Many of the balloons you see in the UK will be doing just this, particularly around Bristol which has a large number due to the location of Cameron Balloons, who build many of those that appear in the skies above England, but in the summer you’ll see them all over the place. Then you get the commercial pilots who offer rides, the ticket stating that the flight will be exactly an hour, plus or minus to allow for the weather, as any more than that would use too much gas and eat into their profit margins. The more people they can fly, of course, the more they earn. You’ll see a lot of almost surreal sponsored balloons, either amusing or ugly depending on your taste. You can probably imagine the one that is an advert for Wonderbra, but there is also a supermarket shopping trolley that flies about. Then you have the gas pilots who just do long distances, mostly in Europe. These are a bit defunct now, although every decade or so people start to talk about them again as a cheap way of moving freight, and they have had a revival recently with coastguard operations in the US. I suppose you might liken most of these to the commercial mountain guides you get in the Alps. At the very pinnacle are the sports balloonists, the real long-distance flyers, who try to cross the Atlantic, fly around the world, or take part in the great balloon races.
Hot-air ballooning is the oldest form of aviation—going back to the days of the Montgolfier brothers in the late eighteenth century—but it took a great leap forward only about fifty years ago with the developments of a couple of American engineers. As part of NASA they were experimenting with burners and propane, and although it might seem relatively low-tech they came up with the sort of cylinder we use today. Gas ballooning, on the other hand, has been going on in Europe for well over a hundred years, which explains its far more widespread prevalence on the continent, where it has become a great tradition.
Many of the original European clubs used town gas to inflate their balloons, and would have an underground pipe running from a factory to provide hydrogen or coal gas, which might be free but very flammable. You can turn up at many places in Germany, Belgium, Switzerland or France and find a launch field, pristinely cut like a bowling green, with a club house and sandpit, and a balloon meister who will inflate and set up your balloon for you. In these countries today there are hundreds of balloonists who go out every weekend and fly for hundreds of miles. Gas ballooning is a wonderful sport since, unlike in a hot-air balloon where you might fly for an hour or two and the limiting factor is your amount of propane (when that runs out you have to land), with a gas balloon you can be up for several days and get forty-eight hours in the air for exactly the same cost.
The physical art and experience of flying a gas balloon is also very different. With a hot-air balloon you will usually have the burner going virtually continuously, and you can hardly hear yourself talk or think. A gas balloon, though, is totally silent. You hear dogs barking in the distance, trains running miles away, and you almost feel as if you are floating on a magic carpet. It is the most serene form of flight, absolutely fantastic. You still have a retrieve crew, of course, usually of two so that they can take turns driving. They will hang around for a couple of hours after you take off until you have a rough sense of where you are heading, then set off following you like the clappers. With retrieve crews it tends to be a matter of great pride to try and keep up with a balloon, and at night they obviously can’t see you. Even if you are only travelling at 20mph, you are moving in a straight line and it can be a devil of a job keeping pace.
I’d only had a very limited number of hot-air balloon hours under my belt before I went to the North Pole, but after I had completed that journey I suddenly had a huge number of Rozier gas balloon hours on my licence from that trip. I thought I could do anything as a result, but I still actually knew very little about the elite end of ballooning even though I was now planning to cross the Atlantic. It was while waiting in Sussex for my third and finally successful attempt at that first of my Atlantic crossings, that Bert Padelt told me a whole lot more. He’d hoped to remain with me until I finally left, but he explained he had a prior commitment and had to leave as he was flying in the America’s Challenge Gas Balloon Race, which is held out of Albuquerque each year. This was complete news to me, I’d never heard of it or anything about balloon racing, so Bert explained everything to me before he went.
The Gordon Bennett Cup is the most prestigious event in balloon racing and the oldest aviation competition in the world. It was first held well over a hundred years ago when it flew from Paris in September 1906, although there was a long hiatus from 1939 when the planned event to be hosted in Poland was overtaken by more historically significant events, until it was reinstated in 1979. James Gordon Bennett who first sponsored the competition was a newspaper proprietor, his father of the same name having founded the New York Herald. No one really seems to know where the expression ‘Gordon Bennett’ denoting amazement or surprise actually comes from, but it probably has something to do with how newspapers at the time were always trying to come up with new scoops and angles to publicize themselves, and the son was perhaps most famous for having dispatched the reporter Henry Stanley to find Dr David Livingstone in Africa in 1871.
Gordon Bennett junior sponsored various different sports and there were in fact originally three other Gordon Bennett Cups, much less long-lived, for biplanes, racing cars and sailing schooners. Gordon Bennett senior had been born in Scotland and his son was something of a playboy as well as a sportsman, with a rather dissolute reputation. A famous if possibly apocryphal story relates how he was engaged to a British woman and, during a drunken dinner in England, rather than withdraw in more seemly fashion he had chosen to relieve himself in the grate of the fireplace, causing his prospective father-in-law to cancel plans for the wedding on the spot.
The basic rules of the competition are very simple and have never really changed, although there is a huge amount of associated protocol and messing about involved that has always driven me barmy. All the balloons must have a capacity of no more than 1,050 cubic metres, and a great deal of checking goes on to ensure everyone is following the correct specifications and rival teams frequently challenge each other over breaches. Each national association may enter three teams, who represent their country rather than simply flying as individuals, and both pilot and co-pilot must be citizens of that same country. Pilots need to have a minimum of fifty hours flying time in command of a balloon, be authorized for night flying, and at least one of each team must be able to communicate with Air Traffic Control in English.
The winning team is the one that travels the greatest distance as the crow flies, which of course you don’t, from the starting point, and there is no time limit, but there are many different grounds for automatic disqualification. This happens if you land in water, or also if you break one of the air traffic control regulations of any country you happen to fly over. This can be a major problem in Europe because some countries, such as Italy, do not allow night flying for balloons. An even starker issue is that others, like Russia or Belarus, don’t allow entry at all into their airspace. A military helicopter from the latter actually shot down a balloon flying in the Gordon Bennett Cup in 1995, killing the two American pilots Alan Fraenckel and John Stuart-Jervis who were competing for the Virgin Islands, so we take that danger pretty seriously and any risk of crossing their borders means you have absolutely no choice other than to land.
The competition has always been hosted by the national association of the country from which a team won the year before, now changed to two years previously, a little like the Eurovision Song Contest. They decide the most suitable place to fly from, in terms of support a particular town might provide and the likely weather conditions that should lead to the best possible race, and it always leaves on the Saturday night closest to the weekend of the full moon in the first couple of weeks in September. In many European countries where there are numerous excellent and very experienced pilots, such as Germany or Switzerland, competition to fly can be desperate and cut-throat, and the fo
rmer has a very complex system for selecting who takes part based on a premier league of pilots, with points awarded for hours and distance flown in the preceding year. There never used to be enough British teams wanting to take part, so if you wanted to fly you could, but nowadays it has become more competitive here partly, I feel, because I have managed to raise the profile of the sport.
I first flew in the America’s Challenge Gas Balloon Race in 2005 with my co-pilot Jon Mason. This always leaves from Albuquerque in October and was first held in 1995, having almost exactly the same rules as the Gordon Bennett. The balloons have the same capacity and the winning team is also the one that flies furthest, the one major difference being that there is no limit on the number of national teams entering and they allow the pilot and co-pilot to be from different nations, which has caused them quite a few problems over the years. Since America also has a lot of pilots desperate to compete in the Gordon Bennett Cup, it acts in the same way as their Olympic trials with the top three placed American pilots being selected for the other event. It wouldn’t matter if you had won the Gordon Bennett five years in a row, if you don’t get that top three in the America’s Challenge you won’t get picked the next year. Since the pilot always selects his co-pilot, there have been cases of relative novices picking co-pilots who are far more experienced than them, from Germany say, attempting to use the rules to beat the selection process.
Albuquerque is a place I absolutely love to fly from, which no doubt has something to do with the fact that in the five times I’ve done so my worst showing has been to come third. At the start of my first competition it almost seemed as if we were jinxed however. Although he was also competing himself Bert had very kindly lent us one of his balloons, and his wife Joan was going to retrieve for us, but just before we were ready to leave she got a call that one of her boys was sick so she had to rush off. We just thought, oh well, we’d hitch-hike back or hire a van. Then, when the balloon was inflating, the gas entry nozzle shot out and broke Jon’s finger. What an absolutely great start that was!
We took off into the night and for various reasons a lot of the other balloons in the competition landed very quickly. Heading north we crossed over the Canadian border, and eventually landed in woods nearly 2,000 miles from where we had started. We were pretty amazed that on our first outing, and from about twenty-five entries, we came third. It’s actually fairly likely that we could have pushed on and won the whole thing at our first attempt, since the balloon that did so was only about 50 miles ahead of us and we still had some ballast left, but we’d found a suitable landing spot and felt we should use it. If we’d carried on it would probably have meant coming down in much thicker forest, and it seemed like rather poor etiquette to borrow a balloon from someone and then trash it in the trees. We were absolutely delighted with third place anyway. In some ways it hadn’t been a terribly eventful flight, but getting back was another matter entirely.
We got a lift in the middle of nowhere from a guy called Mike. He called some friends of his who came out with a pick-up truck and drove us back to the nearest little town where they lived, then found us rooms in a small hotel. The next morning we went to their factory where all our stuff had been held overnight, as we had to set off back to Albuquerque, since with a rostrum finish we needed to be there for the awards ceremony and all the usual backslapping. We hadn’t thought it would be difficult, but it soon became apparent that no one was prepared to hire us a truck that we would then be taking over the US border. We seemed stuffed, until Mike said he’d drive us down in his truck to the US border himself. It was about a three-hour drive, but once we’d crossed the border and found a truck hire company Mike changed his plans again. We’d got on really well and because he was just divorced, perhaps a bit lonely and at a loose end, he said he’d come all the way with us back to Albuquerque.
We took it in turns driving the 1,800 or so miles back, stopping only for comfort breaks and to grab some food, in not much more than a day, one of us usually sleeping whilst the others swapped behind the wheel. Only about six hours after we arrived, Mike said goodbye and drove all the way back by himself. We heard later that when he returned the truck just before the border the manager there who checked the mileage was furious, cussing out the idiot he was certain must have recorded it incorrectly before we left. There was no way, he was convinced, we could have driven over 3,500 miles in three days, but we had. Since he so obviously wouldn’t have been believed Mike said he didn’t bother trying to correct the mistake. We kept in touch after that, and Mike and a friend of his even came over to Europe to retrieve for us with my Shogun in our first Gordon Bennett race.
In 2006 the Gordon Bennett Cup was held in Belgium and Jon and I were rather nervous as we knew we’d be flying north and then crossing the North Sea. I’d flown over the Atlantic of course, but not then in a balloon of this size, and Jon certainly hadn’t done anything like it before. To make matters worse there is always a great deal of hanging around, as the regulations state that you have to be there several days before the race starts (one year they actually tried to disqualify me when I arrived a little late). At the opening ceremony there is a huge amount of razzmatazz, and everyone is obliged to stand to attention for the singing of the anthem of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. There is something slightly fascistic, or at least rather Ruritanian, about the whole affair. At the opening ceremony they also draw lots by country for the departure sequence, with the teams then going one at a time in that order so they are separated from their compatriots.
On the evening of departure all the balloons are weighed-off and a checklist of each one conducted to ensure that everything is according to the rules. There is often a fair bit of shenanigans and arguing about this, since all the pilots want to keep as much ballast as they can because an extra bag of sand either way can make all the difference between winning or not. The Launch Master is anxious to get rid of you as fast as possible, as each balloon is brought over to the podium about three minutes apart. They play your national anthem, he says ‘hands off’, and off you go up and away, slowly if you have managed to stay heavy or like a rocket if you’ve been conned out of too much sand and you are light. You need to be certain you aren’t too heavy however, since if there is any problem in your getting away you go straight to the back of the queue.
We left at dusk and headed into the darkness. In the total silence as we ascended the noise of the big crowd rising towards us was deafening, but slowly that faded. For an hour or so we could see the strobe lights of all the other balloons ahead and behind us, but after that the distance between them gradually increased and we seemed to be totally alone. Our path took us over the Channel to England and I vividly remember going over Norfolk, hearing people outside in their gardens having barbecues and then the voices of people as the pubs emptied out. It was just incredible the way sound travels upwards. You could discern every word of the argument a couple were having. Quite a few balloons landed there, obviously chickening out from heading off across the North Sea, but we were determined we weren’t going that way. It was misty now, so we couldn’t see any other balloons or anything below, but we could hear the intercoms on the oil rigs telling the workers their lunch was ready. It was a very eerie feeling, and because Jon is a psychologist I always have the slight feeling when flying with him that I am being observed.
There seemed to be two tracks that the balloons which had carried on were splitting between. One headed in across southern Norway and Sweden, and most people decided to take that route and then landed as it was nice and flat there with few hills. We chose a more difficult northern route up past the Shetlands and came in over the mountains north of Bergen. By this time we were really tired, and were buffeted about by heavy turbulence over those mountains. We knew from our ground crew that there were only four teams still flying, all on slightly different tracks now, so we were in with a chance. We then crossed Sweden and into Finland, but we were running out of anywhere to go.
Neither of us felt terribly confident about landing the balloon, as a gas balloon is a much harder thing to put down safely than the hot-air variety. Most German pilots, with so much practice, can bring themselves down on a postage stamp, but we hadn’t had many landings and there are a lot of trees in Finland. From the information provided by our retrieve team, who were able to follow what was happening on the official website, it was clear to us that with our track there was now no way we could manage better than third place, but that was still the highest ever for a British team. We absolutely had to land before we hit the Russian border or be disqualified, or worse still shot down, and as there was no point pushing on further into Finland we looked out for a suitable landing spot. The winning team eventually landed just before the Russian border but much further north than us up near the Arctic Circle.
As we were coming in I got the trail rope out and let it down, and then we saw a lake approaching and I had to haul it all the way in again. That really is back-breaking work when you are feeling shattered after three nights without sleep. We’d seen on the map that there was a village nearby called Minnervi Verni, so we might be able to get some help and wouldn’t be stranded in complete wilderness. We hit the ground in a marshy area, let the gas out of the top of the balloon and made everything secure.
Once we were down we contacted the Gordon Bennett control centre who are always very professional and know exactly what to do. They said they would ring the local fire brigade and try to get someone to us as soon as possible. The emergency pack they provide for each pilot includes a phrasebook with useful things to say in every European language. I found the phrase in Finnish that said, on behalf of the Gordon Bennett Committee, these two guys are pilots flying in our competition and please will you provide them with whatever assistance they need and that you can. At least, I think that’s what it said, but obviously I didn’t know a word of Finnish and it could just as easily have been something much less complimentary. I went so far as to phone up my friend Rune and asked him if he could speak any Finnish, but not even he could.
No Such Thing as Failure Page 22