‘Who the hell does Richard Branson think he is?’ Lord King demanded of William Waldegrave in his second call to him. ‘Part of the bloody Foreign Office?’
Lord King’s indignation was echoed by some newspapers, who suggested I was doing it only for personal glory. Stung by this criticism, while staying with King Hussein I tried to analyse my motives in my diary:
Feel absolutely shattered. Been burning the candle at both ends. During an interview with ITN about the various people I saw, I choked up. Telling the story of the British father who had to hand his three-year-old child to a nanny at Baghdad airport to take her out of the country, and the woman from the Philippines who had that day left the country to have her second baby. I could only get halfway through telling it.
What are the motives for doing things? Is there any truth in the jibes? One month ago I was doing an interview with Vanity Fair and was at an all-time low. I’d seemed to have run out of a purpose in my life. I’d proved myself to myself in many areas. I’d just turned forty. I was seeking a new challenge. I was even considering selling up everything except for the airline. Getting smaller. Being able to focus on one business venture that I loved. But also to have the time to try to use my business skills to tackle issues that I felt I could help, such as in attacking the cigarette companies, cervical cancer, etc.
I felt I’d get better self-satisfaction in this way and would not be wasting the next forty years of my life just running companies, getting bigger – a repeat of the first forty years.
Do I need recognition for this? No, I don’t think so. The dilemma is that to campaign on many issues you need to use yourself publicly to get people moving. Television is a very powerful medium. By my speaking on TV, the tons of medicine, the foodstuffs and blankets and tents reached the refugees. The £2 million from Mrs Thatcher’s government has come through. An emergency meeting has taken place between the five main charities. Free advertising is to start on the BBC and ITV. I believe that by moving quickly a major disaster in this case has been averted. But, by not speaking out, it would not have been.
The dilemma is how often one can use the press in this way in one small country like England without losing one’s appeal to the public. If there should be a hint that I’m doing it for personal glory, then I won’t be able to do it at all.
By flying into Baghdad and rescuing the hostages Virgin had again usurped British Airways’ traditional role. At the time I had no idea that the Virgin flight into Baghdad would annoy Lord King so much. I was trying to help out – I had an aeroplane at my disposal and I could act quickly. Although this plane was one of just four planes Virgin Atlantic operated, suddenly we looked like a much larger airline. We had successfully negotiated with Saddam Hussein; we had carried in medical supplies; and we had brought back the hostages. I only found out later that Lord King’s indignant reaction was the start of an entire campaign by British Airways to try to put Virgin Atlantic out of business.
21 ‘We would have about two seconds to say our last prayers.’
November 1990–January 1991
EVER SINCE WE HAD abandoned our attempt the previous December, Per had been building the new envelope for the balloon that would attempt to take us across the Pacific Ocean. By the beginning of December it had been shipped out to Miyakonojo to join the capsule and await a good jet stream overhead.
A Japanese balloonist, Fumio Niwa, was challenging us to be the first to cross the Pacific, and was planning to fly a helium balloon. Per and I and our families and the balloon team arrived in Miyakonojo, and Fumio and I talked and joked over the radio as the preparation went on. He too was grounded by the unseasonably slow jet stream, which our weather-forecasting charts implied would leave us stranded somewhere over the Pacific. We waited and practised safety drills. We also watched the mounting tension in the Gulf on CNN. We felt sure that the Allied attack would take place just after Christmas. Per and I agreed that, if the Allied Forces declared war on Iraq, we would cancel the trip for a second time and return home.
As we approached Christmas there was still no war in the Gulf but there was also no sign of a sufficiently strong jet stream to take us across the Pacific. Bob Rice told us it was likely to be at least a week before an improvement. Per flew back to England for Christmas. Joan and I took our family down to Ishigaki, an island off the south Japanese coast.
The island was very quiet and had the classic Japanese landscape of mountains and sea. I spent time with my mother and father, and we watched the cormorant fishermen in their canoes. These fishermen were carrying out a tradition dating back several thousand years. They lined up six or seven birds along the edge of the boat and one by one the cormorants went diving for fish. The birds then brought them back to the boat and opened their beaks for the fishermen to remove the fish. The birds had rings round their necks to stop them swallowing.
I would have loved to have spoken to these fishermen. Probably they were as stressed about their money and families as anyone else, but their life seemed so tranquil and rooted in such an ancient tradition that I felt they must have come to terms with time in a way I never had. I wondered how they would have viewed my constant rushing about, my wish to set up new companies, to challenge myself, and to fly over the Pacific at 30,000 feet in a hot-air balloon.
At the end of our holiday, Joan took the children back to London to start school. Joan does not – understandably – like the idea of my ballooning and likes even less the idea of seeing me take off. I hugged them all farewell at Tokyo’s Narita Airport and then braced myself for the trip. As my parents and I walked through the airport to catch an internal flight to Miyakonojo I saw a television screen. In wildly flickering footage the news showed a helicopter hovering over the sea and winching a body on board. From the respectful tone of the reporter, I immediately knew that it was Fumio, and that he was dead.
We had all been on such a high, but this put our lives and the risks I was taking with them into perspective: it could have been us. We found somebody who could speak a little English. They explained that Fumio had taken off the previous morning but had crashed into the sea just off the coast. He had radioed for help from his capsule but he was dead by the time the rescue helicopter arrived. He had died of exposure.
The sight of Fumio’s body being winched out of the freezing ocean killed off much of my enthusiasm for the flight. I felt a deep sense of foreboding, but was equally helpless to withdraw. If the weather conditions were right, we would climb into the capsule and take off. I resigned myself to fate, and forced myself to make the best of it.
Later we found out exactly what had happened to Fumio. He had taken off the day before we were due back, hoping to steal a march on us. The strong winds had torn the envelope of his balloon, forcing him to ditch in the Pacific in his capsule. But the ocean was so rough that when the seaplane arrived it was unable to pick him up and had radioed for a helicopter. There was a delay while the rescue services sorted out which helicopter should come. By the time it arrived Fumio was dead. He’d been only about 10 miles into the 8,000-mile journey. It was a salutary warning.
Per and I planned to launch the balloon on Sunday 13 January. The Allied Forces had given Saddam Hussein a deadline of 15 January by which to leave Kuwait, and we felt sure that the attack would take place very soon after that deadline. Unfortunately it was too windy for us to inflate the balloon on Sunday and we postponed it until Monday. The jet stream now picked up speed, and by Monday 14 January it looked as if the flight might be possible. In the evening the weather cleared and we started inflating the balloon.
After taking a sleeping pill that afternoon, Per and I were woken at 2.30a.m. to go down to the launch site. We made our way through the thousands of people who had come to watch despite the cold. We walked behind a police car which slowly inched along. The Japanese children held up candles and waved Union Jacks at us. They sang ‘God Save The Queen’ in perfect English accents. Once again people had set up braziers and were barbecuing fish and sw
eetcorn.
‘Don’t eat anything,’ I warned Per as he was about to accept some fish. ‘The last thing I need is you having a bout of food poisoning up there.’
In front of us, absorbing all the attention, the balloon was straining at its steel hawsers. It towered over everyone. This time it was large enough to swallow the dome of St Paul’s cathedral. It had been heated to a great temperature, and was ready to soar upward as soon as the cables were cut.
We thanked the people of Miyakonojo for their hospitality and released some white doves as a rather futile peace gesture. Just before I climbed up the steps into the capsule, I sent someone to fetch my parents. Everyone was now very edgy, looking up at the straining balloon as it tried to rise. My parents made their way through the barriers and police and we just hugged each other. My mother gave me a letter which I zipped into a trouser pocket.
‘Time to go!’ Per yelled.
As we turned we saw Alex, our designer and engineer, emerge from the capsule with the biggest adjustable spanner we’d ever seen. ‘I think it’ll be OK now,’ he said.
We climbed up the steps and ducked down into the capsule.
As the ground crew backed away, we started firing the burners. The pressure to lift grew stronger and stronger, and then Per fired the bolts which released the steel hawsers and we rocketed upward. For the first few breathless minutes we just marvelled at our silent speed. Then the balloon rose above the dark covering of cloud and we saw the silver dawn on the horizon. I got on to the radio and made contact with the ground crew.
‘You’re up and away!’ Will Whitehorn shouted. ‘The crowd down here are cheering like crazy. It looks amazing. You’re heading up fast.’
Within five minutes we were out of sight of Miyakonojo and heading up into the jet stream. Within half an hour we were well over the Pacific Ocean. Then at 23,000 feet we hit the bottom of the jet stream. It was as if we had struck a glass ceiling. However much we burnt, the balloon refused to go in. The winds were too strong, and they were pushing down the flat dome of the balloon. We kept pushing up against it, and we kept being buffeted back down. We put on our parachutes and clipped ourselves to the life rafts in case the balloon suffered a catastrophic rip. Then, at last, the balloon edged into the jet stream.
The top of the balloon took off ahead of us, and I saw it streaming in front of and even below the capsule. We were knocked to one side. From travelling at 20 knots we were suddenly flying at 100 knots. For a moment I thought we were going to be torn apart, and I remembered my image of the thousand horses dragging us to pieces, but then the capsule came into the jet alongside the balloon and we were righted. The balloon rose above us again and we were safely tucked into the jet. Per’s relief didn’t give me the greatest of confidence:
‘Nobody’s done that before,’ he said. ‘We’re in uncharted territory.’
After seven hours it was time to dump an empty fuel tank. We had six tanks of propane bolted to the capsule. The idea was that we would change the fuel tank when one was empty, jettison the dead weight, and fly correspondingly faster. We decided to go down out of the jet stream as we dropped the tank in case anything went wrong.
We had a video camera beneath the capsule which pointed vertically downward – in effect an extra window for us. The sea below us looked dangerous: it was running to great waves, and although we were 25,000 feet above it we could clearly see the white tops and the deep shadows of the troughs.
I looked at the video monitor as Per pressed the button to release the empty fuel tank. Before I could see what happened, the capsule lurched sideways. I was thrown across the capsule and landed on top of Per.
‘What’s happened?’ I cried.
‘No bloody idea.’
I crawled back up the sloping floor of the capsule to my seat. We were suspended at an angle of about 25 degrees above the horizontal. Per checked all the controls to see if he could see what had gone wrong. We had no idea if we were hanging by just one steel rope and the capsule was about to part company with the balloon and plummet down into the sea. I reran the video and watched what happened when the fuel tanks fell away. To my horror I saw three tanks falling down to the sea rather than one.
‘Per, look at this.’
We watched again in silence.
‘Bloody hell!’ Per said. ‘All the tanks on one side of the capsule have gone.’
Rather than jettisoning one empty tank, we had actually jettisoned one empty tank and two full ones. The implications of this were horrific. We had flown only around 1,000 miles and now we had just half the fuel we had started out with. We had three tanks of propane rather than five to fly us across the most dangerous and remote part of the Pacific Ocean.
‘Watch out!’ Per said. ‘We’re rising.’
I looked at the altimeter. Without the weight of the two full tanks of fuel, the balloon was soaring upward. We were once again buffeted as we entered the jet stream, but we hit it with such speed that we carried on rising. The altimeter ticked steadily upward from 31,000 feet to 34,000 feet.
‘I’m letting air out,’ Per said. ‘We’ve got to come down.’
I stared at the altimeter, willing it to slow down: 35,000, 36,000, 37,000, 38,000 feet. We had no idea how strong the capsule was. We knew that the glass dome was able to withstand pressure of only around 42,000 feet, and even that was something of a guess. If we reached 43,000 feet the glass dome would explode. We would have about two seconds in which to say our last prayers, long enough to see our lungs being sucked out of our chests. After that our eyeballs would pop out of their sockets. We would become a scattering of debris somewhere in the Pacific.
Per had opened the vent at the top of the balloon, but it was still rising. The weight of the three fuel tanks we had dropped and the amount of hot air we’d needed to support them was the problem. It was a race between time and the altimeter. Thank goodness we had gone down out of the jet stream before we had dropped the fuel tanks.
‘It’s slowing,’ I said with helpless optimism. ‘I’m sure it’s slowing.’
The altimeter ticked up: 39,000, 39,500, 40,000, 40,500, 41,000 feet.
We were now in the realm of the unknown. None of our equipment had been tested at this kind of height and anything could go wrong.
At 42,500 feet the altimeter finally stopped rising. I wondered bleakly whether this was because it had broken and simply could not register any greater height. We were way above the heights flown by all passenger jets except Concorde. But then it clicked down 500 feet. And then some more.
‘We don’t want to come down too fast,’ Per said. ‘We’ll only have to burn fuel to bring us back up again.’
He shut the vent and the balloon continued to fall, down to 35,000 feet. Then we had to start firing the burners again to stay in the jet stream.
At last we could confront the problem of the lost fuel tanks. Our radio contact with the San José flight centre remained good, and they were clearly as devastated by the loss of the tanks as we were. There were some rapid calculations. If we were to reach land in the time available to us before the fuel ran out, we had to fly at an average speed of 170 miles an hour, twice as fast as any hot-air balloon had ever flown before. The odds against us were overelming.
‘What about Hawaii?’ I asked. ‘Can we aim to land nearby?’
‘It’s a needle in a haystack,’ Per said. ‘We’ll never get anywhere near it.’
‘I wonder if America is doable,’ I whispered.
‘Of course it’s doable,’ he said. ‘The question is whether we can do it.’
Per’s a precise logician when he wants to be.
I asked over the radio about the conditions below us. Mike Kendrick, the project manager, came on loud and agitated:
‘I’ve just spoken to a cargo ship which is in the area. They said there’s a strong wind and high seas. “Atrocious” is the word he used.’
Per leant over and urbanely asked Mike, ‘What do you mean by “atrocious”? Over.’
‘Keep going on your current altitude,’ Bob Rice came on. ‘The jet is reasonably strong.’
Then, all of a sudden, the radio cut out.
For the next six hours we had no contact with the outside world. Due to the terrible weather around us we were in a high-frequency blackout spot. We were somewhere over the Pacific, hanging by a few steel hawsers to a vast balloon, the remaining fuel tanks dangling off the side of the capsule like a necklace, and we could not make any contact with anybody. We could barely control where we were going or how fast we were getting there, and we hardly dared move around the capsule. Our three main points of reference were the Global Positioning System, our watches and the altimeter. Every ten or fifteen minutes we took a reading off the GPS and calculated our groundspeed.
As we flew on Per began to show signs of utter exhaustion.
‘I’m just going to have a rest,’ he mumbled, and lay down on the floor.
I was alone. Unlike during the Atlantic crossing, when I had been more of a passenger than a pilot, I now really understood what was happening. If we were going to make land, our only chance was to keep the balloon absolutely in the centre of the jet stream. The vein of wind there is only a hundred metres wide, just four times the width of the balloon itself. But staying in it was our only hope.
The sky was pitch-black all around us. I scarcely looked out of the capsule and tried to concentrate on the instruments. As I sat there, with Per lying comatose on the floor, it seemed clear that we were both going to die. With just three fuel tanks we would run out of fuel some thousand miles off the American coast and have to ditch in the sea. It could well be night-time; Mike had told us the ground weather was atrocious – fucking atrocious – and nobody would be able to find us. We would have to fly this balloon for another thirty hours if we were going to live. I knew that the only chance of our living was for me to fly the balloon right in the core of the jet stream. I put all thoughts of death out of my head, and for the next ten hours concentrated intently on the dials.
Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way Page 27
