It was the last great aviation challenge: the race to circumnavigate the world in a balloon. Louis Blériot had flown a plane across the English Channel in 1909; Charles Lindbergh had made his heroic solo flight from New York to Paris less than two decades later; Neil Armstrong had won the space race for the United States bysetting foot on the Moonin 1969. Yet this quieter feat of derring-do had remained stubbornly out of reach ever since ahot air balloonfirst carried people up, up and away in 1783.
There were good reasons – the 25,000-mile voyage depends upon the winds. To cross vast oceans and continents in a balloon, it is essential to reach the jet stream, at an altitude that requires a pressurised gondola capable of providing protection from extreme heat and cold; breathable air; and life-support systems. The advent of satellites and detailed wind mapping made navigation possible, yet a balloon still had to carry a cluster of heavy fuel tanks to stay in the air for three weeks, with its aeronauts suspended below in a pod not much larger than a Mini.
By the 1990s, competition was hotting up, and the prize was being fought over by pioneers with deep pockets.Sir Richard Bransonwas determined to claim it, as was renowned US aviator and former commodities trader Steve Fossett. The tale of how it came to be achieved by a comprehensive boy from Bristol and a brainy Swiss whose grandfather had been the model for Prof Calculus in Tintin is one of the great adventure stories of our time – and it’s told in a new film,The Balloonists, by British directorJohn Dower.
Thedocumentary’s central characters make the perfect odd couple. Bertrand Piccard was born into a family of frontier-expanding explorers: in 1931, his physicist grandfather, Auguste Piccard, became the first human to reach the stratosphere, ascending almost 10 miles in a hydrogen balloon; in 1960, his father, Jacques, was the first to dive to the floor of the Mariana Trench, nearly seven miles deep in the western Pacific. As a boy, Bertrand had been at Cape Canaveral to watch Apollo 11 take off – “You feel the ground vibrating, you feel the air vibrating,” he tells me now. “You see this rocket starting very, very slowly, and you think, ‘I’m witnessing the most extraordinary adventure of humankind.’” The youngster dreamt of an adventure of his own.
Yet the man who helped him realise that dream 30 years later was not even his first – or second – choice as co-pilot. Brian Jones had joined Piccard’s team only after an initial attempt to circle the globe in 1997 with co-pilot/engineer Andy Elson had ended with Piccard’s Breitling Orbiter ditching in the Mediterranean after just six hours. (“I thought that I could never be as ridiculous in my life as at this moment,” Piccard says.) Jones, who was the chief flying instructor for UK Ballooning, was brought in by Elson, a friend and fellow West Country lad, to advise on survival drills and preparations should their second attempt also fail. When Orbiter 2 was, indeed, forced to ditch in Myanmar, Elson left the team and Jones took over as project manager for Piccard and his new co-pilot, the American Tony Brown. He also agreed to double as a back-up pilot.
Jones’s practical organisational abilities hid a well-tested capacity to cope in high-risk situations. By 16 he was flying gliders in the Air Cadets, before joining the RAF, where he became a loadmaster on Hercules C-130 transport planes and, later, a helicopter winchman. In 1975 he was on the Hercules sent to Cambodia to evacuate British embassy staff from the surrounded capital of Phnom Penh, ahead of its inevitable fall to the communist forces of the Khmer Rouge.
“It was just a single trip,” Jones recalls, with typical RAF understatement. “We did what the Americans called ‘the Khe Sanh approach.’” This steep, high-speed combat landing, designed to evade small-arms fire, involved “coming in very high until the piano keys on the runway disappeared below the nose”. Then, the pilot would point the plane almost vertically at the ground and drop the flaps and landing gear, “and you would fly down fast until you collided with the ground”. The embassy staff were waiting to rush out to the plane – “We landed and stayed on the runway, then flew straight off.” Jones later took part in similarly daring missions in Cyprus andSouth Sudan.
Ballooning was a passion that had gripped him in later life, yet when it came to the redesigned Orbiter 3, he was determined to focus less on the race than “on the technical challenges of trying to build a balloon that could make the trip”. Managing weight was essential. The pressurised pod below the balloon was just 5.4m long, 2.8m wide and 1.9m high – barely tall enough to stand up in – and packed with equipment. There was room for only a single, curtained-off bunk, so the crew of two would take rest on rotation: one would try to sleep, while the other sat at a desk charting the balloon’s progress and direction. Piloting is the art of ascending or descending to catch (or avoid) specific wind currents, while also conserving fuel, aided by communication with ground control, which included two specialists, also working in tandem, who would monitor the winds and the weather. The balloon could not turn in any direction by itself or generate forward thrust.
It was an expensive project. “The build itself cost about £1m. And I suspect that the sponsors put as much in again, in terms of marketing and all the rest of it,” notes Jones. There were delicate geopolitical considerations, too. One of Piccard’s great coups was being granted permission to fly over China (whereas Branson was told he would have to fly over the Himalayas and land in Tibet – a hazardous prospect – before an intervention by diplomats persuaded the Chinese to relent, on condition that he leave their airspace as soon as possible). Piccard reports that Beijing told him, “Because you’re the only one who respected us, we’re going to help you.” However he still had to promise that if the balloon strayed above the 26th parallel, he would land. “I committed to do it, and we would have obeyed,” he tells me.
All the challengers were now locked in a gripping head-to-head battle to be first. Attempts – and failures – had been accelerating since the 1980s and by the late Nineties they were coming thick and fast. There were four serious attempts in 1998 alone, the final one by Branson, who managed to get up in the sky again in his Global Challenger balloon before the Orbiter 3 was ready. “Bertrand was, for a Swiss, oddly of a Latin temperament, saying ‘We need to go, we need to go!’” Jones recalls. Brown, a former Concorde pilot, was not convinced. “He was very much [of the mind], ‘It doesn’t fly until I’m ready to fly,’” Jones says.
Even after Branson was forced to ditch in the Pacific off Hawaii on Christmas Day 1998, the clock continued to tick. Elson – by now leading his own charge in a balloon sponsored by Cable & Wireless – was already airborne by mid-February 1999. Tensions continued to run high in the Orbiter camp, culminating in Brown and Piccard having an explosive argument in a restaurant, witnessed by Jones. “Tony felt that I was the diva in the team,” says Piccard in the film, “but it was my project.” The row ended with Brown bowing out, putting Orbiter 3’s back-up pilot into the hot seat.
As a father and grandfather, Jones felt he had to clear it with his wife, Jo, first. She was a pilot herself, he explains, so she knew that if the balloon had to ditch in the remote Pacific, he and Piccard probably wouldn’t survive. He remembers waking her up that night after getting back from the restaurant. “She said, ‘There’s only one thing that really worries me,’” he recalls, noting their shared sense of humour. “‘How will you get back if the world really is flat?’”
At 8.05am on March 1 1999, the Orbiter 3 launched from the Swissalpine village of Château-d’Oex. From then on, the trials kept coming. Piccard’s urgency to catch Elson by flying higher and faster soon had Luc Trullemans, their weather expert on the ground, instructing them to descend or expect the balloon to be pushed towards the North Pole. Then came the flight over the Sahara and the tricky navigation around Yemen – where they learnt that Elson’s balloon had been forced down in the Sea of Japan. The Orbiter flew on over the Arabian Sea, curving towards China and the narrow track just 31 miles wide that would allow them to remain in the jet stream without going above the 26th parallel. Amazingly, they were able to fly 1,120 miles in an almost straight line, Piccard remembers. “It was magical.”
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As they reached the Pacific, though, to avoid the weather that had forced Elson to ditch, Trullemans told them to veer south, adding another 2,000 miles to their journey. There would be nothing below but the empty ocean – this was the real danger zone, because of the time it would take any rescue mission to reach them if they crashed. Then the unexpected happened: they lost contact. On the ground, they feared the worst; in the balloon, they were flying blind. “We lost communication by satellite for two days, because we were very close to the Equator when the satellite was exactly above the envelope of the balloon,” Piccard explains. Finally, the antenna re-emerged from the balloon’s shadow and communication was restored.
By then something else had gone seriously wrong. “Our heating system had failed, and it was incredibly cold,” remembers Jones. He had gone to bed to get some rest and keep warm. “I woke,” he says, “and I was breathing really heavily, as if I’d done a race. I didn’t quite know why that would be. I thought, ‘Maybe I’m coming down with something,’ and I opened the curtain to look at Bertrand, and he was slumped on the desk.” Piccard, he recalls, “had his head down on his arms and was clearly not very well”. Jones’s crisis training kicked in: “Not knowing what the problem was, I put an oxygen mask on Bertrand and one on myself. And very quickly, I started to feel better.”
After putting Piccard in the bunk, Jones set about checking all the systems in turn. On the ground, there was concern that it might be a lung issue or that some form ofchemical contaminationwas being released within the capsule. But the rapid improvement seen in both men on supplemental oxygen suggested carbon monoxide build-up as a possible cause. “The doctor said we probably only had a couple of hours left,” Jones says. He replaced every filter he could find. It turned out that, invisibly, one of them had iced over. Disaster was averted.
Their final challenge came after they had cleared the Pacific and set a course for the Atlantic over Mexico. As they crossed the Caribbean, Jones recalls, the ground controller told them: “You guys have used three quarters of your fuel, you’ve only gone two thirds of the distance. We think you should land in Puerto Rico.”
“You have to understand that I’m not a daredevil, I’m an explorer,” Piccard says. “I hate a random risk. But when we had not enough fuel to make it to Africa, we said: ‘We don’t care. We’ll try.’ Because the worst that can happen is to ditch in the Atlantic and be rescued by a boat.”
Yet, in the absence of a strong wind, the only way forward was to burn more fuel in order to ascend, in the hope of catching a high-altitude jet stream. “It was terrible because every push of propane in the burner hurt me in my stomach,” Piccard says. “But without doing it, we would have ditched in the southern Atlantic.”
He was on the satellite phone to his wife as they climbed. He says: “I was crying. I was saying, it’s the third attempt. We’re probably not going to make it. We haven’t found the good winds. Then, in the last 100m that the balloon could reach, the [wind] direction changed 26 degrees to the left. It was a miracle that my wife and I shared.”
He and Jones watched the speed read-out rise steadily from 60 to 120 knots, approaching an astonishing 140mph. At last, they knew they would make it. The Orbiter finally touched down on a desert stretch in western Egypt on March 21, after 19 days, 21 hours and 55 minutes in the air. The record was theirs.
They look back now with the knowledge that their friendship allowed them not only to reach their goal but to enjoy it. “I thought it was beautiful to live in the sky for three weeks,” Piccard says. “In this capsule, eating, drinking, going to the toilet, sleeping, brushing our teeth, washing ourselves. We were in a little flat up there, suspended under a balloon in the wind.”
After the acclaim and the awards, Jones went back to his old life. Now 79, having failed the aviation medical exam needed to fly in 2019, he says he still likes to “give talks, play golf and just enjoy home life”. Piccard, meanwhile, says that the achievement was a tribute to everything that his illustrious forebears had taught him – “To never accept when people say it’s impossible”.
In 2016, he became one of two co-pilots to complete the first circumnavigation of the world in a plane powered only by solar energy – the Solar Impulse – and later this year will, at the age of 68, attempt to do the same in a plane powered by liquid green hydrogen, produced withrenewable energy. As he likes to say: “It’s not the sky that is the limit, it’s the fuel.”
Both men remember the message that Piccard was sent by Dick Rutan, the American aviator who had made his own unsuccessful attempt at the ballooning record in 1998, wishing them luck before they took off. “Remember,” it said, “the only sure way to fail is to quit.”
The Balloonists is in UK cinemas from May 22
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It was the last great aviation challenge: the race to circumnavigate the world in a balloon. Louis Blériot had flown a plane across the...
