ABORTED MISSION

December 25, 1998

Steve Fossett, Richard Branson, and Per Lindstrand were forced to abandon their quest to travel nonstop around the world via balloon due to the bad weather.

PHIL PONCE: It's the last of the great aviation challenges no one has met -- to circle the Globe by hot air balloon. Last Friday morning, three men boarded a 270-foot high balloon called "The ICO Global Challenge," named for a telecommunications company sponsoring the trip. At 924 a.m. local time they lifted off from Marrakech Morocco, beginning a journey they hoped to take them 24,000 miles around the world, landing in Western Europe shortly after the new year. SPOKESMAN: I'm really enjoying this. PHIL PONCE: Longtime rival Steve Fossett, a wealthy Chicago commodities broker, and British billionaire Richard Branson joined forces for their most recent attempt to circle the earth. Each had tried four times before. Pilot Per Lindstrand of Sweden was the third member of the team. Preparations for a joint flight began almost immediately after Fossett's last attempt failed in August. He was pulled out of the South Pacific after plunging 30,000 feet into the ocean. Still, his last flight established a world record by circling nearly half the globe. But there were problems for the new team from the start. First, Libya said the balloon couldn't enter its air space; it later relented. Then Mediterranean storms threatened to drive the balloon over Iraq during a recent air attacks by British and American forces. The balloonists' operations center in London dealt with that crisis, guiding the crew through a narrow corridor between buffers of restricted air space. They passed within 60 miles of Iraq. Then China initially refused permission for a fly over north of the 26th Parallel, another crisis for the operations center back in London. SPOKESMAN: We've just got permission to do this - to go to China. PHIL PONCE: By Wednesday, the balloon soared over the Himalayas and headed for the Korean Peninsula. Thursday it passed over Japan and set out for a dangerous Pacific Crossing. SPOKESMAN: I have the balloon in sight; he's over the Sea of Japan. He's about 310 - and in about an 11 o'clock position - contact. PHIL PONCE: But then controllers in London became concerned when the balloon seemed headed toward a low pressure area, something that had the potential to end the trip. SPOKESMAN: We've known for a few days that there was a trough in the Mid Pacific and a trough of low pressure can actually suck you down to different latitudes, as I've explained many times, a bit like a bath plug being taken out and the water rushes down. We were racing to get ahead of that trough. I thought we stood a pretty good chance. In fact, we missed it just by one hour. PHIL PONCE: At about 2:30 p.m. Eastern standard time the balloon came down at Sea 10 miles off the Hawaiian island of Oahu. It was to short of what was supposed to been the halfway point. U.S. Coast Guard helicopters rescued the crew from the water, and all three men were reported to be in good condition. PHIL PONCE: Joining me now Tom Hamilton, editor of Balloon Life Magazine. Welcome, Mr. Hamilton. TOM HAMILTON, Editor, Balloon Life Magazine: Good afternoon. PHIL PONCE: Could be expand a little bit more on what happened, why the mission failed, so to speak? TOM HAMILTON: Well, as they were going across the Pacific, the operations center there talked about the trough. Think of it as a long wall, a wall that probably stretched from the West Coast of the United States out past south of the Hawaiian islands. As they approached that wall, the winds basically stopped them, actually caused them to turn to their right to the direction traveled or down to the South. It may have been, I think, a few hundred miles farther North in the jet stream. I think they would have been able to fly around it, up towards the Gulf of Alaska, and then entered the United States and probably in the Northwest area. PHIL PONCE: Mr. Hamilton, how does one fly a balloon? How does it work? How do you steer one? TOM HAMILTON: Well, you don't steer it precisely. You go with the wind. So if you're in a balloon, there is no wind because you're traveling with that. And by going up in elevation or down in elevation, you're able to seek winds in different directions, and that's how they avoided the Korean Peninsula, for instance. They were at about 31,000 feet; the meteorologists had them come down to about 27,000 feet, and they actually got a right turn, were able to miss North Korea, which, in part, probably hurt them in being able to keep the track that they would have liked to have get around this trough. PHIL PONCE: Mr. Hamilton, what makes it so tough to make it around the world? TOM HAMILTON: Well, there are four main obstacles. The first one is weather. You've got to be able to put weather systems together, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere, over a two-week period time and be able to predict that, and weather is, as we know, no matter where we live, can constantly be changing. Second, your equipment has to be able to hold up. There's - at 30,000 feet you're really stressing the equipment, much more so than you are at 3,000 feet. Third, the people physically and mentally who are doing it have to be up to the challenge. And fourth, the political environment - there were four countries denied them permission; China restricted it where they could go, they graciously allowed them to go through the middle of the country. And those are the four things that all the teams have to overcome. PHIL PONCE: And, Mr. Hamilton, on that last point, why is it that countries are so sensitive about any encroachment on their space? What do you hear? TOM HAMILTON: Well, in the case of China, it was actually an air traffic control problem. They gave permission for the very north of the country and the very south of the country, but it turns out in the middle of the country they still handle air traffic control just simply by voice communications. And it was going - it was really more a safety concern from the standpoint of the Chinese, and they were very gracious; they worked with them; they allowed the team to go through, although they have since the ICO Global went through, have asked the other teams in the other hemisphere not to launch until they've worked out the problems. PHIL PONCE: And there are some other teams waiting, yes? TOM HAMILTON: There are five other teams, for them in the Northern Hemisphere that will be using the same type of balloon as the ICO Global Challenger, which is actually a rosy air balloon. It's basically a gas balloon that uses hot air to keep the gas expanded, instead of dropping ballast in the - and the other team is Team Remax; they're using a pure gas balloon. They're going to be flying literally at the edge of space - between eighty and a hundred and thirty thousand feet - and they hope to launch next week from Australia. PHIL PONCE: Mr. Hamilton, some people have been saying that this flight - this attempt was supposed to have been like the best attempt, the best effort. Why were people saying that? TOM HAMILTON: Well, his team had probably the most experienced people on it. Richard Branson and Per Lindstrand have done several long distance flights before together. Steve Fossett now has made three or four of the longest flights; he has a tremendous amount of experience; they have a tremendous support team working with them. They have a tremendous amount of financial backing, and they probably have about the most experience of everybody out there. PHIL PONCE: You mentioned financial backing. How expensive is it to mount one of these? TOM HAMILTON: Several million dollars. PHIL PONCE: So, it's not a hobby just for the - for the casual hobbyist? TOM HAMILTON: This one probably wouldn't be, no. PHIL PONCE: We saw - I understand there was a lot of high-tech equipment on the balloon, computers and that sort of thing, and yet, there's still some very real - very real risks - some real dangers in this, yes? TOM HAMILTON: Yes, there are, particularly, you know, in crossing the Pacific, or even when they were crossing the Himalayan Mountains. If the weather had turned bad on them and they had to try to land the aircraft or abandon the aircraft, in fact, when the consideration of the Chinese may have forced them to land at one point, it would have been, it would have taken a week to get a ground crew in to try to recover them out of the Tibetan Plateau. In the Pacific, they probably weren't going to be anywhere near the shipping lanes; it could take a long time to get somebody to them. PHIL PONCE: And according to Mr. Fossett, in his last failed attempt in August, when he was flying solo, he was almost killed. TOM HAMILTON: Yes. His balloon - Gas L - ruptured, and he was going down - his altimeter pegged out at 2500 feet a minute - he jettisoned some fuel tanks right at the very end. He thinks that helped to cushion the blow because he still had a canopy above him with some gas in it and acting sort of like a parachute, but he was plummeting down in the storm. PHIL PONCE: Mr. Hamilton, why do these people do it? What's the drive? TOM HAMILTON: Well, it's a great challenge, you're actually going out and testing men and equipment here to see if something could be accomplished, and this is a flight that can be accomplished, but the - you're not just driving something around. It takes a tremendous amount of planning and calculating. And it's just simply a great challenge of men and equipment. PHIL PONCE: A quest for glory, maybe, a quest to get your name in the record books? TOM HAMILTON: Well, certainly. Only one team is going to be the first one around to accomplish it. PHIL PONCE: You mentioned that there were several teams waiting. What's your opinion of the likelihood that somebody's going to be able to do it fairly soon? TOM HAMILTON: It's eventually going to happen. It's difficult to say whether it will happen this year or not. Weather patterns are going to play a lot into it -- the other obstacles that we talked about. Whether it's done this year, next year, or in the near future, it will eventually be accomplished. Steve Fossett and some of the other teams have certainly demonstrated that this is possible to do. PHIL PONCE: Mr. Hamilton, thank you very much for joining us. TOM HAMILTON: The pleasure's mine.