‘Keep the fire burning – that’s all that matters,’ I wrote across a page in my notebook after one three-hour session on all the possible outcomes of our flight.
The delay gave me the chance to revisit the banks of dials, gauges and switches built into the capsule walls. It also gave me time to make sure that I remembered the difference between the switches that released the empty fuel tanks and the ones that separated the balloon from the capsule!
‘It’s code yellow,’ Bob Rice announced. ‘Expect a green light by 2100 hours, November 23rd.’
‘Is the Pacific Ocean the largest ocean in the world?’ asked Holly down the telephone. ‘How many miles is it? And how long would it take you to fly all round the world?’
It was time for a sleep. I lay on my hotel bed but couldn’t keep my eyes shut, and so I started to write in my diary:
Trying to have a couple of hours’ rest. Failing miserably. Just looked out of the window to see the end of a beautiful day. The smoke from the volcano looks like thin cloud in the sky. Cars with loudspeakers going through the streets announcing the time of our departure. Civic fireworks planned for 2.30a.m. for anybody from the town not already awake. Imagine an English city council doing that! Still not feeling nervous: elated, excited, but not really nervous. Everything seems to have gone so well. Bob feels the crossing and landing conditions are nearly as good as we can expect. Still have some nervousness about the inflation. In two hours must go back to site for a live interview for News at One.
When I went back to the site I sensed trouble. The balloon’s envelope was still laid out on the ground: inflation had not started. The operation room was full of Per’s team being debriefed: ‘Too windy, too risky, too much downwind.’ They decided to leave the envelope laid out on the ground and hope that the wind fell away by the next night. With the 70-tonne balloon stationary, a gust of wind could rip the fabric. I went back outside and asked for our translator. Somebody gave me a microphone and I apologised to the huge crowd huddled on the hillside above the launch site. We promised to try tomorrow.
The next day was long and listless. The jet stream seemed to be behaving peculiarly and Bob Rice was struggling to work out whether we would land in California or Yukon.
‘Oh, fuck the weather,’ Bob, America’s most renowned and sophisticated meteorologist, finally said. ‘Just go!’
I went back to the hotel for a final sleep, and once again I ended up staring out of the window at the volcano. I heard the drummers starting in town. Then a fax was pushed under my door. In spidery, slanting letters, Holly had written:
I hope you don’t land in the water and have a bad landing. I hope you have a good landing and land on dry land, and Miss Salavesen said to have a good landing too. I hope you have a nice trip.
Love from Holly.
PS. Good luck and I love you too.
I took a sleeping pill and fell on to my bed.
A few hours later Per woke me up and we drove to the site. A crowd of around 5,000 people had come out to watch in the freezing cold. There were families, old ladies, young babies. I heard cheers as the balloon rose from the ground and swung up above the capsule. The burners were roaring now to heat up the air. The wind was still, but we needed to take off as soon as possible in case any gusts caught us on the ground. Hundreds of coal braziers had been brought out on to the slope. Their smoke rose straight up into the starry night air – clear proof of how absolutely still it was.
I was standing with my parents admiring the magnificence of the balloon when a strip of the fabric suddenly peeled off the envelope and hung down.
‘What’s that?’ Dad asked me.
I ran to find Per.
‘What’s happening?’
‘Nothing to worry about,’ Per said. ‘Just a little heat loss. The balloon’s big enough to cope.’
I took Per back into the operation room and Dad grabbed his arm. ‘What’s that flapping off halfway up the envelope?’ he said.
‘It’s air coming up the side of the balloon,’ Per said.
Dad didn’t look convinced.
Per and I walked out and stood underneath the balloon. It effectively had a hole where the lamination had peeled off. We went back to the control room and I found Dad.
‘Dad, don’t tell Mum,’ I said, ‘but we’ve got a hole. Per still feels we’ll make it to America.’
‘You can’t fly in that thing,’ Dad said.
A minute later, more strips of lamination started falling off.
‘Richard, I’m afraid we’re going to have to abort the flight,’ Per said. ‘If we take off, we’ll end up in the Pacific.’
I looked out at the crowded hillside. I was going to have to let them all down. With my hands trembling with cold and bitter disappointment, I once again picked up the microphone.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, trying to stop my voice from choking. ‘The lamination of the balloon has torn apart. We think that it was because we left the balloon out all last night and the frost got into it …’
As the translator repeated my words, a groan rose from the crowd. Then there was a gasp and I looked up to see three or four huge chunks of fabric crash off the envelope and fall down on to the burners. Someone pulled them off, but the whole balloon was disintegrating in front of our eyes.
‘Shut off the burners!’ I yelled. ‘Stand back from there.’
Without the burners, the balloon sagged. It fell to one side, hot air seeping out of its holes.
‘We’ll come back next year,’ I promised. ‘Please have faith in us.’
‘Well, Richard,’ said Dad as we all drove back to the hotel, ‘holidays with you are never dull.’
Joan was two hours into her flight to Los Angeles when she heard the news.
‘Excellent!’ she exclaimed. ‘Champagne all round, please!’
The pilot pulled back the throttle and the helicopter rose still higher. The pale-blue sea shimmered and glittered beneath us. I watched as we approached Necker: the white coral reef and then the pale strip of beach, the leaning palm trees and the pointed roof of the Bali house, the deep green of the forest inland. We circled overhead and I saw our family and friends standing on the beach. Most of them were wearing white with wide-brimmed hats. There was a splash of colour from some tropical shirts. I spotted Vanessa and Robert; Lindi and her husband Robin; all the children; Peter and Ceris, my friends and neighbours from Mill End; Ken and his wife Nancy; Simon and his wife Françoise. I waved down at their upturned faces. In the middle of the crowd I saw Joan in her stunning white dress, with Holly and Sam, her sister Rose, her brother John and her mother beside her. Granny was standing with Mum and Dad, waving up at me merrily.
I tapped the pilot on the shoulder and he brought the helicopter round once more.
I picked up the box of Milk Tray and gripped it in my teeth. Everything was in place. I crouched low and paused at the open door. The wind was hot and fast in my face, the beach and silvery-blue sea spinning crazily beneath me, as I stared down. We were hovering over the swimming pool. I gripped the side of the door and looked back at the pilot.
‘All because the lady loves Milk Tray!’ he shouted.
I took the box out of my mouth for a moment.
‘The kids do too!’ I shouted back.
I flashed him a thumbs up, took one last look at the swimming pool directly beneath me, and then climbed out on to the struts and swung off them. Joan and I were finally getting married and I didn’t want the Milk Tray to melt. I prepared to jump.
20 ‘Who the hell does Richard Branson think he is?’
August–October 1990
I WAS WOKEN UP by a heavy kick in my back. I had been thumped and prodded all night. Since it was now 5.30a.m., I slipped out of bed and put on my dressing gown. I watched Sam snuggle into my warm hollowed-out pillow, which he had been fighting to occupy all night. He and Holly still often slept in our bed with us. I turned on CNN and put my head close to the screen to hear the news. I didn’t need much so
und to understand that it was just as bad. Iraq had invaded Kuwait the previous week and the world was in a tailspin. The price of crude oil had soared from $19 a barrel before the invasion to $36. The price of aviation fuel had rocketed from 75 cents a gallon to $1.50, an even sharper increase than the rise in crude oil because the Allied Forces had begun stockpiling aviation fuel in preparation for an airborne attack on Iraq.
Two of the main ingredients of an airline’s profitability are the number of passengers and the cost of aviation fuel. All independent airlines were now facing disaster: we were having to operate when the price of fuel – which represents 20 per cent of our total overheads – had more than doubled, and the number of passengers flying had dried up. In the first week following the invasion, Virgin Atlantic received 3,000 cancellations. We had a £25 million overdraft facility with Lloyds Bank which we had just broken. I wondered how far we could go before Lloyds asked us to do something about it. I pushed the worry to the back of my mind.
I wondered how many more passengers would cancel today. The big state-owned airlines were even worse hit since nobody wanted to risk flying on a flag-carrier due to the chance of a terrorist attack. Since Mrs Thatcher had allowed the American jets to refuel in Britain on their Libyan raid, companies that were closely aligned with the government were seen as vulnerable to terrorist retaliation. The bomb on the PanAm jumbo over Lockerbie had shown how devastating such retaliation could be. Despite being a normal public company, British Airways still proclaimed itself as the British flag-carrier, and for the first time this reputation was to our advantage. After the first week of empty flights, I was beginning to feel a glimmer of hope that passengers were cautiously returning: we had noticed a slight preference towards Virgin Atlantic in place of either any American airline or British Airways.
In the summer of 1990 Virgin Atlantic was still a tiny airline. We flew to just four destinations in two countries. Each day we scanned the bookings for these four routes to see whether there was any sign that we were winning passengers back. The Tokyo route was our worst hit. We were allowed to fly only four times a week – and never on Sunday, which is the most popular day for businessmen to travel – and so the route was losing money even before Iraq invaded Kuwait. Throughout the summer we had been lobbying to be awarded the two extra flights to Tokyo which were about to be released, but as always we were up against British Airways. Our flights to Newark and Los Angeles had lost passengers from the first week after the invasion, but now we detected a swing towards Virgin in preference to the American carriers. The best news was that our holiday flights to Miami and Orlando seemed to be largely unaffected.
We had celebrated my fortieth birthday the previous month and, although Joan had arranged a wonderful party on Necker, I had found myself feeling uncharacteristically depressed. I felt that Simon had lost interest in Virgin Music, and I sympathised with him. It was extremely tough negotiating every contract and sometimes it felt rather repetitive going over the same points time and again. Although we had built Virgin Music into one of the major independent record labels, all Simon’s wealth was tied up in that single company and I knew that he was worried I might jeopardise it by some new risky venture. Simon wasn’t interested in the other projects I talked about and had only ever seen Virgin Atlantic as a huge liability to the rest of the Virgin Group: a business that could be driven to the wall by British Airways or by something out of the blue – something like a war in the Gulf.
Turning forty had also made me wonder what I was doing with my life. After the great leap into setting up Virgin Atlantic, I now found that it was difficult to develop the airline as quickly as I wanted. Although we had had a wonderful year and had been voted Best Business Class Airline, Virgin Atlantic was confined to operating from Gatwick Airport. Due to a single short runway and the lack of connecting flights, Gatwick was less profitable, both for cargo and passengers, than Heathrow. We were struggling to make money. On top of this we had fallen into a maintenance dispute with British Airways which continued to be a large bone of contention.
Given Simon’s gradual loss of interest, and our endless struggles to make ends meet at Virgin Atlantic, I began to question whether I should start doing something completely different. I even thought of going to university and studying history: it would be nice to have time to read. When I mentioned this to Joan she squashed the idea by bluntly pointing out that this was really just an excuse to meet a whole lot of pretty girls away from home. I mulled over the idea of setting up as a full-time political campaigner. I thought of studying some of the major issues, such as healthcare and homelessness, understanding what the best solutions were, and then fighting hard for the political change to implement them.
But all these thoughts were pushed out of my mind by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. We had the full-blown crisis at the airline, and I found myself caught up in the Gulf War in an extraordinarily personal way.
‘Daddy, please can you help me find my shoes?’
It was Holly.
‘Which ones?’
‘You know, my new trainers.’
As the world on the television continued to disintegrate towards war, and as our half-empty 747 Maiden Voyager headed across the Atlantic towards a dawn over Gatwick, my family gathered in bed for breakfast. Joan brought up a huge tray with fried eggs, fried bread, bacon and baked beans. As we ate, some of the Virgin staff let themselves in through the front door. I heard Penni start up the photocopier downstairs. Our new press officer, Will Whitehorn, trooped upstairs to his office. A dynamo of perpetually cheerful energy, Will had already proved himself to be a terrific asset.
Getting Holly and Sam ready for school was always a kind of mad initiative test. Shoes, socks, vests, shirts, blazers and berets had to be found wherever they had inexplicably hidden themselves overnight. They could be conjured up only by the most inspired lateral thinking.
‘Here they are!’ Joan had somehow thought to look for Holly’s shoes inside the large doll’s house, which hadn’t been used by anyone for as long as I could remember.
‘What were they doing there?’ I asked.
‘No idea,’ Holly said, and put them in her school rucksack without further explanation.
‘Sam, we’re going in two minutes,’ Joan threatened.
Sam had started to reassemble the Scalextric.
As they finally managed to pick up all their bits and pieces and head for the door, the phone rang. It was Queen Noor of Jordan.
My friendship with Queen Noor was one of the unlikely consequences of my balloon trip with Per across the Atlantic. Queen Noor was the Grace Kelly of Jordan. She was American and had once worked as an air stewardess. Tall, blonde and wholly glamorous, she now lived in a walled and heavily guarded palace in Amman. Queen Noor had heard about our balloon flight and telephoned me to ask whether I would teach her and her family how to fly a balloon. I had gone out to Jordan with Tom Barrow and spent a week at King Hussein’s palace teaching the royal family how to fly a hot-air balloon.
We flew over Amman, hovering over the rooftops and looking down on the ancient city with its minarets, whitewashed walls and faded orange-tiled rooftops. Nobody in Amman had ever seen a hot-air balloon before, and they stared up in amazement as we loomed overhead. When they realised that their King and Queen were standing in the wicker basket, they cheered and ran beneath the balloon waving up at us. When we fired the gas burner, all the dogs in the city started barking. With the barking, the cheering and the calls of the muezzins, the city gave in to total pandemonium. King Hussein, Queen Noor and the royal princes waved down as the balloon flew within three feet of the rooftops. I think that the only people who didn’t enjoy the trip were King Hussein’s bodyguards, who had successfully shielded him from nine assassination attempts but who could do nothing to protect him as he floated around in a wicker basket.
When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, King Hussein of Jordan was one of the few world leaders who refused to condemn him out of hand. King Huss
ein pointed out that Kuwait had promised Iraq a number of oil wells as part of its contribution towards the long war against Iran. Yet Kuwait had continually reneged on that promise and it had also cheated on its OPEC quotas.
Among all the chaos which followed the invasion, a huge number of foreign workers fled from Iraq into Jordan. There were around 150,000 refugees congregating in a makeshift camp with no water and no blankets. It was extremely hot during the day, when they had no shade; and freezing cold at night, when they had no warmth. A blanket can be rigged up as shade, and wrapped up in for warmth. As soon as I heard about this problem, I had contacted King Hussein and Queen Noor offering to do whatever I could to help. Queen Noor now telephoned me to say that, although the Red Cross was in the process of setting up a water-distribution system, there was still the task of trying to find up to 100,000 blankets.
‘A few very young children have already died,’ Queen Noor said, ‘but it hasn’t turned into a full-scale catastrophe yet. I think that we’ve only got about two or three days’ grace before we start to lose hundreds of refugees.’
That day I drove down to Crawley and talked to some of the Virgin Atlantic staff about how we would set about finding and then flying 100,000 blankets to Amman. Everyone at Virgin rallied round. During the course of the day we called up the Red Cross, William Waldegrave at the Foreign Office and Lynda Chalker at the Overseas Development Office, and managed to secure 30,000 blankets, with the promise of more to come from UNICEF in Copenhagen. Now that we had offered to provide the plane, the Red Cross put out an appeal on national radio and from that evening a warehouse at Gatwick started filling up with blankets. On top of that, David Sainsbury promised me that he would supply several tons of rice.
Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way Page 25
