I was certainly worried about what the ATC had told me, but right then there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I kept going on up at about 500 feet per minute and it was just like being in an almost completely silent lift. The burners weren’t on except for the pilot light, and normally in a balloon that seems quite serene, but this time it felt more and more spooky and scary. As I got higher and higher it became increasingly cold, and I was thinking to myself I just want to get this over and done with. As the temperature dropped and things froze I knew that absolutely anything could break or malfunction, I was flying by the seat of my pants. My rate of ascent was decreasing, and the reading on the electric barometer slowly ticked down, 200, 195, 190, closer and closer, and then through the 185 I knew I needed.
I stopped at 182, and waited the fifteen seconds for my two little black box barographs to do their stuff and record the pressure. Now it’s time to get the hell out of there, but when I pull on the rope to let some gas out from the top of the balloon nothing happens. Bert had told me I could expect to begin descending slowly, pick up speed later on then slow down again when coming in to land, but I seem stuck here. Another pull for a further three seconds and still nothing! In fact, when I look at the barometer if anything I am still going up! For the life of me I can’t figure this out and I don’t want to go up any further. Think damn it, think! Now I’ve got ATC asking me what my intentions are, and I feel like telling them I wouldn’t mind carrying on being alive.
I was definitely starting to panic and on reflection I am amazed at how lucid my thought processes were, but gradually it began to dawn on me what must be happening. Balloons tend to be white, and on some round the world journeys they even have reflective material on the outside. The reason behind this is that you want to minimize the difference in outside warming temperature between day and night, and I recalled how on my North Pole trip even the effect of a blue logo on the side of my balloon had been considered and calculated. It’s normal to expect the heat of the sun to make a balloon rise later on in the day. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky though, and what none of us had considered was how much greater the influence of the sun would be at such altitude. It was the solar gain heating the helium in the balloon that was making me rise further, or at least counteracting the small releases of gas that would normally be enough to take me back down.
Having finally worked this out I decided I had to pull the rope longer, so this time I kept the valve open for a good ten seconds and then did it again. Very gradually at first the barometer reading began to creep up, then suddenly I started to drop and pick up speed, coming down at 500 feet per minute just as I had gone up. God it was great to be on my way down! I bottomed out a bit at about 20,000 feet, when I pulled the rope again. By this time I felt very relieved and comfortable, since although I would still need oxygen I would be fine switching to constant flow if my supply failed now.
Unlike the patchwork pattern of fields I was used to seeing below me in England, the ones I was descending towards now were vast. There was a nasty amount of drift and I could see a big radio mast that I seemed to be heading towards, which I didn’t fancy at all. By 500 feet above the ground I had stowed everything for landing, but I could see high tension wires about a mile away and I was doing 12 knots or so over the ground. It was time to dump her down and at about 100 feet I pulled the rip on the top.
This part is always slightly scary. Unlike the rope attached to the valve on top of the balloon, which allows gas out slowly, this rope is attached to a piece of fabric that opens a vent and lets it all out. Obviously the last thing you would want to happen (as it would be the last thing you ever did!) is for this to come loose when you were at any altitude, and as a precaution it is tied in place with dental floss. The two ropes are also different colours to prevent them becoming confused, and the rip rope is kept completely out of the basket until you are coming in to land and need it. The absolute importance of the rip panel being secure, however, can also make it difficult to pull out, and on both my North Pole and Atlantic flights I couldn’t actually do so. I was hanging onto the line, jumping up and down, but it simply would not break, and I eventually had to stop the balloon just by keeping the valve open and letting the gas out slowly. This time it popped right out and I dropped like a brick. Although I bent my legs as I hit the ground it still took the wind out of me, and I then had to hurl myself to my knees. The burner suspended above my head came loose from its harness and crashed down on top of the basket, narrowly missing bashing my brains out.
Hopping out of the basket I now felt pretty pleased with myself. I’d been airborne for not much more than two hours, and was somewhere near Akron about 70 miles from where I’d started in Greeley. I knew my ground crew would be on their way and should arrive soon, along with some media that we had organized. It was just a matter of waiting for them, standing there in all my cold weather gear, down jacket and big boots, but it wasn’t more than a minute or two before I saw these flashing lights approaching in the distance. A squad car screeched to a halt and out jumped a great big sheriff, whose first words were ‘Sonny, I’m going to bust your ass!’
Pretty soon there were four squad cars there in the field with me, plus an ambulance and a fire engine. The sheriff said he’d been contacted by the FAA and he was going to haul me in, arrest me for violating air space. He’d taken out his handcuffs and was about to slap them on me when a shrill voice piped up, ‘you take your hands off that boy, don’t you dare touch him!’ My ground crew had rolled up, and this was the FAI observer Barbara Moreton, a delightful, tiny old lady in her seventies then. The sheriff wasn’t really prepared for this sort of stern but diminutive resistance, expressed in a voice that would clearly brook no opposition, and seemed to calm down a bit. What I really needed was a drink, but my water bottle was frozen solid.
We spent two hours milling around in that field, with sheriffs and state troopers, and pretty soon two FAA inspectors also turned up. After what seemed like endless discussion between them the FAA guys said they would handle things from there, and asked to see my passport, insurance, registration, permits, pilot’s licence, everything! The British media later said I was going to be put in jail, although I am not sure how likely that might really have been, but from what I was told there did seem to be a genuine prospect of some sort of prosecution. Eventually however, when they had presumably concluded I wasn’t going to do a runner, they decided they would let me go for the time being.
We all drove back to Greeley, getting there by late morning, and everyone felt pretty sombre. We couldn’t celebrate properly, and although we went out for a steak that night it seemed very muted and hollow. I knew I’d broken the record, but the whole thing might be null and void. Tim said he had absolute proof of all the permits he had applied for, but the fact remained that everything still had to be subject to the approval of air traffic control at any given time and altitude, and they were insisting we had violated their air space. Obviously the whole system is designed for aircraft that can change their height and direction, rather than balloons where there is little fundamental control, but unwittingly we had changed the whole traffic pattern of Denver airport.
We had to write a report, with all times and relevant facts about the whole thing. When we downloaded the trace it showed I had been stuck ‘at the top’ for more than ten minutes, which surprised and rather frightened me even if it had seemed like an eternity at the time. Tim had all the reference numbers for the permits, and everything went into the system of the FAA investigation. Their adage sometimes seems to be ‘we are not happy unless you are unhappy,’ but a month later they came back and said we were completely exonerated. Tim had been deeply upset that he might have done something wrong, but they apologized and admitted that it was their system which had been at fault, which I frankly think is something the Commercial Aviation Authority here would never do. We had been meticulous, but it was still a big ask for the FAA to come out and admit they were in the wrong, yet they did
it.
It was a huge relief as I am not sure I would have gone back and done it again. Everything had worked perfectly, apart from my sheer terror when I thought I wasn’t ever coming down, and it is one of those very rare occasions where I think I can honestly say I wouldn’t have changed a thing, except perhaps a flask of hot tea for when I got back to the ground. Sometimes though, you just feel you’ve been lucky to get away with something. I still hold the record and don’t think anyone will achieve that additional 3 per cent needed to beat it for a very long time. The weights just don’t allow it, and to have a crack someone would certainly need to be a lot lighter than me.
I also wanted to set an altitude record in a hot-air balloon, and my experience of doing that couldn’t really have been more different. The one I had set my eyes on was actually a very old record, going back to 1978, a mark achieved by Carol Rymer Davis, a tiny little lady who sadly later died when I was racing against her. A great deal had changed in balloon design since she set her record, which made me think I would be able to beat her mark. The fabric was now much tougher so it could be thinner and therefore lighter, and oxygen systems had also become more efficient and smaller. The balloon I was going to use was built by Bert Padelt and was an AX-05 class, which meant it had a volume of between 900 and 1,200 square metres.
Most people are a lot heavier than Carol and certainly I’m no lightweight. I thought the only way we could overcome this difference in weight would be to cut whatever else possible down, make everything a lot lighter, and our planning was all about paring things down as far as could be safely done. For instance, we designed a basket with a rigid composite floor but only fabric sides. This was a lot lighter than a traditional wicker basket, in which you certainly feel a lot more comfortable—the fabric would obviously give you no sort of protection if you came down at any sort of speed or smashed into anything.
In the New Year of 2005 we went out to the huge open plains of Calgary in Canada. Snow lay deep over the endless fields stretching as far as the eye could see into the distance, and it was very cold. With all our planning and having done the weight calculations we were confident we’d be able to beat the record easily, and I’d be going up with four tanks of propane. I intended to use a constant flow oxygen system, which is lighter than a demand apparatus. I’d be on the cusp for safety with this, and a lot of people would say I should have had demand oxygen, but with my experience I felt comfortable doing so. Anyway, a day of good weather arrived and we were ready to go. I talked to ATC, up I went, and only made it to about 25,000 feet. We’d missed the record by a good 5,000 feet, which is a big chunk of altitude. When I came back down again we were all utterly confused about how I could have been so far off, and trooped back to the hotel to mull things over. What else could I lose to get my weight down further, other than chop my legs off?
By the next day though we had changed a lot of things, half a dozen or more, some of them very tiny, but one was certainly significant. We’d decided that I could get by with a lot less fuel than I had taken the day before, so instead of four propane tanks we could cut that down to two, pressurized with nitrogen. This would save us a lot of weight and up I went again, but we were still 2,000 feet away from our target. By the next day the weather had closed in with no prospect of another open window appearing, so that was it. We had to pack up and go home.
Back in England we put our thinking hats on, even if this did often involve meetings in the pub. We were determined to have another bash the next year, so we went over everything again and looked at how we could improve things, to achieve more lift as well as cutting down the weight even further. Bert Padelt also provided a lot of input from his home back in the US. The main thing we came up with was the idea of putting a radio thermistor at the top of the envelope, which we could use to keep a check on the temperature there. With a hot-air balloon, if you use the burner too hard and overheat the air you can very easily burn out the top of the envelope, end up with just blue sky above you and drop like a stone. With the thermistor we could push things to the limit but know exactly where to stop. This would help us a lot we thought.
When we got out to Calgary again in January 2006 we were confident that all the changes we had made would be enough. We’d probably tweaked about thirty little things by now, reconsidered everything, taken out anything not absolutely necessary and looked at any way we could do things differently. And everything worked perfectly, so it seemed. I was able to get clearance from ATC to go all the way from the ground, which was much simpler, up I went and there it was, I’d broken the record. Barbara Moreton was our observer again and she sent the barographs off to Don Cameron at his office back in Bristol, who would check them officially on behalf of the FAI. It felt great, we all celebrated and home we went with another record under our belts.
Then a couple of weeks later there was a bolt from the blue. I got a call from Don saying, sorry, but you haven’t actually broken the record. The conversion on the barographs hadn’t been done correctly to take account of the very low temperature and we’d actually missed the record by a sliver, just 250 feet. I was devastated, but as usually happens with me I just felt all the more determined to go back and get the job done properly at last. It was infuriating and deflating however, having to return again when we all thought we’d already cracked it.
Knowing we had to do it once more hadn’t meant we’d stopped thinking however, and by the time we went out again in January of the following year, 2007, we’d made another five or so very minor alterations. The most important of these was that we were feeding oxygen into the burner so that it would burn more efficiently and there was less danger of it going out. It’s really horrible when that happens and you have to climb up out of the basket to light it again, with ice all over everything. I obviously don’t have a bad head for heights, but I really don’t think anyone would feel terribly happy having to do that.
The first day I was ready to go up I went, and it was a very good flight. Perhaps I was just getting used to it now. We passed through the record and the additional 3 per cent I needed, and then managed to put on an extra 500 feet to make absolutely sure. I wasn’t going to miss out by a tiny bit again and I wanted to be completely certain. I came down a lot faster than I’d planned however and the basket started to spin. Thankfully I just had enough fuel to control it, but I hit the ground hard. Two engineers who’d been working nearby were sitting in their truck, and told me later that they didn’t want to come over and just called the police as they were convinced I must be dead, until I crawled out completely winded. My retrievers were still miles away. You don’t feel it at all when you are up there, you could light a candle and it wouldn’t blow out, but the wind had been so strong that I’d been travelling at 120 miles an hour over the ground at the top during the hour and a half I was in the air.
Back at the hotel with Barbara there we hooked the barographs up to the computer. What the hell was going on? There was absolutely no trace at all. The only explanation could be that it had been so cold, about –50°C, that the device had simply failed to work and malfunctioned. Things only got worse. It turned out that Barbara had forgotten to put the batteries in the spare one, so we had absolutely no readings to confirm that we had broken the record, even though we were completely certain that we had. It wasn’t something we could have checked ourselves—and believe me, we would have done if we could—because as pilot and crew we weren’t allowed to go anywhere near the barographs under FAI regulations, to ensure no one could tamper with anything. This is something they are a bit too precious about, in my view. Barbara was in tears, and to be honest I briefly almost felt like killing her myself.
I just had to go and do it yet again. Luckily the next day, 14 January, the weather was just the same, cold but clear. We fitted chemical hot warmers on both barographs, watched Barbara put the batteries in and ensured they were long-lasting lithium ones, then checked they were working properly and that we could see traces on the computer. This was now my fif
th flight and it was the easiest of all, if only in part because I knew I could do it. I went straight up and came straight down again, with a gentle landing that just kissed the ground. This time I was sure the record was mine at 32,480 feet. We rushed back to the hotel to check the traces were ok, and there they were, that was it. Now we genuinely could celebrate, and I took the whole team out to a restaurant in Calgary for massive steaks and too much beer.
There is no such thing as an easy world record, but this was an incredibly satisfying one in terms of the way it was achieved, perhaps the most satisfying of all mine. It had been overcome in lots of small increments, and was a real example of group effort, perhaps a bit like how in a more serious situation Apollo 13 was nursed back to earth after disaster struck. It had needed real teamwork, and we’d not only had to work very hard to break it but think a lot about how we would get there.
As I’ve already said, in my view the ultimate challenge for a pilot since the great pioneering days of aviation in the 1920s has always been flying across the Atlantic. A lot of people died trying to do so in a balloon and there were perhaps twenty attempts before the first successful crossing, many teams simply disappearing without trace. Then finally in 1978 three guys from the American ballooning centre of Albuquerque, Maxie Anderson, Ben Abruzzo and Larry Newman finally achieved it in Double Eagle II, taking off from Maine and landing in a field north of Paris six days later. The first two had tried and failed the year before, being hauled from the sea, badly frostbitten, by a rescue helicopter just off the coast of Iceland. Finally making that crossing was a great achievement, comparable to that of Lindberg first doing so in an aeroplane, and huge crowds welcomed the American trio on their arrival. This was something I desperately wanted to do myself, and even if the actual crossing had been made before I intended to be the first person to do it in an open wicker basket. This might not be an official record of any kind, but it seemed to me that it would in many ways be an even more significant achievement and very much in the spirit of adventuring that I have always tried to follow.
No Such Thing as Failure Page 19