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.
Quest for Adventure Page 41
