Reach for the Skies

by Richard Branson

  The world’s jet streams offer speedy one-way travel around the world—if you can find them.

  High up in the stratosphere, where the heat emitted and reflected off the earth can’t jiggle them about so much, these winds are very strong and very stable; they move much more quickly than the winds below them, and they curl much more slowly. These are the jet streams.

  In 1991, Per Lindstrand and I were planning to cross the Pacific in a hot-air balloon, and had come to Miyakonojo, a small town in the south of Japan. The same jet stream that had carried Japan’s balloon bombs to the U.S. mainland would soon, we hoped, be carrying us across the Pacific. We wanted to be the first to make the crossing. We had not come to race. When we arrived, however, we found a charming Japanese balloonist, Fumio Niwa, challenging us to be the first over the Pacific. Both of us were grounded by the weather for a while; all we could do was kick our heels, waiting for the jet stream to pick up strength enough to bear us across the world’s biggest ocean—waiting, too, with mounting tension, for war to break out in the Persian Gulf.

  The previous October, I had flown with a Virgin crew to Baghdad to bring back British hostages. I wanted to be on the ground if war broke out, not gallivanting around in a balloon. But it would be a massive waste of many people’s time and effort if we did have to abort.

  Christmas came. I went with the family to Ishigaki, an island off the south Japanese coast. Then my wife, Joan, took the children back to London to start school. As my parents and I walked through the airport to catch an internal flight back to Miyakonojo, I saw a television screen. A helicopter was hovering over the sea and winching a body aboard. It was 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. By the time the rescue helicopter arrived, Fumio was dead from exposure. His body was recovered only ten miles off the Japanese coast.

  On Tuesday, January 15, Per and I walked through crowds of thousands toward our balloon. Japanese children held up candles and waved Union Jacks at us. They sang “God Save the Queen.” I couldn’t get Fumio’s death out of my head. Our balloon towered over everyone, large enough to swallow the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral. We released some white doves as a rather futile peace gesture and turned to enter the capsule.

  We ignited the burners, then Per fired the bolts that released the steel hawsers and we rocketed upward. On the radio, Will Whitehorn shouted: “The crowd down here are cheering like crazy. It looks amazing. You’re heading up fast.” (Will was in charge of the recovery crew. He was watching our backs, chartering rescue boats to the limits of their range to cover our progress.)

  Within five minutes we were out of sight of Miyakonojo, and within half an hour we were well over the Pacific Ocean. At 23,000 feet, we hit the bottom of the jet stream.

  It was as if we had struck a ceiling. However much we heated it, the envelope refused to go in. It simply squished itself flat against the wall of wind. We put on our parachutes and clipped ourselves to the life rafts in case the balloon should rip.

  At last, the balloon edged into the jet stream. I watched aghast as the silvery envelope went screaming off ahead of us. Dully, I wondered: if the ballon was hurtling all the way over there, what’s keeping us in the air here? Before puzzlement could turn to panic, the balloon dipped below the level of the capsule—and tugged the capsule after it, into the stream.

  The shock was vicious. We were knocked flying. After traveling at 20 knots, we were suddenly flying at 100 knots. For a moment I thought we were going to be torn apart, but then the balloon rose above us again and we were safely tucked into the jet.

  “Nobody’s done that before,” Per announced, cheerfully. “We’re in uncharted territory.”

  The real trouble began about seven hours into our flight. The capsule my friend Alex Ritchie had designed for our 1991 Pacific balloon crossing carried six propane tanks in a necklace around it, and we had just emptied our first. Per pressed the button to jettison the tank—and the entire gondola suddenly lurched to one side and hung at an angle. The empty fuel tank had fallen away, all right—and had taken two full tanks with it.

  The implications were horrific. We had flown only about 1,000 miles. Now we had just half the fuel we had started out with, and we were crossing the most dangerous and remote part of the Pacific Ocean.

  “Watch out!” Per said. “We’re rising.”

  Without the weight of the two full tanks, the balloon was soaring.

  Thirty-one thousand feet.

  Thirty-four thousand feet.

  “I’m letting air out,” Per said. “We’ve got to come down.”

  We had no idea how strong the capsule was. We knew that the glass dome was able to withstand the lack of pressure at 42,000 feet, and even that was something of a guess. If we reached 43,000 feet the dome would explode. Per had opened the vent at the top of the balloon, but we were still rising.

  “It’s slowing,” I said. “I’m sure it’s slowing.”

  The altimeter ticked up: at 41,000 feet we were in the realm of the unknown. None of our equipment had been tested at this kind of height. Anything could go wrong.

  At 42,500 feet, the balloon leveled off; and, having avoided a quick and spectacular death, it was time for us to face the slow and miserable one: with so little fuel, we seemed doomed to ditch into the Pacific. To reach land before the fuel ran out, we would have to fly at an average speed of 170 miles an hour—twice as fast as any hot-air balloon before us. It was around about then that our radio link gave out: the storm raging below us had wiped out the signal. We were alone.

  We descended into the jet stream, and for the next six hours we sailed high above the storm-tossed ocean. No polar explorer had ever seen such an expanse of white. The clouds beneath us were wrinkled, like cauliflowers or brains. As night fell, lightning lit them up from within. I paid the sight little notice. I was too busy staring, barely daring to blink, at the altimeter, tweaking the burners to keep the balloon where the winds were fastest.

  Per and I had no idea what fate had in store for us over the Pacific.

  “Nobody’s done that before,” Per announced, cheerfully. “We’re in uncharted territory.”

  And—this was nothing short of a miracle—it seemed to be working. Per and I were hurtling eastward toward America at well over 200 miles per hour! No balloon had ever traveled so fast. The jet stream, which had threatened to destroy us when we first encountered it, was saving our lives.

  While Per, exhausted, grabbed some sleep, I stayed glued to the altimeter, every nerve singing as I strained to detect the slightest wobble or buffet in our flight. The jet stream had an inner core only about 4,000 feet in diameter. If we stayed in the core, we might cross the ocean and live. If I let us slip out of the core, we would slow down and surely die. The slightest roughness would suggest that the balloon and the capsule were in different airstreams.

  A very beautiful white-and-orange flickering lit up the capsule. I looked up and saw lumps of burning propane falling from the burners onto the capsule! I imagined one of those lumps falling onto the freezing-cold glass of the canopy: it would surely shatter.

  Per, waking to my shout, quickly lifted us to where the oxygen would give out and the fire would be extinguished—around 43,000 feet—and again we found ourselves staring, silently and prayerfully, at the glass dome.

  It held.

  We sank back into the jet stream.

  After eight hours of communications blackout, our radio came on again.

  “Thank God we’ve got hold of you,” said Bob Rice, our chief meteorologist. “I’ve worked out your route. You’ve got to change course. Right now.”

  “Yes?”

  “Come down immediately,” he said. “Your jet stream is turning.”

  Our relief at hearing Bob’s voice was cut through with shock at his news. Our jet stream was turning, all right—a few minutes later and we’d have been on our way back to Japan!


  One of the odd aspects of the record-breaking fraternity is the close bond you form with people you might never see again. I run into Per very seldom now; outside the capsule of a high-altitude balloon, we live and work in different worlds. I haven’t spoken to Bob Rice in years. Yet there was a time—there were many times—when I would be hanging on Bob’s every word. At times, he has been my only hope, the one man who could save my life and the lives of my crewmates.

  Bob Rice is a weatherman—one of the very best. Among the adventure community in particular, he’s a legend. He first trained in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War, and by the time he retired, in 1999, he’d amassed more than 50 years’ worth of meteorological experience, half of it focused on special projects and adventure support. He took a key “mission control” role on 26 long-distance manned balloon flights, as well as countless sailing races and record attempts.

  When Bob worked with Earthwinds (an ill-fated round-the-world ballooning project that Virgin Atlantic sponsored back in the mid-1990s), balloonist and PR man William Armstrong was watching: “Beginning his workday ritual at 3:30 each morning, Rice would stuff his pipe with Black-and-Tan (his exclusive private brand), ignite the tobacco and proceed to incense the room like the high priest of forecasting before celebrating the weather mass.”

  “What captured me was the idea of weather as a living, breathing thing,” Bob says. “You don’t just type in a bunch of numbers and data. You visualize it. You see waves, you see storm clouds, you see the system.” Bob’s speciality was to apply to ballooning something called the Trajectory Model—a nifty piece of mathematics developed to track the path of volcanic dust and radioactive particles from nuclear explosions. Bob used it to say where a balloon would travel at given altitudes.

  Using the Trajectory Model, Bob had worked out that if we dropped down to 18,000 feet, the prevailing winds would carry us north. We were then pretty much guaranteed to complete our journey—although we would have to kiss Washington State goodbye and settle for a very chilly landfall in the Arctic! The prospect of taking the largest balloon ever built out of the stratosphere and down into bad weather wasn’t an appetizing one. The waves beneath us were topping 50 feet, so if we ran into trouble, even if we ditched near a ship (hardly likely on an ocean that covers virtually half the planet); it would not be able to reach us. Turning in seas that high would snap a boat in half. After so long out of radio contact, however, and after such a close shave, we were only too glad to follow Bob Rice’s advice.

  Meanwhile, on board their United Airlines flight to America, Will Whitehorn and the ten-man retrieve team were having kittens. They were getting messages passed to them from the flight deck and knew only that the balloon had lost almost half its fuel. By the time their flight landed at LAX, Per and I were already heading north. There was a flight already arranged to take the team up to Seattle. After that, they would have to make things up as they went along.

  There had always been a slim risk that Per and I would find ourselves whisked into the Arctic, so the team was carrying gear for us. But they had no survival gear for themselves, and conditions were worsening by the minute. In Seattle, the retrieve team became a pure raiding party, gathering cold-weather gear wherever they could find it. Ground crews at the airport handed over boots and gloves. Within minutes of their landing, a Learjet was powering up on the tarmac, cleared for Yellowknife, in the Northwest Territories.

  On board the capsule, we listened to Mike Kendrick over the radio: “You’re heading way north,” he told us. “The rescue team is chasing you to try to get to where you’re going to land.” After 36 hours of flying, we finally crossed the coast of northern Canada. It was too dark to see, but we felt safer. Even though we were now heading for the Rockies, one of the most inhospitable mountain ranges you could find, at least it was land. We hugged each other and shared a chocolate bar. It was an incredible feeling. As we started flying over the Rockies, we made radio contact with the local ground control, Watson Lake Flight Service.

  “Put your rescue beacon on,” they told us. “You’re heading into a blizzard. There’s zero visibility and a wind of 35 knots.”

  We weren’t the only ones risking our lives now. Our retrieve team had boarded two helicopters and were trying to scissor their way to our likely landing place. It was hopeless. It was snowing, and they were already in winds topping 35 knots. At one point Will lost all visibility and had to put his helicopter down on a road.

  Per and I knew we had to land soon after dawn. If the morning sun heated the envelope, we would end up in Greenland, maybe even farther—and well beyond the reach of any rescue team. When we were at 750 feet, I opened the hatch and climbed out onto the top of the capsule. I crouched there for a minute and watched the snow whirl around me. It was very quiet.

  I shouted down to Per: “Don’t get too low. It’s all forest. We’ll never get out of there.” Then: “There’s a space ahead. Can you see it?”

  Per shut off the burner, I climbed back into the capsule, and we headed down. We landed heavily and went skidding across the ground. Per fired the bolts, and the capsule came to a halt. The envelope flew off without us. We wrenched open the hatch and clambered outside. It was minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit out there. I made radio contact with Watson Lake Flight Service. “We’ve done it!” I cried. “We’ve arrived! We’re all in one piece!” We were the first people to cross the Pacific in a hot-air balloon. We had traveled 6,700 miles, from Japan to Canada, in 47 hours. We had broken the world distance record and traveled at speeds of up to 245 miles per hour. It had been, by the world’s reckoning, a triumph.

  “Where are you?”

  I looked around me.

  “Richard?”

  “Uh, we’ve landed on a lake,” I said. In the distance, the envelope was draped across the pine trees. The wind shredded it. “Uh, we’re surrounded by trees.”

  It took a Canadian Hercules eight hours to find us and scramble a helicopter to pick us up. Not bad going, when you consider that our lake was one of about 800,000 other, virtually identical lakes. Per had frostbite in one of his feet, and I had frostbite in a finger. We huddled together, eating our supplies, desperate for warmth as the snow and wind howled around us.

  “Per?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Why aren’t we in California?”

  The American ballooning pioneer John Wise, born in 1808, amassed more than 400 ascents during his long career and, incidentally, became the first airmail carrier in the United States. It’s perhaps not so surprising, then, to learn that he knew all about the jet stream—or at least he understood that there was, at a certain height, a “great river of air which always blows from west to east.” He even hoped to use that stream to cross the Atlantic—a project doomed to failure, given the materials of his day, but which nonetheless carried him to a new world distance record of about 1,000 miles. (He left St. Louis at 4 P.M. on August 15, 1859, and was wrecked in a treetop on the shore of Lake Ontario in Jefferson County, New York, at 3 P.M. the following day.)

  Wise’s dream of exploiting the jet stream for air travel would only be realized a century and two world wars later, in Pan Am’s pioneering passenger flights from Tokyo to Honolulu. Flying in the jet stream cut the time of that flight by more than one third, from 18 to 11½ hours. Before those flights, the jet stream was a dangerous and often unpredictable mystery. I should know: the jet stream could have killed my mother.

  Before I was ever thought of, my mum, Eve, was a pioneer several times over. Her adventures began, inauspiciously enough, at Heston airfield. She turned up there one day at the start of the Second World War to ask what her chances of flying were. She was given the brush-off. Still, one instructor had seemed more sympathetic than the rest, so Eve—a beauty and a professional dancer—turned on the charm. Disguised as a man, she learned to fly gliders, and soon she was instructing new pilots—men who a few years later were fighting the Battle of Britain.

  Civilian life posed new chall
enges for her: after the war she became one of the first—maybe the very first—British stewardess on an international airline. Hers were pioneering years for air travel: glamorous, certainly, but also uncomfortable and—by modern standards—dangerous. Seriously: looking after the passengers on the planes of British South American Airways must have made glider flying look like sailing paper planes. Today’s cabin crews provide a prompt and courteous supply of drinks and nibbles. When BSAA’s planes reached 25,000 feet, Eve was dishing out oxygen masks. My dad proposed marriage to her as soon as he dared, in a desperate bid to stop her from flying. She flew Comets when Comets were falling out of the sky (we’ll come to that story later) and Avro Lancastrians, one of which vanished over the Andes just a couple of days before she was due to fly in it, on August 2, 1947.

  BSAA’s Star Dust was less than two years old when it took off from Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires, for Santiago, Chile. The flight crew were RAF veterans with hundreds of hours of flying experience. The captain was an experienced navigator. The passenger list reads like the cast of a period thriller: a king’s messenger carrying diplomatic documents, a German émigré suspected of Nazi sympathies, and a rich Palestinian with a large diamond sewn into the lining of his jacket. This was a pioneering period, when only the very rich and the very well connected flew.

  Shortly before the airliner disappeared, it radioed ahead to report that it expected to enter airspace over Santiago in four minutes. Just over 50 years later, an Argentine mountain guide came across the wreckage of a Rolls-Royce engine at the foot of a remote glacier in the Andes, about 50 miles east of the city.