Quest for Adventure

by Chris Bonington

  When he became conscious, the capsule was upside down, full of acrid smoke, half full of water, tossing up and down with the waves. Something was burning. He had his head torch on so that he could see what he was doing and realised that the burners were incinerating the side of the Kevlar capsule. If he was to survive, he had to get out fast.

  He grabbed his dinghy, got the hatch open and crawled out to find that there were flames all round the capsule and that the huge canopy of the balloon had collapsed on top of it. Somehow he had to get from under it before he was drowned or burnt to death. He inflated the dinghy and, lying on his back in it, used his arms and legs to push and pull himself through the water from under the canopy. In the struggle he lost his head torch. Then the only light was the glow of the flames.

  At last he got clear of the canopy but a gust of wind took his dinghy away from it. By this time the flames had died down and he couldn’t even see where to paddle back to. He was tossing in his tiny rubber dinghy in the middle of the Coral Sea without water, food or light. He assured me later that he had not been too concerned. He had sent out his May Day signal on the way down and was confident that someone would pick him up in due course. An Australian Navy refuelling ship eventually found him after twenty-three hours in the sea. Steve described his feelings both at the time of his catastrophic descent and while he waited to be picked up as one primarily of disappointment. He had seemed so close to success. It would take him several months to replace the balloon. It wasn’t so much a matter of cost as time. He regarded the cost as comparatively modest. The southern hemisphere attempt, entirely funded by himself, cost around $400,000. He knew that Branson, Piccard and several others were preparing their next attempts that December when the northern hemisphere season started. It would have been difficult to get a new rig together in time.

  He was still on the Australian Navy vessel when Richard Branson phoned him by satellite to commiserate and then propose that Steve joined his team. Fossett’s first response was to say, ‘Well Richard, it’s all very dangerous. I don’t know whether we should be doing this. I’ll think about it – give me a ring when I’m back home.’

  He was back in California a few days later. Richard Branson rang again. ‘Have you thought about it?’ he asked.

  ‘Not very much,’ Steve replied, but then impulsively, ‘OK, I’m on.’

  He went to visit Lindstrand Balloons to discuss the design of the new balloon with Per, making several suggestions, and coming to the conclusion that, of all the contestants, they had the best chance but even so he didn’t rate their chances of success very highly. At least it wasn’t going to cost him anything. Richard had invited him along for the ride as copilot and Steve felt flattered by the confidence put in him.

  This was a new balloon and capsule, much larger and more comfortable than Steve Fossett had been accustomed to. The capsule had two floors, the upper one being the control room which was ten feet in diameter with three pilot stations and comfortable swivel seats arranged round the walls. There were portholes but they were so small that the crew depended on video cameras mounted on the outside of the capsule to see what was going on.

  The lower floor had two tiny compartments, one for a single sleeping berth and the other for stores. The only spot in the capsule where anyone could stand upright was in the centre, just below the Perspex dome. The capsule had two compact engines, fuelled by propane, to run the generators, in addition to the burners for heating the air inside the fabric of the balloon. It was the size of a small caravan but the three-man crew were going to be cooped up in it for up to three weeks. They had changed the name of the balloon from Virgin Global Challenger to ICO Global Challenger. ICO is a satellite communications company and Virgin felt that they were going to get credit for the flight anyway through Branson’s high profile, so promoting ICO would cover most of the costs.

  They all assembled in Marrakesh in late November but had to wait for the right winds. They were ahead of their competition and had permission to fly over China below the 26th parallel which meant keeping south of the Himalaya. A weather window came through on 22 December. The take-off was the usual combination of media razzmatazz, the chaotic excitement of any balloon launch and an endearing family involvement that was very much part of all of Branson’s adventures. Not only were most of Branson’s immediate family there for the send off but also Per’s daughter, Jenny, and the children of Alex Ritchie who had died earlier that year from the injuries sustained in his parachute accident.

  For once the launch went smoothly, but as they gained height, their rate of ascent stalled. On the previous occasion too much helium had been added and this time the ground crew had over-compensated with too little. Per gave the burners an extra boost to warm the helium, and they shot up at an alarming rate of around 1,900 feet a minute, burning some holes in the lower fabric of the balloon. Per got the balloon under control, pressurised the capsule, and they settled down to the regular routine of a long-distance flight. But not for long.

  National boundaries and sensitivities play as large a part as storms and technical failure in the hazards of ballooning. Branson was told by ground control that Libya had withdrawn permission to cross its border. They debated what to do. No one fancied the risk of being shot out of the sky. They could drop very low and try to crawl round to the south of Libya on ground winds but would lose too much time. They therefore decided to lose a bit of height to get out of the faster winds and try to persuade Colonel Gaddafi to change his mind.

  Branson had plenty of contacts. He had worked with King Hussein of Jordan to rescue the hostages held by Saddam Hussein at the start of the Gulf War and he also knew Nelson Mandela. The trouble was both would be asleep and he didn’t like to disturb them. In the end he dictated a letter himself and had his office in London fax it to Gaddafi. It did the trick and permission was renewed. They hadn’t lost too much time, opened up the burners to climb back into the wind and were swept over Libyan air space to the Mediterranean. There were reports of thunder storms over Turkey and Branson was going down with a chest infection and had lost his voice, partly the result of stress, combined with the dry air of the capsule and all the talking on the satellite phone. He took an antibiotic and on they swept.

  The next challenge was how to get round the aerial exclusion zone over Iraq. The Americans and British had just started bombing and a large balloon might have made a very tempting target for the frustrated and angry Iraqis. Bob Rice, the team’s meteorologist, was confident he could steer them on a series of different altitudes through the narrow corridor over Turkey between Iraq and Russia. They were being swept along at a good rate and by the morning of the 21st were over Afghanistan and facing their next crisis. They had permission to fly down a narrow corridor across South China but the jet stream went to the north of the Himalaya across Tibet and they were trying to get permission to take this path. It was 6.30 in the evening and they were over the northern plains of India. It was crisis time. The jet stream would take them towards Everest and over Tibet. If they dropped height and started trying to crawl round the southern edge of the Himalaya they would lose too much time and, more to the point, too much fuel. Their capsule with its compressor as well as the burners was fuel-hungry.

  They discussed what to do. Steve Fossett, newcomer to the crew, was impressed by how well they worked as a team, Branson taking a share of piloting the balloon and the three of them reaching decisions on a consensual basis. They had two choices: to abandon the attempt or go for it without permission. They decided to take the latter course, maintained their height and were carried across the Himalaya and over Tibet. They were playing for high stakes and all felt tense as they talked with their control centre about the reactions of the Chinese.

  Branson claimed with some justification that a landing would now be dangerous. It was 9.45 p.m. GMT, they were over mountainous country and it was pitch dark. At ten o’clock the following morning they learnt that at least the Chinese would refrain from shooting them d
own but they were ordered to land at the first opportunity. The crew claimed that it would be too risky and kept flying through that day on comparatively light winds – they were only travelling at a ground speed of around forty miles per hour. Finally, at three o’clock that afternoon, they were told they could fly over China but that they should clear Chinese air space as soon as possible.

  By 5.30 p.m. on the afternoon of 23 December they were once again over the sea. Their political problems had ended but they still had the Pacific, North America and the Atlantic in front of them. They had been in flight for five days, reckoned they had fuel for a further seven and therefore needed a fast easy run in the jet stream. By Christmas Eve they had crossed Japan, were over the Pacific and at last in the full jet stream, travelling at 30,830 feet at a speed of 146 miles per hour. They might just make it all the way.

  But this optimism did not last for long. Bob Rice was already worrying about a trough of low pressure across Hawaii. There seemed no way of avoiding it without leaving the jet stream and going tar to the south away from any prospect of a quick rescue. The winds could even have taken them back on their track.

  The following morning they were in the midst of the storm system, had lost the jet stream and were faced by defeat. They agonised over what to do. Per Lindstrand told me that he fancied at least trying to make the coast of America, which would have broken Steve Fossett’s previous record, but the others, with no prospect of completing the circumnavigation, opted for the safer course of ditching near Honolulu where they could easily be picked up. I can’t help wondering if the fact that it was Christmas Day, when thoughts of family are particularly strong, helped to influence the decision.

  There were four more competitors waiting to join the race. First off should have been an American outfit called Team RE/MAX, named after the sponsor, one of the United States’ biggest real estate companies that already had a large promotional balloon fleet. Dave Liniger of RE/MAX was hoping to fly a huge helium-filled balloon around the southern hemisphere at a height of around 70,000 feet. They planned to set off from Alice Springs in Australia, but the canopy was so huge and fragile they needed an almost totally windless day to launch. It was never sufficiently calm and there is doubt if they were ever really ready. The attempt was abandoned mid-January 1999.

  Breitling Orbiter 3 was also ready to go, but after ICO Global Challenger’s illicit flight over China, the Chinese government cancelled all permissions. The Breitling management hoped that, being Swiss, they might be able to persuade the Chinese to give them permission, and therefore put the launch on hold while they negotiated. Of all the contestants they were the only ones who had taken the trouble to visit Beijing and they now assured the Chinese that they would not commence their flight before getting permission to overfly China.

  In the meantime they had been having some crew problems. Andy Elson had only planned to make the one trip on Breitling Orbiter 2 since he wanted to get his own show off the ground, initially with James Manclark This fell through and Andy teamed up with another balloonist, Colin Prescot, who ran Flying Pictures, a company specialising in aerial photography and filming from balloons. Prescot had good media contacts and complemented Andy’s at times erratic genius with a methodical, more down-to earth approach. He commented on their partnership: ‘The Times called us The Odd Couple, to which Andy replied, “There’s nothing odd about us, it’s everyone else.” We’re very different characters. Very different. He’s the fiery, brash, blunt, sometimes very rude engineer – boy genius, I always call him – very clever ... and I’m not.’

  Colin might not have been a brilliant designer, but he was a first-class organiser and also a great diplomat who could appreciate Andy’s qualities and cope with his temperament.

  Back in the Breitling camp, Piccard had decided to limit his crew to two. Wim Verstraeten’s wife had just given birth to twins, and so he was even more pre-occupied than usual and had not been able to give the project the time that Piccard felt was essential. He had also observed on the previous flight how out of his depth Wim had been with all the high-tech equipment. Indeed it was surprising how long such a big and physically clumsy man had lasted in the confined space of a balloon capsule. Elson described to me how Wim had once trodden on his laptop without noticing what he had done. So Piccard resolved that, despite their friendship, he would have to make a change. He therefore invited Anthony Brown, a Concorde flight engineer who was also a customer of Cameron Balloons. It wasn’t a happy choice, influenced as it was by the PR advantage of the association with the name Concorde and with little reference to how well Piccard and Brown would get on together.

  Brown was used to everything being tested and tried with flight manuals and procedures. There just was not the time to do this in the race to prepare Breitling Orbiter 3 for the next season. It wasn’t helped by the fact that Andy Elson was no longer working as their design engineer. He had written down very little of what he had done and Brian Jones, ‘his nursemaid’, now had to take over the entire project. He told me of the dilemma.

  ‘We showed Tony how the various controls and systems worked but Tony said, “No, I can’t follow this. I need to have specifications. I need to have drawings and flow charts.” And we said, “We haven’t got them. You know that this is a £300,000 budget six-months-to-do-it-in, throw-every-resource-you’ve-got-and-get-it-out-of-the-door kind of project.” He wasn’t happy about it.

  ‘Then Bertrand said to him, “Look, Tony, if you can’t get your head around this now, how can I trust you when I go to sleep?” Unfortunately, Tony took this as an insult. Bertrand didn’t mean that. What he meant was, “How can I have confidence in your abilities?” and not as an insult but as a discussion element, almost. Well that started it really, and it went from bad to worse. There was a discussion with us all over dinner and Tony started off along the lines of, “Well if you can’t trust me, Bertrand, I’m not going to fly this thing until I’m ready to fly.” And Bertrand said, “Well how long is it going to be?” Tony said, “I don’t know but I just have to get my head around all these things.” Bertrand said, “But we might have to fly in five days’ time.” And Tony said, “I’m telling you, I’m not flying.”

  ‘And at that moment I thought, I could be flying here! I had an inkling.’

  Brian Jones, as well as being project manager, was reserve pilot. An ex-warrant officer in the RAF, he had spent much of his career as a loadmaster on transport planes, something that instilled a steady methodical approach. He had finally left the air force to become a salesman in the drug industry. It was while doing this that he had taken up ballooning, eventually going into partnership with Andy Elson’s tourist balloon flight project. Brian is quite small of stature, unobtrusive, very modest, easy to get on with and, I suspect, very supportive. He knew more about the project and the technical details of it than anyone, was longing to fly but at that critical discussion felt he could take no part in the argument between Bertrand and Tony. When they tried to involve him, he said, ‘Look, don’t bring me into this.’

  Next morning Tony withdrew from the flight.

  This was just three days before their planned launch date. There were posters all over Chateau d’Oex with Tony Brown’s picture as copilot. Inevitably Breitling were upset and tried to botch up some kind of compromise. But Tony was adamant and Piccard and the entire flight crew were immensely relieved. Brian commented: ‘Bertrand said it was as if a big cloud had blown away. The technicians were amazing, because they were my guys. I’d just stepped over the fence; it was quite extraordinary, they went into overdrive.’

  But they had a long time to wait while they negotiated with the Chinese authorities and then awaited a suitable global wind pattern. Two American teams, Spirit of Peace, commanded by Jacques Soukup, and J. Rennee, commanded by Kevin Uliassi from Illinois, gave up but Andy Elson and Colin Prescot decided to set out anyway, even though it would mean a slow and uncertain flight without the help of the jet stream, to avoid Chinese air space. They
had obtained permission but this had been revoked after Branson’s illicit over-flight.

  They knew that they were going to have a long slow journey and that meant taking on more fuel. Andy was still committed to kerosene, convinced that it was lighter because it didn’t need pressurised containers and that it burnt better. By accepting a lower altitude ceiling they could increase their payload considerably with an impressive two and a half tons of extra fuel. This meant devising a piggy-back system for the eighteen barrels hanging over the side and a stronger crown ring and living wires to attach the capsule to the balloon. Andy had also designed a system that he believed needed less fuel than the balloon designed by Lindstrand. It was the kind of improvisation at which he excelled.

  Their Cable & Wireless balloon launched from Almeria in Spain on 17 February and swung south towards the coast of Morocco, for they were planning to head far to the south across the desert to keep well away from Chinese air space. Even their own meteorologist, Martin Harris, gave them very little chance of success and most of the other pundits said they were mad even to start and that the only reason they did so was to avoid breaking contract with their sponsor. Andy and Colin, however, while accepting that their chances were slim, still felt they could succeed.