There are two basic kinds of balloon: a gas balloon has an envelope filled with a gas (helium or hydrogen) that is lighter than the surrounding air; a hot-air balloon has an envelope that is filled with ordinary air that has been heated. Air, like any gas, will expand and thin out as it grows warmer. As the air in its envelope warms up, a hot-air balloon will become progressively lighter.
However thin the gas in your balloon, you’re eventually going to reach a height where the surrounding air is thinner. At that point, you’ll stop rising. The only way to go higher is to lose some weight—in other words, to throw something out of the balloon. That something (sandbags, lead weights, unpopular passengers) is called “ballast.” To come down again, you need to make your balloon (slightly!) heavier than the surrounding air. This is most easily done by “venting” your balloon: letting some air or gas out of it.
Up, up, and away: a contemporary hot-air balloon, designed by Don Cameron.
This is pretty much all you need to know for now. So let go of that anchor rope—and before you know it, we’re up in the air.
Balloon ascents are gentle. Because we’re moving with the wind, we won’t even feel the breeze against our skin, even in a gale. Even in a snowstorm. On board a balloon, borne along at hundreds of miles an hour, you can strike a match and the flame won’t even keel over to show you in which direction the wind is blowing. When a bird flies past, you can hear the beat of its wings. The prevailing impression, in these first few moments of ascent, isn’t of flying at all: it feels more as though the earth has fallen away.
If you had your eyes closed, you might not even notice you had left the ground. This happened to Charles Green, Britain’s most famous balloonist of the nineteenth century. Green was due to make his first ascent from Green Park in London in 1821, as part of the festivities surrounding the coronation of George IV. As the moment of takeoff neared, sightseers packed so tightly around the balloon that Green slumped, exhausted, into the basket and told his assistants to get him some air. They paid out the rope, lifting him a few feet from the ground—and the balloon broke free. Green had no idea he was flying until cheers from the rapidly dwindling crowd persuaded him to peer over the side of the basket.
From the basket of a hot-air balloon, you can really recapture the excitement that must have flooded the minds of the early “aeronauts” as for the first time in human history they saw their world laid out before them, as though it was a map. In 1858, the photographer Nadar (his real name was Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) sailed 258 feet above the valley of Bièvre in France and captured a daguerreotype—an early photograph—of the earth below, blurred by the vibrations of the balloon. “We have had bird’s-eye views seen by the mind’s eye imperfectly,” he wrote. “Now we will have nothing less than the tracings of nature herself, reflected on the plate.”
“Elevating photography to the height of art”: Nadar caricatured in 1862.
Of course, map views are commonplace now. Those of us who lived through the cold war experienced its most frightening moments almost entirely from the air: aerial images of Cuban missile installations; surveillance satellite photographs; overhead map projections of nuclear-weapon damage; airplane views of H-bomb tests.
For me and my generation, I think ballooning is a perfect tonic, a way to discard the paranoia of the cold war and get back to the sense of wonder enjoyed by Prince Pückler-Muskau as he sailed in a balloon over the city of Berlin in 1817: “No imagination can paint anything more beautiful than the magnificent scene now disclosed to our enraptured senses: the multitude of human beings, the houses, the squares and streets, the high towers gradually diminishing, while the deafening tumult became a gentle murmur, and finally melted into a deathlike silence.”
People sometimes expect to see the curvature of the earth from the vantage of a hot-air balloon. This isn’t possible: the height you normally reach in a hot-air balloon is nowhere near great enough. Few complain. They’re too taken up with another strange and very beautiful optical illusion: the earth, far from falling away at the edges, seems to be curving upward. It looks, as we rise, as though we’re contained in a giant bowl.
This illusion, too subtle to be noticed from a plane, is the result of diffraction—the same phenomenon that makes a pencil seem to bend when you dip it into water. The air is thinner now, as we ascend, and we are looking at the ground through air that becomes progressively thicker. Everything seems bent toward us, as though the earth were cupping us in its hands.
Few newcomers to ballooning expect to see outer space, and yet, after a very short period of ascent, the sky does begin to darken. I don’t have the words to explain why this should be so moving, but I’m by no means the first balloonist to get a lump in my throat at the sight. The nineteenth-century aviation pundit Monck Mason—never short of a purple phrase or two—writes with genuine passion of the way the balloonist “obtains . . . unerring tokens of his approach to the nether limits of the void and infinite gulf that lies beyond him; and I have no doubt, could he but continue his course until he had attained the outward margin of the atmosphere, he would . . . behold an impenetrable abyss of perfect blackness, in which every visible source of light would stand like a disk of solid flame.”
The air thins out incredibly quickly, the higher we go. We’ll feel the first effects of altitude a mere 9,000 feet above sea level. That persistent headache? That’s the low pressure, trying to suck your brains out through your eye sockets. The air here is too thin for most of us to breathe. The people who live at these heights—Himalayan Sherpas and the folk of remote villages in the Andes—have bred over generations an enviable ability to handle a lower-than-usual level of oxygen.
Let’s climb another 9,000 feet. We’re at less than two thirds the height of Mount Everest, and already we’ve left the rest of humanity behind. Nobody lives at this altitude: human lungs just can’t cope.
Now let’s climb as high as Everest’s peak: 29,035 feet. Most untrained people, exposed suddenly to conditions here, would fall unconscious within six minutes. Even with supplemental oxygen, the low air pressure (one third earth normal) is sucking blood into our lungs.
Balloons had been around for about 20 years when balloonists began reaching lethal heights. In 1803, Étienne Robertson reached 23,526 feet before he began to choke. A year later, Count Francesco Zambeccari and two passengers were swept up into a rising current over the Adriatic: “We had difficulty hearing each other—even when shouting at the tops of our voices. I was ill and vomited; Grassetti was bleeding at the nose. We were both breathing short and hard, and felt oppression of the chest.”
In 1862, in an effort to understand the perils of high altitude, the British Association for the Advancement of Science sponsored meteorologist Dr. James Glaisher and celebrated balloonist Henry Tracey Coxwell to study the upper atmosphere. Dressed in street clothes, without caps or gloves, they set off from Wolverhampton, in the rain.
At 15,000 feet, the temperature had dropped to 17 degrees Fahrenheit, and ice began forming on Glaisher’s instruments and around the neck of the balloon. At 25,000 feet, the air temperature had fallen to minus 6 degrees Fahrenheit. Though their hands and lips had turned blue and their eyes bulged grotesquely, Glaisher manfully persevered with his experiments. He had brought pigeons along to see how well they coped with high altitude. At regular intervals, he threw one out of the carriage. It dropped like a stone. At 28,000 feet it suddenly dawned on Coxwell that he could no longer reach the cord to vent gas from the balloon. He grabbed the iron ring around the base of the balloon to pull himself up—and his hands froze to the metal.
Glaisher convulsed and passed out. Coxwell, vomiting, raised himself up on the iron ring and got the rope between his teeth. He managed eventually to gnaw through it, and lost a tooth for his trouble.
Coxwell and Glaisher topped out at 35,000 feet. Both survived their crash landing.
Higher still. At 39,000 feet, the only reason we’re still breathing is because I brought along tanks
of 100 percent pure oxygen.
And higher. Our oxygen masks are tied, screamingly tight, to our faces, and it takes real effort to breathe out. The air in our lungs would much rather escape through our tear ducts. Our eyes are watering constantly, and it hurts. Quick, put this pressure jerkin on—it’s basically a heavy shirt lined with a bladder that inflates. It makes breathing easier, but now the blood in our bodies is rushing into our arms and legs.
Time for the pressure suits. These have bladders to contain abdomen, thighs, and calves. Feeling better? Make the most of it. These things were designed for emergencies. Were the cockpit of your military plane to suddenly depressurize, the suit would give you a couple of vital minutes to dive your aircraft down to 38,000 feet. In about two minutes, we will black out as the blood squeezes out of our veins into the surrounding tissue, expanding to fill unpressurized nooks and crannies.
We are not going to reach outer space, because very soon there’s not going to be anything for our balloon to float through. How high we can get is hard to say. There is no point at which the earth’s atmosphere obviously stops and space begins. The Hungarian-American engineer Theodore von Kármán drew a line in the sky at 62.1 miles—that’s over 327,000 feet. At this height, he said, the air was so thin, you’d have to travel very fast indeed for the wings of your airplane to work: so fast, you would put yourself into orbit.
We have risen about a third of the way to the Kármán line; 113,700 feet is the highest ever attained by a human being in a balloon. Of course, Commander Malcolm Ross and Lieutenant Commander Victor Prather Jr. used a prototype space capsule for their 1961 journey. I haven’t given us that luxury.
As far as our bodies are concerned, we’re in space. Our saliva starts to bubble. Our skin puffs up in spots. Our stomachs swell and our eyes pop outward. And then—good news! We will not explode! This never happens. Even without a flight suit to contain it, skin is tough and won’t split. Our bodies will simply expand to twice their usual volume as the water inside us boils and turns to vapor.
But let’s look on the bright side (we’re only spinning stories, after all). Arthur C. Clarke, the space visionary who scripted the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, has his astronaut, Bowman, leap unprotected from his space buggy into an airlock, exposing himself to the vacuum of space for about 10 seconds. In reality (we know this from a couple of nasty accidents in industrial vacuum chambers), Bowman would have about 15 seconds before he blacked out. After that, his rescuers would have all of one and a half minutes to revive him.
Unnerved? I certainly am! It’s high time we started our descent.
As a child, I was haunted by dreams of being able to fly. I knew that realizing my dream was never going to be easy for me. For a start, I’m not great with machinery. I’m dyslexic, and prone to confuse my left and my right. (I’m not alone: the commonest navigational error known to mountain rescuers is an error of 180 degrees. People regularly head off in exactly the wrong direction!) Still, I have the instincts of an engineer. I am fascinated by how things work and how things are done and how things might be done differently.
In the 1980s, if you were as interested, as I was then, in flight technology and new materials and wild new engineering ideas, Per Lindstrand was a name that was hard to avoid. Per explained to me that previous record-setting balloons had traveled at about 6,000 or 7,000 feet, buffeted by ever-changing winds, plagued by freezing fogs, and not infrequently struck by lightning. Per wanted to take us above the weather, into the jet stream, a river of fast, dry air whose reasonably constant and predictable course would enable us to cross the Atlantic at speeds of up to 130 miles per hour.
He explained that the jet streams that encircle the earth have an endearing habit of moving especially quickly across oceans—handy for record breakers!—and that the exotic materials he used for his balloon envelopes were the only ones he believed could withstand the stresses the balloon would suffer as we inserted ourselves into the stream.
I asked Per if he had children. Yes, he said: two. This reassured me. I knew then that, however great the risks he would expose us to, they wouldn’t be stupid risks. Per had plenty to live for. (This sounds melodramatic, I know, but remember what he was proposing: you don’t want to find yourself suspended 38,000 feet above an ocean only to discover your copilot has a death wish.)
I’ve always held to the notion that you only live once, and that if you want your life to have any meaning, you simply have to throw yourself into things. So I agreed to his proposal. I was heading for my mid-thirties—young enough to attempt something crazy, old enough to know that this was a young man’s game, and not one I could afford to put off. (Steve Fossett later gave the lie to that idea, becoming an adventurer in his mid-fifties.) I knew, too, that I could put this project to good use, harnessing the publicity from the balloon flight to sell the idea of Virgin Atlantic in America. At the time, our airline was only a couple of years old. We were a tiny company by the standards of the industry, and we didn’t have cash to throw around—certainly nowhere near enough to fund the expensive U.S. marketing campaign we desperately needed. Flying in the jet stream with Per would convey, far better than any ad campaign, Virgin Atlantic’s spirit of innovation and adventure.
I began life as a journalist, and I’ve always been sensitive to the fact that getting free coverage is one thing; deserving it is quite another. The project had elements of glamour, pleasure, and surprise, all of which contributed to the brand. Best of all, it was a real story. What Per was proposing was a genuine adventure, using new materials in an unexpected way to achieve what before had been considered unachievable. Besides, I thought, it’s a chance to learn a new sport, it’s another step on the way to my pilot’s license—and what could be more restful, more beautiful, than a ride in a balloon?
I had no idea, back then, that only six other teams had ever attempted such a crossing. I didn’t know that five had perished in the attempt. Nor did I realize that Per, as well as being the most daring and innovative balloon designer of his generation, was also the most expensive! (I’ve had more arguments about money with Per than I’ve had hot dinners on board Virgin Atlantic. Per once proposed coating our inner envelope with gold. He used words like “reflectivity”; I used words like “no.”) In short, I had no idea—none—what I was letting myself in for. I should have read more history.
At 2:30 P.M. on Friday, July 3, 1987, Per Lindstrand and I reached the coast of Ireland and became the first people ever to cross the Atlantic by hot-air balloon. (You can find the full story of our escapade in my autobiography, Losing My Virginity.) The journey had begun badly—two full propane tanks had fallen from our capsule, triggering our rapid ascent! But the flight had been magnificent, and only 29 hours long—far shorter than expected. The winds had worked in our favor, so that by the time we reached Ireland we still had three tanks full of propane attached to the capsule.
We were almost home. Once we had jettisoned our surplus fuel, we were free to land. Per brought the balloon down low, just outside the little village of Limavady. Just as we were preparing to dump the fuel, a savage gust slammed into us, driving us into the ground. Suddenly, we were out of control. Our radio aerials were destroyed, every one of our external fuel tanks was ripped away, and the balloon, free of its burden, rocketed into the air.
Our balloon was now only partly inflated—and the higher we got, the colder the air in the envelope became. Any second now, we would lose our buoyancy and come crashing back to earth. We had one small reserve fuel tank inside the capsule. Per hurried to connect it to the burners. We could still make it.
Then—we couldn’t.
When you want to lose height in a hot-air balloon, you simply let some of the air out. A cable hangs down inside the envelope, and pulling it opens a vent at the top. The force of our ascent had flattened the envelope, lowering the cable.
“It’s tangled!” Per cried. The cable had snagged on something, and the whole balloon began to corkscrew, closing the mouth of the e
nvelope so that we couldn’t heat the air inside.
I opened the hatch, climbed out on top of the capsule, and hacked away at the cable with my knife. When it gave, the balloon whipped around and the mouth of the envelope came open. Per ordered me inside and fired the burners full blast.
We had come within 300 feet of the ground. Per decided we should aim for the beach. We didn’t have enough control to chance a landing where there were trees, houses, or power lines. I put on my parachute, and when we saw the coastline approaching, Per vented hot air from the top of the balloon to reduce our height.
Per Lindstrand and I explore the capsule of the Virgin Atlantic Flyer.
Again the wind slammed us, and before we knew what was happening, we were swept out to sea. Heavy fog hung over the ocean. For a moment, we lost all visibility. Then the waves came into view, foaming, rearing—we were going much too fast.
We hit the sea. The balloon dragged us across the surface of the ocean, bouncing us from wave to wave. Per hurtled into me. Winded, I struggled for purchase as Per grabbed the red lever that was now our only hope. Explosive bolts would sever the cables connecting the capsule to the balloon.
Nothing happened. Per yanked the lever up and down, but the bolts did not fire.
“Get out!” Per shouted at me. “Richard, we’ve got to get out.”
Per braced himself against the hatch and pushed it open. He heaved himself up and climbed through. I lunged after him. We clutched at the steel hawsers and prepared to jump—and another gust of wind caught us.
The balloon rose. Per jumped. I didn’t follow him.
Reach for the Skies Page 3
