuel. Per wanted to get rid of these before making a landing and therefore turned off the burners in order to descend and find an empty field in which to dump the tanks. Unfortunately, an eddy of wind caught them and drove them down to hit the ground while still travelling at around thirty-five miles per hour. They were dragged bouncing across the field and in the process lost all their fuel canisters and radio antenna. Then, with the loss of weight, they were catapulted back into the sky. They narrowly missed hitting a house and some power lines, had just one small reserve fuel tank left and the gondola was spinning like a top, thus closing down the mouth of the balloon so the burners could no longer heat the air inside. They had lost all their power and were in semi-darkness inside the gondola. It was chaos.
Deprived of the heat from the burners, the balloon was now falling. Branson climbed out of the hatch and with his knife hacked at the cable that had snagged causing the gondola to spin. The balloon was just 300 feet above the ground. It was at last stable but travelling fast because of the wind.
‘I’ll try to put her down on the shore,’ shouted Lindstrand.
But as they dropped through the thick grey cloud they saw with horror that they had already cleared Northern Ireland and were heading out over a storm-wracked Irish Sea. Lindstrand was trying to juggle between bursts of heat from the burners and releasing hot air from the top of the balloon to manage a controlled descent. Branson had put on his life jacket and collected their rubber dinghy which was attached to him by a cord. Per had been too busy trying to control the balloon even to get his life jacket on.
They hit the sea and were being hauled, bouncing over the waves with the capsule on its side. It was time to separate from the balloon. This was a matter of pulling the lever that activated explosive charges in the retaining bolts that would tree the gondola from the cables leading up to the balloon. But this was easier said than done as they were being hurled all over the place and couldn’t reach the lever. At last Per managed to get there and heaved on the red lever. Nothing happened. The charge had failed.
‘Get out, Richard,’ Per shouted. ‘We’ve got to get the hell out of this.’
Per was out first, squeezing up through the hatchway, followed by Branson. They were being towed through the bucking black angry waves by the canopy of the balloon acting like a giant chute in the wind. Clinging on to the cables on top of the angled gondola, buffeted by the wind, drenched in spray, it was a terrifying, out-of-control situation. A bigger gust started to lift them.
‘We’ve got to jump,’ shouted Per and leapt for the sea. The gondola immediately bucked higher with the loss of his weight. Branson froze as the raging sea dropped away from him. He was quickly too high to jump.
Per was down in the ocean without a life jacket or dinghy and Branson was in the gondola, rocketing up into the sky, with all too little knowledge of how to bring it back down again. In their fast flight across the Atlantic, Per had done most of the flying. Branson describes his predicament:
‘I climbed back into the capsule. It was now the right way up and I felt reassured to see the screens and controls the way they had been as we crossed the Atlantic. I ran through the options: I could parachute into the sea, where nobody would be likely to find me and I could drown; or I could sail up into the darkening sky and try a night landing, should I be lucky enough to reach land. I picked up the microphone, but the radio was still dead. I had no contact with the outside world.’
It was worse for Per as he watched the balloon vanish into the cloud. Several miles from shore, his chances of swimming to land were minimal, as were his chances of being spotted by a passing boat or plane – a swimmer in rough seas is barely visible from a distance. Fortunately Per was a strong swimmer, since his father had made him swim daily, winter and summer, in the cold lakes of Sweden. He has a fair amount of body fat and, perhaps most important of all, a sanguine resilient nature. This was just one more crisis to come through.
Branson’s first reaction was to parachute. He even climbed out of the gondola and prepared to jump, but at the last minute decided against it. The last time he had jumped had been with other skydivers. He had pulled the wrong release and had jettisoned his main chute. One of the other divers had pulled the reserve chute for him. He was now on his own in the cloud, 8,000 feet above the sea. And even if he managed to get down, what then? He could well drown.
He changed his mind and resolved to keep flying. He reckoned he had about thirty minutes of fuel left. Something might happen. Back in the gondola he took off the parachute, joggled the burners on and off to make a smooth descent and peered through the porthole into the opaque cloud. At last he came out of the cloud, saw storm-flecked waves beneath him, but he also picked out a helicopter.
He got the balloon down, this time made his jump and a few minutes later was hauled out of the sea. A British frigate, HMS Argonaut, just happened to be in the area with a helicopter in the air. But where was Per? He spent altogether two hours in the bitterly cold sea before being picked up by a couple of youngsters in an inflatable, guided in by the helicopter whose lifting winch had jammed. The Atlantic crossing had been a superb achievement but they had both been very very lucky to survive.
But the risk game is addictive. Just a few years later, they were contemplating the inevitable next challenge – to cross the Pacific by hot-air balloon. Once again there were false starts. Their first attempt from Japan in 1989 ended in farce when the balloon fabric, which had been laid out on the ground prior to inflation, delaminated with a night’s frost. They returned in 1991 and had an eventful, nail-biting flight. They had a good take-off but the winds of the jet stream were so strong they had difficulty in pushing up into it, their huge canopy being snatched by the wind and trailing out in front of them. It was as if they were bumping up against a solid ceiling of moving air. Then, with the balloon accelerating as if hauled by a thousand wild horses ahead of the gondola, which was tilted on its side, suddenly they were part of the jet stream, travelling at the same speed as the racing air, at peace with the elements.
But not for long. It was time to drop their first empty fuel tank. They descended out of the jet stream. Per pushed the button and suddenly the capsule lurched sideways to an angle of about fifteen degrees to the horizon. Could some of the cables have parted? They had a video camera that looked straight down and, re-running it, Branson saw that instead of just one empty canister falling, there were three. They had jettisoned two full canisters, the result of faulty wiring on the explosive bolts and had lost half their fuel only 1,000 miles into their flight.
But they had a more immediate problem. With the sudden loss of weight the balloon was careering out of control upwards. They must stop its climb as it approached 42,000 feet, as this was the ceiling for their pressurised cabin. Higher than that and the windows could burst out, the instant decompression killing them in seconds. They stabilised at 42,500 feet, and edged back down to a safer altitude.
Per, exhausted, cat-napped on the floor, leaving Richard in charge, with the challenging task of keeping the huge balloon in the narrow corridor of the jet stream’s aerial travelator.
‘Even at this amazing speed, it still takes an hour to fly 200 miles and we had 6,000 of them to fly. I tried not to be daunted by the length of the journey ahead, but concentrated on each fifteen-minute section. I was desperately trying not to fall asleep. My head kept dropping forward and I pinched myself to keep awake. I suddenly saw an eerie light on the glass dome above us. I looked up and marvelled at it: it was white and orange and flickering. Then I yelled: it was fire. I squinted at it and realised that burning lumps of propane were tumbling all around the glass dome, just missing it.’
Per reacted quickly, telling Richard to gain height so that the combination of extreme cold and lack of oxygen would put out the fire. They took the balloon to 43,000 feet, well above the balloon’s safety limit, before the fire died.
Their situation was still serious. The gondola remained tilted, they were above one of the emptiest stretches of the Pacific, a storm was raging below, there could be no question of ditching and they had lost half their fuel. They also lost radio contact for seven hours with their control centre at San Jose in California which had the vital information on weather patterns that would help them select the right height at which to fly.
At last, Branson got through. The support team had been getting desperate, envisaging the capsule ditched somewhere in the vast wastes of the world’s largest ocean. Bob Rice, the flight director, was able to tell Branson that the jet stream they were riding at that moment was about to swing round to the west to take them back into the centre of the Pacific, but if they lost height to reach 18,000 feet, they should find another jet stream that was sweeping north-east toward the Arctic. This at least would take them to land, though much further north than they had originally planned, amid the cold mountain wilderness that guards the Pacific coast of Canada. Bob also gave them the news that the West was bombing Baghdad. The Gulf War had started.
They lost height, found the new jet stream and were swept with even greater speed towards the coast of America, crossing it after only thirty-six hours of flying time. But they were still not out of trouble. They were heading for a blizzard. They would have to cross the Rockies before they could hope to make a landing. Even when they were over relatively flat ground, it was covered in dense forest. They had to find a frozen lake on which to land. Per opened the hatch and Branson climbed out on to the top of the capsule in the bitter cold. It was snowing hard, but there wasn’t a breath of wind as they were travelling with it. He could see the tops of the tall dark pines, like a thousand daggers pointed upwards, racing by beneath them. He took out the retaining pins on the explosive bolts holding the cables attached to the canopy and then remained on top to try and spy an open space on which to land. They were tearing further and further into the Arctic wildness, further away from any kind of help from the ground.
At last he saw a space ahead, a frozen lake. Branson climbed back into the capsule, Per cut the burners and they plummeted down, hitting the ice at around forty miles per hour. This time the explosive bolts worked. The envelope was carried by the wind out of sight over the dark wall of trees and the capsule skidded to a halt. They had crossed the Pacific and miraculously had survived. They even managed to raise Watson Lake Flight Services to tell them that they were sitting waiting to be picked up on a frozen lake in the middle of a forest – only to learn there were 800 lakes in the area.
While they waited for eight hours in a temperature of –60 °F, Per was already proposing the next venture – to fly round the world non-stop. After all, they had crossed the Pacific, having lost two fuel tanks, and still had fuel to spare. Branson couldn’t help wondering why he had entrusted Per with his life, reflecting on the narrow escapes they had had. They had been through so much together and yet there was a barrier between them:
‘I knew that he had pushed the technological boundaries of balloon flying further forward than anyone, but it was sad that we hadn’t developed a stronger bond with each other. I get close to most of the people that I spend a long time with. But Per is not a team player. He is a loner. He’s often difficult to read. He is someone who is quick to criticise. I’d been brought up to look for the best in people. Per always seemed to find the worst.’
Per felt hurt by these comments, feeling that he had led and organised the team in his first company Thunder & Colt and then Lindstrand Balloons, which had not only built the balloons but had also provided ground control for all the flights that had captured so many records. He felt he was very much the taxi driver, the hired hand, delivering Richard Branson the fame and publicity that Per considered was Branson’s principal drive.
I came to know Per in 1989 after the Atlantic crossing and just before that of the Pacific. I had become involved in a venture to fly in a balloon over Everest. It was the brainchild of Hasseeb Zafar, a London-based accountant who wanted to get into the sponsorship business. He examined all the potential adventure records that could be achieved and came up with this idea, the balloon being the perfect advertising hoarding for a company logo. He found a sponsor in Star Micronics, from Japan, the world’s second largest computer printer company. He invited Per Lindstrand, as one of the world’s most accomplished balloonists, to be the pilot and asked me to take part in the press conference to launch the venture. I was intrigued and couldn’t resist the temptation to try to become involved and actually fly over the mountain I had climbed just a few years before.
It was planned for the autumn of 1989. I set aside the time, became involved in the logistic planning and even had a few balloon flights. It was suggested that I should learn to parachute but I have always had an instinctive fear of jumping and decided that jumping out of a balloon over Everest would lead to almost certain death so declined the invitation, Per had a try at climbing on the Bossons Glacier above Chamonix where we went for a publicity balloon flight over Mont Blanc. He discovered that he disliked climbing as much as I did the thought of skydiving.
I enjoyed Per’s company. He has a wry, if at times sharp, sense of humour and I could see that he would always be cool in a crisis, but I felt he was never fully committed to the project. When he insisted on postponing it until the spring of 1990, saying that preparations were not sufficiently far advanced, I decided to pull out. I had already taken on other projects in the spring but, perhaps more to the point, I had serious doubts about trusting myself to the basket of a balloon dangling below a thin envelope of heated air. I began to realise how little I knew about ballooning and, although Per would be doing all the flying, I still found the prospect frightening. I was discovering that I was a climber, not an all-round adventurer. The fact that I suspected, correctly as it turned out, that Per wanted to delay the flight to fit in with his plans to cross the Pacific with Branson also influenced me.
Leo Dickinson, a filmmaker and ex-climber, who had taken to the air as a free-fall parachutist and had already been involved in ballooning, crossing the Annapurna range with the Australian, Chris Dewhirst, was delighted to take my place. In the short term my doubts were justified. The spring attempt was hindered by a revolution against the king of Nepal that led to the balloon being stuck in customs while Per waited impatiently at the Everest View Hotel close to their objective. By the time the balloon was at last cleared, he had lost patience and doubted whether the winds would ever be right for the attempt. Leo claims he was keen to have a go, even after Per had left for home, but they lacked a pilot prepared to fly and abandoned the attempt.
Leo, who has never lacked determination, persuaded Ian Smith, the UK managing director of Star Micronics, to stay with the project. He brought in a balloonist and engineer called Andy Elson to act as technician and reserve pilot who succeeded in raising the money in Australia for a second balloon so that the two balloons could film each other. This had always been Leo’s scheme. Leo crewed with Chris Dewhirst, while the second balloon was flown by Andy Elson and Eric Jones, a long-time friend of Leo’s who was both an outstanding solo climber and free-fall parachutist. This time, with a fully committed team and the benefit of what they had learnt the previous spring, they succeeded, though not without some narrow escapes. Andy Elson’s burners went out three times when close to Everest and they started to plunge. They had to relight them each time using the flint strikers but then found that flame was so intense it was melting the fabric of the balloon. He had to coax the burners to give just enough heat to ease the balloon over the top of Everest, clearing it by about 1,000 feet.
This all happened in 1991, ten months after the crossing of the Pacific. It is surprising how quickly adventurers forget the sense of fear and the discomforts they have suffered. It was not long before Richard Branson decided to join in the race to be first to fly round the world. There is no way he could have stood aside as the contestants began to line up. He named his balloon Virgin Global Challenger and could at least justify the costs as publicity for his Group.
But there was a pause. The world was plunging into recession and no one wanted to invest in ballooning. It wasn’t until 1995 that the race got going with Branson being the first at the starting gate. He and Lindstrand decided to add a third pilot, Rory McCarthy, another successful businessman, who was a joint venture partner with the Virgin Group. He was a hang-glider pilot who had set an altitude record for hang-gliding in 1984 by being dropped from a height of 36,700 feet from a balloon piloted by Lindstrand.
Branson planned to set off very early in the year from Marrakesh in Morocco, poised to catch the winter jet stream which he hoped would waft them across to Northern India, but the jet stream didn’t materialise and they returned home without making a launch.
That same year, 1995, another contender emerged. Steve Fossett is a millionaire businessman, not so much an entrepreneur as a brilliant financier in the options market. In 1999 I met him in Colorado at a party hosted by Tim Cole, his flight director. He was on his way from Washington to Florida to take lessons in aerobatics, flying his own Cessna Citation, at $17,000,000, the fastest non-military jet on the market. Stocky and quiet, there was no side to him, no flamboyance. In a group he listened rather than held court, and yet there was a focused self-confidence. I interviewed him at 6.00 a.m. the following morning over breakfast, before he took off for Florida. He had changed into a white shirt with captain’s bars, symbol of the hours he had spent learning how to fly a sophisticated twin-engine jet and the image he wanted to project.
Fifty-three years old, born of middle-class parents in California and the second of three children, he had a happy and conventional upbringing, being taken back-packing by his father and then becoming a Scout. He was always very competitive, but wasn’t attracted to team games. Average at school in academic studies, he just managed to get into Stamford and achieve his degree, before joining IBM as a systems engineer. He couldn’t see himself getting to the top of IBM and so moved into the financial industry, joining Merrill Lynch. His career then took off and after a few years he went independent, specialising in trading. He made a huge fortune. He told me:
‘I was a natural for trading. I was never quite so good at being an employee in a big business organisation. I wasn’t very good at pleasing people in office politics but it turns out that in trading I’m very competitive. You know, on the floor of the Exchange, competition is paramount. You try to be the fastest and the most aggressive – you must have seen scenes of people waving their arms aloft – so I could be very competitive but I could also be relaxed, work very, very quietly, very methodically. It’s a theoretical business where our speciality is stock options and there are ways of valuing stock options so that you can determine, from your computer model, what you should pay, when they’re available too cheap you buy them and when they’re too expensive you sell them, and you work out spreading strategies to keep your exposure to market more or less neutral. So it’s based on probabilities of success. If you reiterate that enough times it translates into an income. But using sound probability type approaches, that was compatible to me, plus the competitiveness.’
It’s all very similar to playing the adventure game and he used the wealth he acquired to pursue individual competitive challenges. Unlike Richard Branson, who bought in the expertise to achieve his records, Fossett wanted to do it for himself. He used his wealth to put in place the necessary hardware and infrastructure and to speed the learning curve in the activity he chose, but this was aimed at achieving personal excellence. His list of achievements is impressive. He has swum the English Channel, taken part in the Iditarod Dogsled Race and the Iron Man Triathlon, skied from Aspen to Vale in a record 59 hours, 53 minutes and 30 seconds and taken part in the Twenty-Four Hours Le Mans Sports Car Race. He also attempted to climb Mount Everest, but had problems with the altitude, found it took too much time and perceived that he could only get to the top by being heavily reliant on others. He didn’t repeat the attempt.
In 1990 he made a major decision to give his adventure sports first priority, devoting three-quarters of his time to them and keeping his business just ticking over, once again in contrast to Branson, who continues to expand his businesses and squeezes in his adventures when he can.
At first Fossett concentrated on sailing, breaking eight long-distance sailing records, including the fastest crossing of the Pacific, both with a crew and solo. He also raced, gaining a further eight race records. Fossett was always looking for challenges. He had followed Dick Rutan’s Earth Wind project to be the first man to fly non-stop round the world without refuelling, had thought about ballooning, but it wasn’t until 1993 that he focused on it.
‘I was in Paris, on my way to Le Mans to do some qualifying rounds when I passed a shop with some scarves in the window; one of them had pictures of the famous aviators of history – Lindbergh, Armstrong, Rutan and so on. So I started thinking about it and said, you know this stuff isn’t as inaccessible as you think it is. And whoever makes it round the world first by balloon, they will have earned themselves a place in this pantheon of aviation. So just symbolically I bought this scarf and gave it to my wife.’
He didn’t waste time. He bought a Rozier balloon from Cameron Balloons, on the grounds that they had a good track record, and started taking lessons, getting his licence that same summer. Rozier balloons are named after the pilot of the first manned balloon flight, Pilâtre de Rozier, who conceived the idea of combining buoyant gases and hot air in hybrid balloons in the 1790s. He was also the first person to die in a balloon, while trying to cross the English Channel. Workable designs relying on the de Rozier concept were not possible until recently. The top section of the main gas bag is filled with helium to provide a passive source of lifting power but when helium is cooled at night, it loses its buoyancy and the balloon sinks; when it overheats during the day, the balloon can rise uncontrollably. To provide a dynamic ballast system, a cone-shaped bag is inflated with air heated by burning propane or kerosene. Pilots can control the amount of fuel burned to maintain a steady altitude, or to seek altitudes with advantageous wind directions. Cameron Balloons covered the entire assembly with a lightweight shroud of aluminised film, which reduced the effects of solar heating and slowed nocturnal cooling. The gondola hung below.
Fossett decided to start by flying the Atlantic and invited an established balloonist, Tim Cole, to accompany him. It was a good choice. One of Fossett’s secrets of success both in business and adventure has been his choice of colleagues and the way he has kept them with him. The flight went smoothly and immediately Fossett began planning his next venture. He succeeded, in 1995, in making the first solo crossing of the Pacific, flying from South Korea to Mendhem in Saskatchewan in 104 hours. He could have landed earlier but was determined to make sure he had the world distance record – not bad for someone who had been ballooning for just two years.
Part of his secret was to use a fairly low-tech unpressurised cabin and at the same time to have a superb back-up team. Tim Cole became his flight director and he chose the best specialists he could find, following their instructions in coaxing his craft from one weather system to the next on his way across the empty reaches of the Pacific.
By 1996 he felt ready to attempt the circumnavigation of the world. He set out from the Strato Bowl in South Dakota, a natural depression by the banks of a river, giving good protection from the wind. He was using a brand new balloon with a double envelope and solar panels for generating power, and a special tracking device for following the sun. As so often happened with all the contestants the pressure to get the new technology into use meant that there had been very little time for testing. It was a matter of trying it all out on the actual flight.
As Fossett gained altitude after take off, he discovered that Cameron Balloons had miscalculated the amount of inflation of the inner skin and as a result the outer skin was ripping, with splits appearing all over the surface. Nonetheless he kept flying above the biggest storm that had hit Washington that year. At this stage his solar panel tracking device failed which meant his batteries weren’t being recharged. He ran out of power about 150 miles out to sea. This meant that he had no communication with his control centre although his GPS with independent batteries was still working.
He weighed up the risks of carrying on blind across the Atlantic with a damaged outer canopy and, not surprisingly, decided to turn back, but even this was not easy for he had to find the right wind to do so. He lost height to get a wind that took him into the Bay of Fundy, between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. He described what happened.
‘I had a hard time. The balloon wasn’t performing well because of the shredded skin and at one point I couldn’t stop it descending because the burners weren’t powerful enough either. I went all the way from 15,000 feet to hit the water. Fortunately it was pretty calm and protected in there. I cut away two tanks to lighten the load and was able to take off to fly back to the coast of New Brunswick. I actually made a nice landing!’
The Virgin team meanwhile moved down to Marrakesh in December 1996 and were ready to fly on 5 January 1997. The night before take off Rory developed pneumonia and he was replaced by Alex Ritchie, who worked for Per Lindstrand. They also had a brand-new, much bigger balloon which, as usual, would be test flown on the flight. The final preparations, as always, were fraught, coming to a crescendo as the huge canopy was inflated. The burners roared into action and the balloon, like a huge prehistoric monster straining at its tethers, finally lifted into the skies. They quickly discovered that the safety catches that locked the fuel tanks in place hadn’t been removed so they would be unable to drop the tanks once empty. After crossing the Atlas Mountains, Per deliberately lost height in order to go outside and remove the offending safety catches but they were caught in a fierce down draught and could only regain height after throwing out all their ballast, spare food and propane. There was no question of being able to carry on and so they landed in Algeria. It was another abortive attempt but, like Fossett, they learned a great deal from the mistakes that had been made.
Fossett was in the air, once again on his own, just a few days later on 14 January, setting out this time from St Louis, Missouri. He crossed the Atlantic without incident and had intended to take a branch of the jet stream across the British Isles, Northern Europe and Russia, but he missed it and had no choice but to catch the sub-tropical one over Gibraltar, Algeria and Libya, the one that Branson was planning to use. It sounds a little like catching a series of connecting trains and is just about as unreliable! Fossett did not, however, have clearance to fly over China, even though ex-President Carter had tried to get permission for him. This meant skirting the Himalaya to the south and by the time he reached India he realised that he had insufficient fuel and therefore landed at Sultanpur on 20 January.
He had broken his own previous distance record, set over the Pacific, for the longest-ever balloon flight and had learnt a great deal on the way. Flying solo imposes considerable extra strains. He had an autopilot which fired the burners to maintain a fixed height but it wasn’t completely reliable, particularly in coping with sudden down draughts. Because his capsule wasn’t pressurised he had to wear his oxygen mask at all times and since he didn’t have a heater it became bitterly cold at night. The reason for this abstemious approach was that it reduced weight still further which meant he needed less fuel and consequently could use a smaller and more easily manageable balloon than the huge Virgin one that carried three people and had all the trimmings.
Meanwhile, another contender had come on the scene. Bertrand Piccard from Lausanne in Switzerland is a psychiatrist with a distinguished scientific and adventurous pedigree. His grandfather, Auguste Piccard, pioneered the development of pressurised cabins for high-altitude balloon flights. His work had a considerable influence on future aircraft design and eventually putting man into space. He then turned his attention to deep-sea research, designing submersibles that could go deeper than ever before. In his lifetime he establish both height and depth records. His son Jacques, Bertrand’s father, continued the deep-sea research, reaching the bottom of the 36,000-foot-deep Mariana Trench.
As a child Bertrand had met scientists and astronauts, particularly when his father had been based in Houston. His own appetite for adventure had taken him into hang-gliding while studying at university. He took it to the limit, both in aerobatics and high-altitude flight. It was during this period that he came to know Wim Verstraeten, a Belgian professional balloonist whose balloon he used as a launch pad for his hang-glider. It was at a dinner at the great ballooning centre of Chateau d’Oex, near Montreux in Switzerland, that he happened to sit with Verstraeten and some other balloonists and the conversation came round to the Trans-Atlantic Balloon Race that Cameron Balloons were organising. It was light-heartedly suggested that Bertrand, as a psychiatrist, would be an ideal partner for Wim, even though he had never before flown a balloon. The idea took root and Bertrand, still without a balloon licence, won the Trans-Atlantic Balloon Race in 1992 with Wim Verstraeten, sealing a strong friendship. Bertrand’s greatest contribution to their success was to hypnotise Wim to help him sleep during the flight.
Circumnavigating the world by balloon was to someone like Bertrand Piccard an obvious next step and one that would place him in the record books alongside his father and grandfather. Unlike Branson and Fossett, he had no wealth of his own and it was a matter of finding a sponsor. In this he was extremely fortunate. He knew Theodore Schneider, owner and chief executive of Breitling, a Swiss company producing high-quality aviation chronometers. He had helped Bertrand in a small way with the Trans-Atlantic Balloon Race and in return Bertrand had displayed the Breitling logo. It took just one meeting to gain Breitling’s sponsorship for the circumnavigation and the company proved to be loyal and immensely supportive over the three attempts.
The ballooning world is a small one and that of long-distance balloonists even smaller. Many of the individuals involved in the circumnavigation of the world became interlinked. This was particularly the case with Andy Elson. Perhaps the most colourful of all the contenders, Andy has an engineering background and ran a small specialist engineering company in Bristol. When he became interested in ballooning, he quickly started taking part in competitions, and he flew with Leo Dickinson to get good publicity pictures of the Star Micronics balloon which was to attempt the crossing of Everest. Leo was impressed, both by Andy’s handling of the balloon and his readiness to try anything, and invited him to join the Everest flight.
Andy returned from this first great adventure to be greeted by disaster. His business partner had taken over his company and shortly after that his wife left him. He was faced with a huge debt but he was determined to pay all his creditors, so took tourists on balloon flights over Bath and Bristol, worked for the Bath City Council manufacturing wrought iron gates and did some work for Cameron Balloons on the engineering side. He test flew the burners that Steve Fossett was planning to use for his Pacific flight and happened to be in Korea just before Fossett took off, volunteering to help with the final preparations. As a result Fossett employed him in his backup team for his first circumnavigation attempt. In addition he became more and more involved in the engineering of the burners and other support systems of the capsule for the Breitling attempt.
Cameron was offering Piccard a complete package, not only of Rozier balloon and capsule, but the control centre and management of the project in flight. Alan Noble, Cameron’s marketing manager, was also the project director. Normally the burners are fuelled by propane but Andy saw advantages in using kerosene, which doesn’t require pressurised cylinders. The kerosene can be stored in flexible bags. These were tucked away all over the capsule, even under the mattress of the bunk.
Piccard and Verstraeten were ready to fly from Chateau d’Oex in early 1997. Characteristically all the gear for the flight had been hurled in at the last minute, much of it piled on to the bunk, compressing a full fuel bag stowed beneath it, blowing a fuel valve and causing the kerosene to flood the interior of the capsule shortly after take off. They decided to ditch in the Mediterranean without delay.
Andy is arguably one of the most brilliant innovative designers in the balloon business, but he isn’t a great organiser, has a quick temper and tends to keep all his plans in his head. In his tourist flight business he had gone into partnership with a quiet and very methodical ex-RAF loadmaster called Brian Jones and he now brought Brian into the Breitling venture as project manager. In Brian’s words, ‘I was Andy’s mother, nursemaid, secretary and general assistant’. They started working on Breitling Orbiter 2 for the next season.
The season for the jet stream and long-distance ballooning in the northern hemisphere is from December into the spring. The Virgin Global Challenger team was back at Marrakesh in December 1997. Richard Branson was in a hurry to get going and, according to Per Lindstrand, insisted on inflating the balloon during the day when there was a greater risk of wind and thermal currents. This was by far the biggest of all the balloons. The wind caught it and away it went, months of work, money and effort with it. However, the team didn’t abandon the attempt. They were able to recover the canopy but it was damaged beyond repair. Per’s company, Lindstrand Balloons, worked flat out over the Christmas period to manufacture a new one and delivered it to Morocco by January 15th.
Meanwhile the race was hotting up. On 31 December, New Year’s Eve, Steve Fossett launched his third attempt from St Louis and some hours later, Kevin Uliassi, an experienced balloonist but a newcomer to the circumnavigation race, lifted off from a 300-foot-deep quarry just east of Chicago. Disaster struck Uliassi almost immediately when the device to release the helium failed, causing a build up of pressure that led to the balloon envelope splitting. He showed great skill in landing the damaged balloon. In the meantime Fossett was making good progress, sweeping across the Atlantic and then Europe. His control room’s biggest problem was not so much the balloon as getting permissions to overfly the more sensitive countries. He still had no clearance to fly over Libya, and they therefore kept him in a more northerly trajectory, hoping to bring him further south to catch the sub-tropical jet stream once he had permission. But permission came too late. Fossett was too far to the north, flying over Romania in light winds. He continued over the Black Sea but it was becoming increasingly obvious that he would be unable to get further south, the heater in his capsule had failed and he was using up too much fuel. He finally made a landing on 5 January 1998 in the region of Krasnodar to the east of the Black Sea. Once again he had achieved a record distance flight but his end objective had eluded him.
Only a few days after Fossett’s landing, Dick Rutan and Dave Melton set out from Albuquerque in New Mexico. Rutan’s 1986 achievement in copiloting the experimental Voyager plane round the world without refuelling had been one of the first things to inspire Fossett. Rutan himself now had less luck in his balloon and a similar failure to that of Kevin Uliassi forced him and his co-pilot to parachute out shortly after take off. Dave Melton was severely injured on landing. Back at Marrakesh the Virgin team were hit by tragedy. Alex Ritchie, the third pilot, was fatally injured in a parachuting accident, and they abandoned their bid for that year.
The final serious 1998 attempt was at the end of January when Breitling Orbiter 2 made its launch from Chateau d’Oex. Andy Elson had been brought into the crew to join Bertrand Piccard and Wim Verstraeten. Apart from anything else, he was the only one who knew how all the new technology worked. The operational manuals were skimpy and all the real information was in his head.
Andy had already been trying to get a circumnavigation attempt of his own off the ground. He had been approached by a man called James Manclark, another millionaire, though not in the same league as Richard Branson or Steve Fossett. Manclark wanted, or needed, to find sponsorship to help cover the cost but hadn’t succeeded in doing so. The project had been put on hold therefore and this presented Elson with a wonderful opportunity to make an attempt in a balloon capsule which he had helped to design yet without any financial risk or organisational hassles. His role was to be flight engineer with Piccard and Verstraeten as first and second pilots.
On their first attempt at launching the capsule was very nearly dropped from the crane lifting it into position after two of the cable terminations parted. Everything had to be checked and rechecked and they finally launched on 28 January 1998. One of the computers was down and Andy had to reprogramme it. A fault developed in one of the hatches which meant that Andy had to make a spectacular abseil down the side of the capsule several thousand feet above the Mediterranean to hold it in place while the others re-secured it from the inside. More serious, they somehow managed to lose 1,000 litres of fuel, a third of their total supply. Their only chance of success was to jump from jet stream to jet stream and have a fast circumnavigation. So they settled down to flying over Italy, Greece and Iran, wafted by the sub-tropical jet stream.
They still had no permission to overfly China, which meant that, like Fossett before them, they had to skirt round to the south, losing the jet stream. By the time they did get permission, it was too late. They were in the wrong position to pick up the jet stream again and it was obvious they did not have enough fuel to complete the voyage. But they decided to continue anyway, creeping at a low altitude across India’s northern plains, getting as far as they could. Bertrand commented:
‘I realised how important it is to accept whatever life brings. If we had fought against our situation, we would have suffered a lot: we might even have landed and gone home angry and despairing, blaming the entire world – especially China; but, by making the best of what happened to us, we were choosing not to suffer; if you refuse to accept what life brings, you suffer, but if you accept your fate, you feel less pain.’
A sound, almost Buddhist philosophy. They kept going until over Burma and landed just short of Rangoon. They had achieved an endurance record but hadn’t flown as far as Steve Fossett.
Steve was already planning his next attempt. Rather than wait for the northern hemisphere season, he decided to try the southern hemisphere, which meant setting out in August of 1998. It was certainly much riskier, for not only was it mostly over water, but they were very empty waters as well. He set out from Mendoza in the foothills of the Argentinian Andes on 7 August, had problems with his burners over the Atlantic, but kept going. He didn’t have much choice. He made the first crossing of the South Atlantic on 11 August, passing 118 miles to the south-east of Cape Town and then on in the jet stream across the huge empty wastes of the Indian Ocean to reach the north-western Australian coast on 14 August. He was carried over northern Australia, had plenty of fuel and it looked as if he had success in his grasp. There was just the Pacific to cross! Thunderstorms were forecast but they were meant to top out at around 29,000 feet and his control centre told him he would be able to fly over them.
They were drinking champagne to celebrate Steve’s crossing of Australia when he hit a huge cumulonimbus cloud just off the coast of Australia over the Coral Sea. It was now dark. He couldn’t avoid it, couldn’t climb over it, was sucked into the boiling clouds and caught in a traumatic down draught. His variometer read a descent rate of 2,500 feet per minute and he’d been told that you couldn’t survive a descent rate on impact of more than 2,000 feet per minute. He cut away two oxygen cylinders and two fuel tanks, but the catastrophic descent continued. He lay down on his bunk on the theory that in a horizontal position he’d have a better chance of survival. He watched the barometer. It continued to wind down. He expected to hit the sea at 1,300 millibars, but he passed that, the pressure being so low, and it was 1,004 millibars when he hit the water. It must have been like hitting concrete and he was knocked out.
When he became conscious, the capsule was upside down, full of acrid smoke, half full of water, tossing up and down with the waves. Something was burning. He had his head torch on so that he could see what he was doing and realised that the burners were incinerating the side of the Kevlar capsule. If he was to survive, he had to get out fast.
He grabbed his dinghy, got the hatch open and crawled out to find that there were flames all round the capsule and that the huge canopy of the balloon had collapsed on top of it. Somehow he had to get from under it before he was drowned or burnt to death. He inflated the dinghy and, lying on his back in it, used his arms and legs to push and pull himself through the water from under the canopy. In the struggle he lost his head torch. Then the only light was the glow of the flames.
At last he got clear of the canopy but a gust of wind took his dinghy away from it. By this time the flames had died down and he couldn’t even see where to paddle back to. He was tossing in his tiny rubber dinghy in the middle of the Coral Sea without water, food or light. He assured me later that he had not been too concerned. He had sent out his May Day signal on the way down and was confident that someone would pick him up in due course. An Australian Navy refuelling ship eventually found him after twenty-three hours in the sea. Steve described his feelings both at the time of his catastrophic descent and while he waited to be picked up as one primarily of disappointment. He had seemed so close to success. It would take him several months to replace the balloon. It wasn’t so much a matter of cost as time. He regarded the cost as comparatively modest. The southern hemisphere attempt, entirely funded by himself, cost around $400,000. He knew that Branson, Piccard and several others were preparing their next attempts that December when the northern hemisphere season started. It would have been difficult to get a new rig together in time.
He was still on the Australian Navy vessel when Richard Branson phoned him by satellite to commiserate and then propose that Steve joined his team. Fossett’s first response was to say, ‘Well Richard, it’s all very dangerous. I don’t know whether we should be doing this. I’ll think about it – give me a ring when I’m back home.’
He was back in California a few days later. Richard Branson rang again. ‘Have you thought about it?’ he asked.
‘Not very much,’ Steve replied, but then impulsively, ‘OK, I’m on.’
He went to visit Lindstrand Balloons to discuss the design of the new balloon with Per, making several suggestions, and coming to the conclusion that, of all the contestants, they had the best chance but even so he didn’t rate their chances of success very highly. At least it wasn’t going to cost him anything. Richard had invited him along for the ride as copilot and Steve felt flattered by the confidence put in him.
This was a new balloon and capsule, much larger and more comfortable than Steve Fossett had been accustomed to. The capsule had two floors, the upper one being the control room which was ten feet in diameter with three pilot stations and comfortable swivel seats arranged round the walls. There were portholes but they were so small that the crew depended on video cameras mounted on the outside of the capsule to see what was going on.
The lower floor had two tiny compartments, one for a single sleeping berth and the other for stores. The only spot in the capsule where anyone could stand upright was in the centre, just below the Perspex dome. The capsule had two compact engines, fuelled by propane, to run the generators, in addition to the burners for heating the air inside the fabric of the balloon. It was the size of a small caravan but the three-man crew were going to be cooped up in it for up to three weeks. They had changed the name of the balloon from Virgin Global Challenger to ICO Global Challenger. ICO is a satellite communications company and Virgin felt that they were going to get credit for the flight anyway through Branson’s high profile, so promoting ICO would cover most of the costs.
They all assembled in Marrakesh in late November but had to wait for the right winds. They were ahead of their competition and had permission to fly over China below the 26th parallel which meant keeping south of the Himalaya. A weather window came through on 22 December. The take-off was the usual combination of media razzmatazz, the chaotic excitement of any balloon launch and an endearing family involvement that was very much part of all of Branson’s adventures. Not only were most of Branson’s immediate family there for the send off but also Per’s daughter, Jenny, and the children of Alex Ritchie who had died earlier that year from the injuries sustained in his parachute accident.
For once the launch went smoothly, but as they gained height, their rate of ascent stalled. On the previous occasion too much helium had been added and this time the ground crew had over-compensated with too little. Per gave the burners an extra boost to warm the helium, and they shot up at an alarming rate of around 1,900 feet a minute, burning some holes in the lower fabric of the balloon. Per got the balloon under control, pressurised the capsule, and they settled down to the regular routine of a long-distance flight. But not for long.
National boundaries and sensitivities play as large a part as storms and technical failure in the hazards of ballooning. Branson was told by ground control that Libya had withdrawn permission to cross its border. They debated what to do. No one fancied the risk of being shot out of the sky. They could drop very low and try to crawl round to the south of Libya on ground winds but would lose too much time. They therefore decided to lose a bit of height to get out of the faster winds and try to persuade Colonel Gaddafi to change his mind.
Branson had plenty of contacts. He had worked with King Hussein of Jordan to rescue the hostages held by Saddam Hussein at the start of the Gulf War and he also knew Nelson Mandela. The trouble was both would be asleep and he didn’t like to disturb them. In the end he dictated a letter himself and had his office in London fax it to Gaddafi. It did the trick and permission was renewed. They hadn’t lost too much time, opened up the burners to climb back into the wind and were swept over Libyan air space to the Mediterranean. There were reports of thunder storms over Turkey and Branson was going down with a chest infection and had lost his voice, partly the result of stress, combined with the dry air of the capsule and all the talking on the satellite phone. He took an antibiotic and on they swept.
The next challenge was how to get round the aerial exclusion zone over Iraq. The Americans and British had just started bombing and a large balloon might have made a very tempting target for the frustrated and angry Iraqis. Bob Rice, the team’s meteorologist, was confident he could steer them on a series of different altitudes through the narrow corridor over Turkey between Iraq and Russia. They were being swept along at a good rate and by the morning of the 21st were over Afghanistan and facing their next crisis. They had permission to fly down a narrow corridor across South China but the jet stream went to the north of the Himalaya across Tibet and they were trying to get permission to take this path. It was 6.30 in the evening and they were over the northern plains of India. It was crisis time. The jet stream would take them towards Everest and over Tibet. If they dropped height and started trying to crawl round the southern edge of the Himalaya they would lose too much time and, more to the point, too much fuel. Their capsule with its compressor as well as the burners was fuel-hungry.
They discussed what to do. Steve Fossett, newcomer to the crew, was impressed by how well they worked as a team, Branson taking a share of piloting the balloon and the three of them reaching decisions on a consensual basis. They had two choices: to abandon the attempt or go for it without permission. They decided to take the latter course, maintained their height and were carried across the Himalaya and over Tibet. They were playing for high stakes and all felt tense as they talked with their control centre about the reactions of the Chinese.
Branson claimed with some justification that a landing would now be dangerous. It was 9.45 p.m. GMT, they were over mountainous country and it was pitch dark. At ten o’clock the following morning they learnt that at least the Chinese would refrain from shooting them down but they were ordered to land at the first opportunity. The crew claimed that it would be too risky and kept flying through that day on comparatively light winds – they were only travelling at a ground speed of around forty miles per hour. Finally, at three o’clock that afternoon, they were told they could fly over China but that they should clear Chinese air space as soon as possible.
By 5.30 p.m. on the afternoon of 23 December they were once again over the sea. Their political problems had ended but they still had the Pacific, North America and the Atlantic in front of them. They had been in flight for five days, reckoned they had fuel for a further seven and therefore needed a fast easy run in the jet stream. By Christmas Eve they had crossed Japan, were over the Pacific and at last in the full jet stream, travelling at 30,830 feet at a speed of 146 miles per hour. They might just make it all the way.
But this optimism did not last for long. Bob Rice was already worrying about a trough of low pressure across Hawaii. There seemed no way of avoiding it without leaving the jet stream and going tar to the south away from any prospect of a quick rescue. The winds could even have taken them back on their track.
The following morning they were in the midst of the storm system, had lost the jet stream and were faced by defeat. They agonised over what to do. Per Lindstrand told me that he fancied at least trying to make the coast of America, which would have broken Steve Fossett’s previous record, but the others, with no prospect of completing the circumnavigation, opted for the safer course of ditching near Honolulu where they could easily be picked up. I can’t help wondering if the fact that it was Christmas Day, when thoughts of family are particularly strong, helped to influence the decision.
There were four more competitors waiting to join the race. First off should have been an American outfit called Team RE/MAX, named after the sponsor, one of the United States’ biggest real estate companies that already had a large promotional balloon fleet. Dave Liniger of RE/MAX was hoping to fly a huge helium-filled balloon around the southern hemisphere at a height of around 70,000 feet. They planned to set off from Alice Springs in Australia, but the canopy was so huge and fragile they needed an almost totally windless day to launch. It was never sufficiently calm and there is doubt if they were ever really ready. The attempt was abandoned mid-January 1999.
Breitling Orbiter 3 was also ready to go, but after ICO Global Challenger’s illicit flight over China, the Chinese government cancelled all permissions. The Breitling management hoped that, being Swiss, they might be able to persuade the Chinese to give them permission, and therefore put the launch on hold while they negotiated. Of all the contestants they were the only ones who had taken the trouble to visit Beijing and they now assured the Chinese that they would not commence their flight before getting permission to overfly China.
In the meantime they had been having some crew problems. Andy Elson had only planned to make the one trip on Breitling Orbiter 2 since he wanted to get his own show off the ground, initially with James Manclark This fell through and Andy teamed up with another balloonist, Colin Prescot, who ran Flying Pictures, a company specialising in aerial photography and filming from balloons. Prescot had good media contacts and complemented Andy’s at times erratic genius with a methodical, more down-to earth approach. He commented on their partnership: ‘The Times called us The Odd Couple, to which Andy replied, “There’s nothing odd about us, it’s everyone else.” We’re very different characters. Very different. He’s the fiery, brash, blunt, sometimes very rude engineer – boy genius, I always call him – very clever ... and I’m not.’
Colin might not have been a brilliant designer, but he was a first-class organiser and also a great diplomat who could appreciate Andy’s qualities and cope with his temperament.
Back in the Breitling camp, Piccard had decided to limit his crew to two. Wim Verstraeten’s wife had just given birth to twins, and so he was even more pre-occupied than usual and had not been able to give the project the time that Piccard felt was essential. He had also observed on the previous flight how out of his depth Wim had been with all the high-tech equipment. Indeed it was surprising how long such a big and physically clumsy man had lasted in the confined space of a balloon capsule. Elson described to me how Wim had once trodden on his laptop without noticing what he had done. So Piccard resolved that, despite their friendship, he would have to make a change. He therefore invited Anthony Brown, a Concorde flight engineer who was also a customer of Cameron Balloons. It wasn’t a happy choice, influenced as it was by the PR advantage of the association with the name Concorde and with little reference to how well Piccard and Brown would get on together.
Brown was used to everything being tested and tried with flight manuals and procedures. There just was not the time to do this in the race to prepare Breitling Orbiter 3 for the next season. It wasn’t helped by the fact that Andy Elson was no longer working as their design engineer. He had written down very little of what he had done and Brian Jones, ‘his nursemaid’, now had to take over the entire project. He told me of the dilemma.
‘We showed Tony how the various controls and systems worked but Tony said, “No, I can’t follow this. I need to have specifications. I need to have drawings and flow charts.” And we said, “We haven’t got them. You know that this is a £300,000 budget six-months-to-do-it-in, throw-every-resource-you’ve-got-and-get-it-out-of-the-door kind of project.” He wasn’t happy about it.
‘Then Bertrand said to him, “Look, Tony, if you can’t get your head around this now, how can I trust you when I go to sleep?” Unfortunately, Tony took this as an insult. Bertrand didn’t mean that. What he meant was, “How can I have confidence in your abilities?” and not as an insult but as a discussion element, almost. Well that started it really, and it went from bad to worse. There was a discussion with us all over dinner and Tony started off along the lines of, “Well if you can’t trust me, Bertrand, I’m not going to fly this thing until I’m ready to fly.” And Bertrand said, “Well how long is it going to be?” Tony said, “I don’t know but I just have to get my head around all these things.” Bertrand said, “But we might have to fly in five days’ time.” And Tony said, “I’m telling you, I’m not flying.”
‘And at that moment I thought, I could be flying here! I had an inkling.’
Brian Jones, as well as being project manager, was reserve pilot. An ex-warrant officer in the RAF, he had spent much of his career as a loadmaster on transport planes, something that instilled a steady methodical approach. He had finally left the air force to become a salesman in the drug industry. It was while doing this that he had taken up ballooning, eventually going into partnership with Andy Elson’s tourist balloon flight project. Brian is quite small of stature, unobtrusive, very modest, easy to get on with and, I suspect, very supportive. He knew more about the project and the technical details of it than anyone, was longing to fly but at that critical discussion felt he could take no part in the argument between Bertrand and Tony. When they tried to involve him, he said, ‘Look, don’t bring me into this.’
Next morning Tony withdrew from the flight.
This was just three days before their planned launch date. There were posters all over Chateau d’Oex with Tony Brown’s picture as copilot. Inevitably Breitling were upset and tried to botch up some kind of compromise. But Tony was adamant and Piccard and the entire flight crew were immensely relieved. Brian commented: ‘Bertrand said it was as if a big cloud had blown away. The technicians were amazing, because they were my guys. I’d just stepped over the fence; it was quite extraordinary, they went into overdrive.’
But they had a long time to wait while they negotiated with the Chinese authorities and then awaited a suitable global wind pattern. Two American teams, Spirit of Peace, commanded by Jacques Soukup, and J. Rennee, commanded by Kevin Uliassi from Illinois, gave up but Andy Elson and Colin Prescot decided to set out anyway, even though it would mean a slow and uncertain flight without the help of the jet stream, to avoid Chinese air space. They had obtained permission but this had been revoked after Branson’s illicit over-flight.
They knew that they were going to have a long slow journey and that meant taking on more fuel. Andy was still committed to kerosene, convinced that it was lighter because it didn’t need pressurised containers and that it burnt better. By accepting a lower altitude ceiling they could increase their payload considerably with an impressive two and a half tons of extra fuel. This meant devising a piggy-back system for the eighteen barrels hanging over the side and a stronger crown ring and living wires to attach the capsule to the balloon. Andy had also designed a system that he believed needed less fuel than the balloon designed by Lindstrand. It was the kind of improvisation at which he excelled.
Their Cable & Wireless balloon launched from Almeria in Spain on 17 February and swung south towards the coast of Morocco, for they were planning to head far to the south across the desert to keep well away from Chinese air space. Even their own meteorologist, Martin Harris, gave them very little chance of success and most of the other pundits said they were mad even to start and that the only reason they did so was to avoid breaking contract with their sponsor. Andy and Colin, however, while accepting that their chances were slim, still felt they could succeed.
As soon as they had got themselves organised after take-off, Andy collapsed on to the bunk and went into a deep sleep. He had been working flat out for days. Colin, on the other hand, was well rested and very happy to take over the controls. They weren’t going fast but the voyage was smooth and their equipment was functioning well. The balloon was heading further south than any of their predecessors, crossing miles of empty desert over Mauritania, Burkina Faso and Niger. They even called up the airstrip at Timbuktu to ask if there was any conflicting traffic for a balloon on its way round the world to be told, ‘Not today.’
They flew on over Saudi Arabia and the Indian Ocean without incident but not very fast. Their best speed on the voyage was a very brief spell at fifty-nine knots achieved over Saudi Arabia, yet they had plenty of fuel and were in for the long haul. They took the world’s endurance record for long-distance balloon flight while over India, beating the record made by Breitling Orbiter 2 the previous year. Andy was banking on using his skill as a balloonist and the accuracy of the forecasts on weather and wind speed from his control centre to ease the balloon around the south of China.
The risk he was forced to accept in these more tropical climes was that of thunder storms. They hit their first storm system over Thailand. Huge cumulonimbus clouds were building up around them. They could hear aircraft asking air traffic control for diversions to avoid the weather. They were right in the middle of it. Andy had gone to bed and Colin was trying to edge the balloon down a narrow canyon between huge cloud walls, his only means of steering the adjustment of altitude by turning the burners off and on.
Suddenly the balloon was engulfed in cloud. There was a deafening roar and it swung violently from side to side. The variometer needle was off the scale at 2,000 feet a minute upwards and then, almost as quickly, it indicated 1,500 feet a minute down. Andy tumbled out of his dreams and they burned and burned their way out of trouble, Andy taking hold of the emergency propane valves at the top of the capsule while Colin screamed out the instrument readings. There were frightening pauses as the balloon seemed to lurch uncontrollably and then accelerate upwards while the whole envelope flapped and tore above them.
It was difficult to know when to start burning again. But the aim was most definitely to move up. Eventually Colin asked Andy whether they were yet clear of cloud and he confirmed they were. The balloon was at 29,000 feet, only 2,000 feet below its ceiling. Timing the shutdown of burners was a fine judgement in itself because to burn through the ceiling would have spilt a lot of gas and sent them downwards again. The balloon levelled out and they sat back in their seats with a cup of lemon and ginger tea (for the first time in the flight they later had a cup of something a little stronger to calm their nerves). It had been a close call. They were now flying at their ceiling of 31,000 feet and at last were above the clouds, but there were more storms ahead over Laos and Vietnam.
Then yet another crisis occurred when they heard from Bangkok air traffic control that Laos and Vietnam refused them permission to enter their air space. They made a hurried satellite phone call back to England to wake Lou de Marco, who had recently retired as Head of Flight Operations at the Civil Aviation Authority, and who had organised all their permits for them. An hour passed and they learnt they had, after all, been given clearance. The storm clouds had dissipated and the balloon headed over Vietnam and across the China Sea, neatly by-passing Hainan Island, which belongs to China, by making a series of small adjustment to altitude. They had succeeded in getting around China and were now heading with fair winds parallel to the Chinese coast, north towards Japan. They had been in the air for sixteen days but still had sufficient fuel to complete the circumnavigation, provided they could rejoin the jet streams over Japan.
It had been a remarkable achievement to get round China and still be capable of completing their voyage. Two days later they were over Japan. There were three choices of jets streams, a southerly one that would take them to Hawaii where thunder storms were forecast, a central one which was also heading for storm activity, and a northern one, starting in north Japan, that would give them a clear run across the Pacific towards Vancouver. They headed for this, confident that they could reach it before the next storm system developed. Andy retired to the bunk for a good night’s sleep convinced that the next morning they would be on their way across the Pacific.
As dawn broke Colin saw that they were between two layers of cloud with great plumes of snow falling around them. He asked Martin Harris back at Mission Control for instructions and was told to keep edging northwards. They desperately needed some sunlight to recharge the batteries to run the fuel pumps and power their communications system but, even at 18,000 feet, cloud was still above them and they were being blown back to the east. Andy had had so much confidence in his solar panel recharging system he had not brought along any emergency lithium batteries. Had they kept going up to their ceiling of 31,000 feet to get above the clouds and recharge the batteries, their meteorologist warned them that they would have entered the jet stream taking them to Hawaii and cumulonimbus clouds rising up to 55,000 feet – something they definitely wanted to avoid.
Colin woke Andy. ‘How’s the world?’ he asked, his familiar start to-the-day remark. ‘Not great. Come and have a look,’ was the reply.
Their prospects were bleak. They were both all too aware of how near they had been to disaster in the storm over Thailand. There seemed no alternative but to ditch while they could still do so in control, close to land, with the rescue services ready to pick them up. Could they have gone on? Their most serious immediate problem was one of power. They didn’t have a generator to charge their batteries. Andy had decided it wouldn’t be necessary and wanted to save on fuel. They could manage without the fuel pumps, since they had three days’ supply of propane for emergencies, but they would have been helpless without their communication system. They certainly had sufficient fuel to cross the Pacific and, had they had a good run, to cross America and the Atlantic as well. I suspect that the memory of their narrow escape over Thailand had a profound influence on their decision.
They ditched off Japan on 7 March. They had improved their endurance record to eighteen days, but had completed only forty-one per cent of the journey, less than halfway in terms of distance. However, they had lived to tell the tale and they remained good friends.
Meanwhile Piccard had finally received permission to cross Chinese air space and launched Breitling Orbiter 3 at Chateau d’Oex on 1 March, a week behind Cable & Wireless with no real chance of catching them up. He wasn’t discouraged, believing that there was a good chance of the competition failing to get round China. At the start of their voyage they were forced to backtrack, heading south-westwards over the Mediterranean to join the southern jet stream over Morocco. Once in it, they were swept along at a good rate over Mali and Algeria by 3 March, but it was on that day they learnt that Andy Elson and Colin Prescot had rounded China and therefore now had a good chance of completing the circumnavigation.
Piccard told me that he and Brian Jones were not unduly despondent. They got on well together, and were confident in their balloon which had been changed back on to a propane fuel system and, under Brian’s meticulous and very methodical supervision, had not had the acute technical problems experienced on the two previous flights. Both teams still had a long way to go. It was a matter of picking the best possible route, guided by their meteorologists and the control centre. Four days later, over the Yemen, they learnt that Cable & Wireless had ditched. They were now on their own.
The balloon continued its methodical, relatively slow course across the Arabian Sea, over India and into the air corridor China had allowed them. They had to stay south of the 26th parallel, and keep south of the Himalaya and Tibet. It was a very narrow corridor and needed all the skill of Pierre Eckert and Luc Trullerman, the two meteorologists, to place them in it. By 10 March they had crossed south China and were over the Pacific heading for Hawaii. This was the most dangerous part of the entire voyage. Their trust in the meteorologists was stretched to the limit when they were rerouted on a course that took them far to the south of the originally planned line to find a promised jet stream that had not yet even formed. Pierre and Luc had run computer projections of the more direct northerly route to find that the same bad weather pattern that had defeated Branson and his crew would overtake them. A radical change of plan, however, is always difficult to take, particularly when it is dictated from a comfortable control room on the other side of the world to two people already fatigued and stressed from eleven days in the confines of a pressurised capsule. They were both afraid, but shared their fear and through this gained the courage and confidence to follow the advice of the meteorologists.
It continued to be frightening, They were heading slowly for one of the most empty parts of the Pacific where, if they had been forced to ditch, rescue would have been a long time arriving. There was even doubt about how much time they would have to abandon the capsule before it sank or capsized. To make matters worse they sighted huge cumulonimbus clouds to the south and, as it became dark, they wouldn’t be able to spot them until they were actually engulfed. In addition, it was now bitterly cold in the capsule. They were run down, undernourished and unable to exercise. This was the toughest part of the voyage for they were surrounded by uncertainty, but buoyed by the strength of their own relationship. Brian’s gentle sense of humour and Bertrand’s philosophical strength, combined with their innate trust in the team in their control room back in Geneva, helped them through, although at times Alan Noble, their director, pushed them sorely. He seemed to have frequently adopted an unnecessarily acerbic tone in his instructions to the balloonists.
They were also having problems with the valves of the burners and eventually diagnosed the fault as icing up. The only solution was to lose height to thaw them out so they dropped down to 6,000 feet over an empty, still ocean, opened the hatch and climbed out to feel the warmth of the sun and breathe fresh air. They had also been instructed to dump every bit of surplus weight to try to improve their ceiling for the anticipated flight in the high jet stream.
They ascended to altitude once again and began the slow crawl towards their hoped-for jet stream. The pressure continued to build with growing friction between the balloonists and Alan Noble reflected in terse faxes and, more worrying, Bertrand began suffering from severe headaches. Brian tried to lighten the atmosphere with limericks faxed back to control. They were still having problems with the burners and therefore decided to make another descent to try and fix them. They dumped even more surplus weight and returned to altitude.
At last, around day fifteen, they began to build on speed and were being blown in the right direction at a height of 34,000 feet towards the coast of Mexico. Their meteorologists had got it right and success seemed possible, though the fuel situation was still critical. They couldn’t afford to lose the jet stream. And there were still crises. They tried to drop two of their empty canisters just before reaching the coast, but only one fell and they suspected that the other had somehow jammed. They were afraid it might become dislodged when over land and kill someone on the ground, but they were loath to lose height once again, so tried every device they could think of, including jumping up and down in the capsule, to dislodge the offending canister. By this time they were over Mexico and when it finally worked itself tree, they just had to hope it had fallen on to empty ground.
They were now sweeping over Mexico and then they lost the jet stream and began drifting off course towards Venezuela. They were in despair, faced once again by the threat of failure and, even more serious, both Brian and Bertrand became short of breath, gasping for air. There were fears that they were hypoxic, but the oxygen was flowing freely. They wondered if it could be a build up of carbon dioxide and cleaned all the filters but the reading once again showed up as normal.
Medical experts in Switzerland were consulted and one came up with the possibility that they were suffering from pre-oedema of the lungs from breathing exceptionally dry air for days on end. They started wearing oxygen masks which not only increased their supply of oxygen but also trapped and recirculated the moisture from their breath. A friend of Bertrand, who was a doctor practising hypnotism, called in at the control centre and suggested he talked to Bertrand over the phone to help him to relieve his stress.
Bertrand was at the controls and there seemed just one last chance of getting them back on course to find the jet stream – to climb as high as possible. Bertrand opened up the burners regardless of the shortage of fuel, reached a height of 35,000 feet and started to swing on to a track of eighty-two degrees. They were still only travelling at forty-two knots per hour, but it was in the right direction and they were once again in with a chance. He was even able to call his wife Michele on his mobile phone, picking up a signal from one of the Caribbean islands. He experienced a sense of euphoria, flying literally on top of the world, talking to the woman he loved and feeling that success had been snatched from the very jaws of defeat.
They now began to increase speed as they swept over the Atlantic carried by the jet stream. There were still problems, since they were flying through several busy airline routes, but with some persuasion from their own control room they were given a corridor at their required altitude. It was now easier to ignore the bitter cold and the tempo of success was building up with floods of e-mails and requests for interviews from the media. Both Steve Fossett and Richard Branson sent their congratulations with those of thousands of others.
They were swept over the Atlantic reaching speeds of over 100 miles per hour and crossed the coast of Africa at 5.36 a.m. But they could see nothing. The coastal desert was uninhabited and not a single light glimmered out of the darkness, though the dawn was superb as the sun crept up above the horizon, casting its long shafts over the desert. They crossed the magic and invisible finishing line of 9.27° west at 10.00 a.m. GMT on 20 March to be the first men to circumnavigate the globe by balloon. In achieving this they had accomplished what is perhaps the last great terrestrial first and, as if to underline their victory, they flew on to Egypt to land in the desert twenty hours later at 6.00 a.m. GMT, on 21 March. They had flown 25,361 miles in twenty-one days, both a world distance and endurance record.
It was very much the story of the tortoise and the hare. On paper they were the least experienced participants. But Bertrand Piccard, who did not even have a balloon licence when he won the Trans-Atlantic Race in 1992 as Wim Verstraeten’s copilot, and Brian Jones, who had never made a long-distance flight before he joined Breitling Orbiter 3 at the last minute, in fact made an extraordinarily strong team, complementing each other’s skills and qualities. Piccard had learnt a great deal from his flights on Breitling Orbiter 1 and 2, while Brian Jones, quietly systematic, was a very competent practical balloonist who both liked Piccard and gave him his total support. In Bertrand’s words, ‘We took off as pilots, flew as friends and landed as brothers’.
They had the benefit of a very high level of support and guidance from their flight control centre with superb wind and weather forecasting but, perhaps most important of all, they also had those lucky breaks with the weather – the key factor in so many great adventures, whether making the first ascent of Mount Everest, sailing round the world single-handed or reaching the Poles.