I’d never tell any of the fraternity this to their faces, but perhaps you don’t have to be terribly clever to climb or to attempt polar challenges. You need to learn from experience of course, particularly with the latter, but there are times when you really just have to get your head down and keep going. I soon discovered things were a bit different with ballooning and you had to be rather more cerebral about things. In the five years before Bertrand Piccard successfully made the first round the world flight in the Breitling Orbiter 3, there must have been something like twenty-two failed attempts from people like Steve Hilton, Richard Branson and Steve Fossett. Perhaps that very quickly became part of ballooning’s appeal for me, and also the fact that it is really unheard of for anyone to have major achievements in three such entirely unrelated fields. It’s very unusual for anyone to move seriously from mountaineering to polar, or vice versa, but I can’t think of anyone else who has added a third such string to their bow; maybe the odd sailor but never aviation. I very soon fell in love with the sport, which I found attracted a rather different type of person to my other adventuring: lovely and quirky, perhaps more thoughtful, the sort of people who like the challenge of working together as part of a genuine team effort.
Having said that, I really only started ballooning for just the one flight. With most climbing and polar trekking you have to learn your trade as you go along, but I didn’t get my balloon pilot’s licence just to fly around England or anything like that, although I’ve done a fair bit of it since, but purely to attempt one trip. After just failing in my second attempt to reach the Geographic North Pole in April 1997, it having been a terrible struggle and fearing I might never make it under my own steam, I’d started wondering if it was possible to do it another way, in a balloon. This had tragically been attempted by one of my great historical heroes, the Swedish pioneer Salomon Andrée, exactly a century earlier, but the huge advances in meteorology in the hundred years since then made me think it might genuinely be possible. Back then the state of knowledge about prevailing seasonal wind patterns at different altitudes, and of course the inability to see them in real time, effectively left adventurers in a state of total ignorance. Today things were very different.
I was originally taught to fly by a Bath-based balloonist called Terry McCoy. Terry took me flying around his local area and I soon got the ballooning bug; I loved the fact that you can feel the wind against your cheeks and also the simple sense of freedom that comes from using the wind currents. Brian Jones, who had been the co-pilot on the Breitling Orbiter, was the instructor who took me on my check-out flight for my pilot’s licence (I got my fixed-wing licence later on in 2003) and has since become a good friend. He was the perfect examiner because he continued to use even the test as a teaching experience and was very positive in everything he said. Brian is the person who has taught me pretty much all I know about ballooning.
In the UK, 99 per cent of balloons are of the hot air variety with a modern burner and propane tanks as fuel. When you heat the air in the balloon it rises, if you stop doing so it comes down. You really can’t get anything simpler than that. As with all balloons they are classified by their volume, from AX-01 (with a hot-air variety) having a volume of less than 250 square metres, up to AX-15 the massive size of more than 22,000 square metres. The next type up is a gas balloon (AA-01–AA-15), where you have a semi-permeable cell which doesn’t allow any gas to escape and is sealed at the top and bottom; there is a little valve on the top and you use a lighter-than-air lifting gas. These days we use helium or hydrogen for that and sand as ballast. If you want to go up you drop sand over the side and, to come down, you pull a rope which lets gas out of the top via a valve.
The third type is a combination balloon known as a Rozier (AM-01–AM-15), where you have both hot air and at the top of the envelope a closed gas cell. This is the most effective type of balloon for longer distances. When you heat the hot air with the propane burner that in turn heats the helium in the cell, causing the balloon to rise, and the heat of the sun on the balloon during the day will do the same. I’m afraid you can’t really get away from the fact that ballooning is a pretty expensive sport; a brand new balloon big enough to fly four people costs about £30,000, plus around £300 per flight for the gas and insurance. Partly to get my hours up, I made the first hot-air balloon flight across the Andes with only three hours P1 (the pilot in overall charge of the balloon, or solo as I was in that case) experience, which in retrospect was probably one of the most stupid things I’ve ever done. The first time I flew a Rozier was on my flight to the North Pole.
Salomon Andrée’s journey in 1897 ended in failure, his balloon coming down on the way from Spitsbergen to the North Pole. He and his two companions died in their attempted return on foot south to civilization. My North Pole flight was audacious I suppose mainly because no one knew if it could be done, but in a sense I was never really too worried and felt it was relatively safe. It required a great deal of planning, but I was pretty sure I would come out of it alive. It could have been very dangerous if the only possible weather pattern would have taken me away after the Pole towards northern Iceland, leading to my worst nightmare of having to drop into the ocean, but realistically I would never have allowed that to happen and would have put the balloon down on the ice way before that. Then it would just have been a question of erecting my tent and waiting to be rescued, although I obviously wasn’t keen that should need to happen. As it transpired the wind took me all the way back almost to my initial departure point on Spitsbergen.
The things I am probably proudest of achieving, both in terms of planning and execution, are my two Atlantic crossings in a Rozier and then a gas balloon, and my Rozier and hot-air balloon altitude records. For many people the Atlantic crossing will always seem the ultimate challenge, as it was in the pioneering days of aviation back in the 1920s, and in both cases the quest claimed many lives. Despite that, during my Atlantic crossings I felt pretty comfortable most of the time because I knew the planning had been right, even if many people seemed to think I was mad. For me the most dangerous thing I have ever done was certainly my Rozier altitude record, because there was absolutely no room for error. With the Breitling Orbiter, which coincidentally held the record previously from the end of their round the world trip, the pilots were inside a pressurized capsule, sitting in shirt sleeves in nice comfy chairs. That was still a great achievement and, maybe in comparison, to take off in a small open basket sitting on a fishing stool might seem on the verge of foolhardy. I would be within a whisker of it all going horribly wrong, if I ran out of oxygen or something on the basket didn’t work properly.
The idea for my first world altitude record was hatched whilst hanging around in Canada for seven weeks in the summer of 2003, waiting to get the right weather for the Atlantic crossing on which I was about to embark. I was planning to use the same balloon for both, the very one that I had also flown to the North Pole, so it was a trusty old friend by now. This was a Rozier mixed balloon, so with a gas cell and also using hot air, of the AM-08 class, which means an envelope of between 2,200 and 3,000 square metres. My particular balloon was built by Don Cameron in Bristol with a 90,000 cubic foot capacity.
The existing record for that class was held by the great ballooning icon Per Lindstrand, who in 1996 had taken it to 34,943 feet, which also took him up through six further classes all the way up to AM-14. The absolute record, AM-15, was held at 38,732 feet by Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones in Breitling Orbiter, from their landmark round the world success in 1999. They hadn’t set out to break the altitude record, it was simply a coincidental by-product of being in an absolutely massive balloon and also comparatively very light at the end of their trip.
It has always been the case with distance and duration aviation records of all kinds that you need to exceed the existing mark by 1 per cent to break it. This is probably just an historical throwback to the days before GPS when such things were more difficult to determine exactly, and for the s
ake of consistency has never been changed. However, with altitude records, the required margin is 3 per cent, since for various scientific reasons altitude has always been, and remains, slightly harder to judge very accurately. To break the Breitling Orbiter’s record, taking out all seven classes above me, I would need to reach 39,894 feet. Of course, with that necessary margin needed to break an altitude record, the higher the mark is set the progressively harder it is to break in the future. The challenge I wanted to set myself was to achieve a point that might prove impossible ever to beat, or at least that might stand for a very long time.
The figure we decided to aim at was 41,000 feet. I knew that would be very hard, but if I managed to achieve it no one else would be in the record books anytime soon. This would be something very special I felt. I wouldn’t hold the record for anything below a Rozier AM-08, but I knew no smaller balloon could ever have any prospect of getting higher, it simply wouldn’t be large enough to generate sufficient lift. By taking away all the other classes above me, however, I would technically be breaking eight world records. To use a boxing analogy, it would be a bit like a flyweight beating a heavyweight, and normally a good big ’un always beats a good little ’un. The thought of this had really got my competitive juices flowing.
It took a hell of a lot of planning, and for six months Tim Cole (in charge of the bottom end), master balloon-builder Bert Padelt (in charge of the top) and I worked our socks off. I’d known them both since Bert first contacted me with an offer of help before my second attempted Atlantic crossing out of Pittsburgh, and he had introduced me to his friend Tim. At the end of the day it all really boiled down to a very simple equation. From our cubic capacity we could calculate how much weight the balloon would carry at any given altitude. If you inflate the envelope at sea level it will generate a defined amount of lift, but if you go to 5,000 feet it will be somewhat less and at 10,000 feet even less still. If you take this up on a graph to the world record level we were aiming at, you can see the exact amount of weight you can afford to carry. The calculation itself isn’t that difficult, but packing everything you need into that weight limit certainly is, particularly for a bloke like me. Lighter boxer shorts were a start, but that was soon followed by no beer and definitely no second puddings.
It was obvious from the start that the flight would have to take place in north America, since it is just so much easier doing things there. Being such a huge country, even with crowded skies it means there are wider open spaces between the flight paths, and generally speaking air traffic control (ATC) is that much more accommodating. Of course there are still strict rules you have to follow, permits you must apply for and clearance you need from ATC at any given time and altitude, but if possible they will try and find a way to let you attempt something, whereas in the UK the default position always seems to be that you can’t bloody well do that here, a ‘not on my watch’ rather than a ‘can do’ mentality.
We’d be taking off from Greeley just outside of Denver, Colorado, for the simple reason that this is where Tim lives, but with the added advantage of the fields there seeming to be the size of Wiltshire. I was fed up of trying to land a Rozier balloon on a postage stamp, smashing my way through any number of things before I could come to a halt. It was from here that Tim and Bert had done five other altitude and test flights for all of Steve Fossett’s trial launches, and as a team I am convinced they are simply the best. Bert had flown out by the time I arrived in Denver at midday on Monday 22 March 2004, and after such a long build-up everything happened very quickly. I’d got there with the expectation of flying on Thursday, but now I found that the weather had changed and it would be first thing the next morning.
I would be flying in a very small, two-man wicker basket, the base a rectangle of about 4 by 5 feet, sitting on a fishing stool and with two Worthington propane gas tanks and three oxygen systems crammed in around me. That night we went through everything for the tenth time, planning for any possible contingency, all the things that could go wrong. If this fails, we do that, if that freezes we switch to this. We’d built-in double redundancy throughout, but I was still nervous about how things would function in the extreme cold, and particularly about the oxygen apparatus which was unlike anything I had previously used other than in training.
There are big differences between the physiologies of individual people, subtle variations within the human body, and you train in a barochamber to recognize hypoxia. Since in a balloon you are going up very fast without any form of acclimatization you need oxygen from a much lower level than when climbing a mountain, almost from the start at Greeley where I would be taking off from a ground altitude of about 10,000 feet above sea level. There are two different types of oxygen system, and how high you are planning to go determines which one you need to use.
The rule of thumb is that at 10,000 feet you need 1 litre a minute, at 20,000 feet 2 litres and at 30,000 feet 3 litres. You can certainly safely go up to 20,000 feet on what is termed constant flow oxygen, the type I used on Everest, but if you intend venturing beyond roughly 30,000 feet the air pressure and your physiology reach the point where constant flow oxygen ceases to work and you need what is termed demand oxygen, similar to an aqualung, where oxygen is forced into your body at a rate roughly three times that of constant flow. Pilots using oxygen at altitude will always be on a demand supply. If something goes wrong you don’t have long, just as happened to the golfer Payne Stewart and his entourage who all died when the cabin pressure and oxygen in his private plane failed. I would be aiming for a lot higher than that.
So for my altitude record I needed demand oxygen, with a back-up system should the initial one fail, and also a spare constant flow supply in case I additionally needed that on the way down. At the rate I would be climbing I’d be at the height of Everest in about forty minutes, certainly not stopping on the way up, so I would also need to pre-breath for an hour before I took off, to get my body attuned and the red corpuscles in my blood well-saturated with oxygen. Unless you do this properly to force the nitrogen out of remote areas in your body, you could very easily end up getting extremity pains or even the bends. And since you are using up so much more oxygen than would be the case on constant flow you are very aware about the limits of your supply in the time you have to get up and down. Each cylinder lasts about two hours.
The other thing that would be new for me was that I was going to have to take a ‘geometric altitude’ with a barograph, which could be different to the altitude that might register on my altimeter. The barograph reading needed to be adjusted on a computer programme to take account of the temperature and air pressure. When that dropped to 185 I knew I would be at 41,000 feet. I’ll admit I was nervous and didn’t have the best of night’s sleep, not just because I had to be at the balloon, literally in Tim’s backyard, at 4.00 a.m.
When I turned up the next morning everything was ready to go. One last weather check and the helium started to be piped into the balloon. TRACON, the authority that co-ordinates all American ATC, were contacted and told I would be taking off at 6.00 a.m., and I was provided with transponder codes and radio frequencies in return. Bert had given me a clear flight profile, that I’d be rising at about 500 feet per minute until I gradually slowed down and would top out, hopefully at the altitude record. I was weighed off to reach 41,000 feet, and now I had to start an hour of pre-breathing before lift-off. The really scary part was when I had to take a deep breath as the bottle was changed and switched over to a new one in the basket. Just one breath off the bottle, I’d been told, would put all the nitrogen back into my body and make my hour of pre-breathing a complete waste of time. Then suddenly it was time, and Tim said the Balloonist’s Prayer.
May the winds welcome you with softness. May the sun bless you with his warm hands. May you fly so high and so well that God joins you in laughter and sets you gently back into the loving arms of Mother Earth.
I was airborne and everything was working perfectly. I gradually got rid of my thre
e bags of sand, passing through two sets of clouds on what seemed like a non-stop elevator ride to the top. But it was soon clear there might be a hitch. I started off talking to air traffic control, and when I got to 20,000 feet the ATC told me to change my transponder code and call up another guy to get further clearance. I was being handed over to another ATC responsible for the air space in a higher altitude band. He seemed disconcerted by my wishing to pass through and wanted to know where my approval was. This made no sense to me, as Tim had been meticulous about getting permission for my flight from the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) three weeks ago, yet the ATC knew nothing about this. His view was clear, I didn’t have approval to pass through his altitude band and had to stop.
He didn’t seem very interested in my explanation that I couldn’t do so, that there is no hanging around in a balloon and you are just going up. My only alternative was to cancel the whole trip. I was violating the airspace, he said, and should contact this number when I landed. Here, I knew at once, was a massive problem. With any world record regulated by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), if you break a local aviation law then the record is void and will not be ratified. Tim is absolutely pedantic about such things so I was certain he must have cleared everything, but right now that appeared to count for nothing. Unbeknownst to me, right at that moment this ATC was bringing to a halt all traffic going into Denver airport, and starting to direct the planes in on another flight path and onto a different runway.
No Such Thing as Failure Page 18
