The Flight of the Pacific Peregrine

With just ten minutes left on the countdown clock the pressure to launch was building. At any moment the Japanese government might lodge an official protest, denying use of its airspace and forcing a cancellation of the flight. With 100,000 cubic feet of helium already in the balloon, the result would be costly, if not disastrous to Steve Fossett’s plans to be the first to cross the Pacific Ocean solo in a balloon.

The flight of the Pacific Peregrine was to launch from Olympic stadium in Seoul, South Korea ostensibly to celebrate Korea’s 50th anniversary of independence- independence from Japanese rule. Yet it was at this precise moment in time when Steve Fossett asked Bruce Comstock to climb into the tiny capsule that would serve as Fossett’s home for the next several days and instruct him on the use of perhaps the most important piece of equipment on board the balloon, the autopilot that Comstock had personally designed.

"I was standing next to the capsule when Steve said ‘why don’t you come in and show me how to use the autopilot?’" recalls Comstock. "For the next five minutes there I was giving Steve a description of how to use the autopilot. Finally I told him if all else failed to find some time in the flight to read the manual. Then I shook his hand, looked him in the eyes and just said ‘Do It!’" The anticipated call from the Japanese never did come and a few minutes later, Steve Fossett flew off into the history books...

That Fossett found himself in Seoul, South Korea in position for such an endeavor is in itself a great story of self determination and fortitude. Unlike many who had come before him in the field of record flights and ocean crossings, Fossett had no extensive team of experts to assist him. He had begun the process of staging such a flight virtually alone. However, when he needed assistance, Fossett was not afraid to go after the best. For example the very selection of Seoul as a launch site was the result of Fossett’s seeking expert advice.

"The selection of Seoul was through discussions with Bob Rice when we were trying to determine where the best location on the Pacific Rim would be for launching a Pacific flight and continuing on beyond," says Fossett. (While Rice assisted in the selection of the launch site, he was unavailable to Fossett to serve as his meteorologist. Lou Billones would fill that role admirably.)

Fossett lift-offs bathed by the stadium lights. A local South Korean balloonist tethers in the stadium as part of the balloon tribute to South Korea's 50th anniversary of independence from Japanese rule.
Right: Bruce Comstock and Nick Saum prepare Fossett's gondola for the upcomming flight

Fossett has the media's undivided attention and he makes a few last remarks before setting off on his historic journey across the Pacific.
Right: Finishing preparations are made to the Pacific Peregrine

Fossett would soon learn that the selection process was nothing in comparison to gaining the necessary permissions. "It was horrendously difficult," he recalls, "but at each turn we felt we were being encouraged and we just kept going forward but it remained difficult the entire way.

"I had just presumed that Korea was not that foreign a country, because they are very industrialized and have a very successful economy. But I learned that there is a major cultural difference. They are very hesitant about things like this and they have not permitted foreigners outside of the US military to use their airspace before, so my flight was to be a first in that sense."

In the end the flight required the permission of eight government ministries and the military. To assist in dealing with the Korean bureaucracy Fossett enlisted the support of a hard charging Korean balloonist, Jun Hewn Baek, who just seemed to know how to get things done, especially when armed with sums of Fossett’s cash. When Mr. Baek’s local know-how was not enough to open the necessary doors, Fossett brought in some political clout in the form of Senator Larry Pressler of South Dakota and former Secretary of Defense Les Aspin. Their role was to assure the Korean’s that Fossett knew what he was doing and would not embarrass the Koreans if they granted him the permissions he desired.

In selecting his launch crew and support team, Fossett used the same tenacity that had carried him through the various levels of the Korean government. Bruce Comstock recalls how it happened.

"Steve first called me in November and asked if I would take charge of the launch in Korea but I declined. I didn’t want to go over there and work alone plus I had other things I wanted to do. So I thanked Steve and declined.

"He called again on December 19th and asked me again to be his launch director. I thought about it for a couple of hours and called back to again say no thank you. A few hours later," says Comstock, "Nick Saum called and said Steve had just invited him to go over and coordinate his launch. ‘And,’ Comstock recalls Saum saying, ‘I said I’d do it if you would!’"

In retrospect Comstock says Fossett’s selection was a smart one as he and Saum found that they often complimented each other. Plus Steve’s preoccupation with government clearances demanded someone take care of the equipment, its preflight checks and the ever present problem solving required to plan such a flight.

In fact it was Comstock and Saum who, once in Korea, raised questions that caused a delay in the planned launch from late January to mid February. "Steve was talking about flight temperatures of -40 C and Nick and I immediately were puzzled because propane won’t vaporize at that temperature. On board the balloon were several systems, the burner pilot lights, the electrical generator, and the heaters, that required vapor propane for fuel. If vaporization were not possible, these systems would not function and Steve would have a serious problem," explained Comstock.

The solution was to add ethane to the fuel system to both provide increased pressure and a lower vaporization temperature. But like so many other aspects of the flight there was not an adequate amount to be found in Korea, so a supply had to be imported from Canada. Thus the team broke camp in mid-January, returned to the US, then was back in Korea on February 12th for the final few days of preparations.

For Steve Fossett preparation was not so much physical as it was mental exercise. "Preparation for me was really an effort in expanding my fields of knowledge that a person needs to have for such a flight," explained Fossett. "I really focused on meteorology. I wanted to understand meteorology well enough so that I would understand what my meteorologist was advising me. So I can now run trajectories, I can call up weather chart anywhere in the world and analyze the weather myself. And of course I wanted to be able to understand all of the functions of the balloon and our equipment like the satellite navigation system, the HF radios, GPS navigation and so on. These are things that I am very comfortable with since I’ve done a lot of work with similar systems in sailing."

While Fossett was busy in the final days with practice drills and learning the ins and outs of some of his more sophisticated equipment, the flight was almost canceled just two day prior to launch when a test of the Comstock designed autopilot showed it to be completely inoperable.

"This led to quite a focused conversation among the three of us," recalls Comstock, "because Steve had said he would not fly without the autopilot working."

What followed that conversation was nothing short of a scavenger hunt as Comstock and Fossett embarked on a door to door search through the electronics district of Seoul in search of a much needed component. "We wandered around through alleys, dingy buildings and all sorts of little shops yet amazingly enough we found the integrated circuits that I needed," says Comstock. "There were two chips on this integrated circuit that had failed and we found the first one rather easily. The other one I thought was rather rare. Well we finally entered this one shop that looked more like a bakery than an electronics warehouse, it was just full of these old glass cases with chips and circuits everywhere. When I informed the shopkeeper what we were looking for she asked if I wanted it made by National Semiconductor or some other company. It turned out she had a huge carton of these things from two manufacturers. It was really quite amazing." With that crisis averted, all was at last ready for launch, early on a Saturday morning...

"The conditions were just perfect," recalled Fossett. "There was absolutely no wind. All the lights of Olympic stadium were on and it was decorated with banners, some of them 60 feet tall. The media were there, the public was not invited, but the media there were very well represented.

"The climb out was uneventful. I climbed out very quickly to 12,000 feet and took it easy at that altitude until daybreak when I climbed to about 14,500 feet."

Most often the planning in long distance flying is to climb high and gain speed in the upper altitudes. This theory was certainly proved out by Lindstrand and Branson in their crossings of the Atlantic and Pacific. But for the first day or more of Fossett’s flight, he flew relatively low and slow, averaging only 30-35 knots an hour. According to Fossett this was a conscious decision on his part.

"I was coming down the back side of a low pressure area and if I had climbed high I would risk being looped around to the north, so I wanted to fly low to get more southing in the trajectory, to get through Southern Japan to the bottom of this low pressure area, then go up to a higher altitude and go straight across from there."

While the flight planning and trajectories were working as hoped, some of the equipment on board the balloon was not-specifically the two heaters designed to keep the tiny capsule comfortable in the extreme cold of altitude. One quit just two hours into the flight, the other lasted a scant eight hours more. The two heaters, designed for use in mobile homes had been the thorn in Nick Saum’s side the entire time they were in Korea. The team had used identical heaters to heat their office at Olympic Stadium prior to launch but their performance had been nothing short of miserable. It was in part because of their pre-flight failures that two of the heaters were installed on the capsule, a NASAesque sense of needing a back-up to the main system. Surely both could not fail. Looking back, Bruce Comstock turned philosophical when discussing the failure.

"These are actually nice little heaters," says Comstock, "and whoever makes the next flight like this will probably use the same one and they will probably function perfectly. No doubt it was just some little something that needs a minor adjustment, because they worked after the flight and they had worked in a pressure chamber before the flight."

Comstock had received word of the failed heating units shortly before he left Korea, flying by jetliner to the UK where he would monitor the rest of the flight with flight director Alan Noble of Cameron Balloons.

"I was sitting on the plane from Hong Kong to London when I woke up and it was cold and I was really uncomfortable. Then I realized it was probably 65 degrees in the cabin and I was uncomfortable while Steve was sitting there at minus 20 in the capsule going day and night at that temperature. I realized then how trivial my discomfort was."

Fortunately Fossett, who indeed spent the next 3 days at below zero temperatures, was not caught off guard. "I had brought on board clothes that I have used in minus 40 or 50 degree temperatures before so I was equipped for the cold. But it was very disconcerting to have both heaters fail but I just had to face the fact that I would be living in a cold environment the rest of the trip," says Fossett.

If the failure of the heaters and the extreme cold was cause for concern in the early hours of the flight, the Comstock autopilot would emerge the hero of this unique journey as it allowed Fossett to remain well rested throughout the long trip.

"There is no question the Comstock autopilot was a key part of this trip," explained Fossett. "I had asked Bruce to develop an autopilot in advance of my trans-Atlantic flight but I didn’t tell him why. So we tested it on that flight and it works great.

"The true reason I wanted the autopilot was I wanted to fly solo and now I had one which enabled me to sleep. It’s not a perfect autopilot. It required retuning as it slipped altitude. Typically it would slip or lose say 750 feet of altitude in a period of 45 minutes so I just set my altitude alarm and went to sleep. When the alarm went off I would awaken, fly the balloon back up to my desired altitude, reset the alarm and go back to sleep again. Still I only averaged about two hour of sleep a day. I could have gotten more, it just seemed to me that was all I needed, my sleep requirements seemed reduced maybe because I was just sitting still.

"And I was busy all the time. There was much more to do on this flight than on the Atlantic crossing-partly because I was alone and so doing all of the communications, navigation and the evaluation of the weather and flying characteristics of the balloon. Plus I was having equipment problems, the heaters had failed and there were some problems with the generator and some of the communications gear. So I was busy, I took five books with me and never opened a one, but I would say it is a reasonable work load for one person to fly the balloon even under less than ideal circumstances," concluded Fossett.

Surprisingly perhaps, weather presented no real difficulties during the flight. On the first night Fossett experienced some minor icing while flying over Japan. The only other threat appeared as he prepared to make landfall, completing the first successful solo crossing of the Pacific Ocean by balloon.

"A high pressure ridge developed near the Pacific Coast which threatened to send me quite far north, up near Juneau, Alaska, before I would loop around and come back south. That was the trajectory based on flying at 18,000 feet," explained Fossett. "So, I gritted my teeth, flew the balloon on up to 22,000 feet, straightened out the trajectory and made landfall early Tuesday morning over Vancouver Island.

"I was of course just delighted that my strategy worked, that by flying high I had achieved a straighter trajectory. When I looked down and saw land I was very happy, because there was the assurance that when over land you have many choices of landing sites, so I immediately felt much safer."

Any ocean crossing must include emergency planning for a ditching at sea. This flight was no different, though Fossett was quick to admit that regardless of the extensive planning and survival gear, no one could look forward to an ocean landing.

"Despite your best preparations, it’s a bad place to land," says Fossett in a bit of understatement. "The capsule itself had been proven seaworthy and on a supplemental basis I had a life raft and a survival suit. I also carried a EPIRB beacon, which is the international marine rescue system which through a network would have sent an emergency message to the nearest ocean going vessel. Now that’s all fine and good, but if I were to go down it would probably be because of a storm and in fact some of the weather I flew over included gales down below that created seas with 22-24 foot waves, so you really don’t want to land there.

"In fact it was part of our flight plan that I would not do a voluntary ditching. I would use the duration of the balloon (17 days) to keep it in the air at all costs and try to work my way toward land."

With the crossing complete Fossett had achieved one of two goals he had established for the flight. Now it was on to claim the absolute world distance record which he did in another four hours of flight. "It was open ended how far I would fly," explained Fossett. "The likely reasons I would terminate the flight would be bad weather ahead or that I would lose the trajectory and stall out in some manner.

Fossett crossed over the coastal ranges and the Rockies which were engulfed in a snowstorm forcing him to fly quite high, 22 to 24,000 feet. "I came out of the mountains and straight over the city of Calgary," Fossett said, "and at this point I just wanted to enjoy myself so I went up for some altitude to 26,600 feet exceeding the previous altitude for Rozier balloons but not by enough to establish a new world record. After that I just started setting up for landing deciding that I would land at dusk when the winds would be the lightest."

There had been some discussion of his flying on through the night for a landing near dawn but he ruled out that option for several reasons. First, after crossing over Calgary he was now flying over the open wheat fields of Saskatchewan where he noted "they don’t even have fences!" More importantly he was rapidly running out of electrical power and the winds had dropped to a very manageable five knots. The weather forecast was not so certain for the next morning when Fossett would have found himself in Illinois or for the day after when he would be in South Carolina. So, a dusk landing it would be in Canada.

"I just came in and hovered and picked my spot," Fossett recalls of his landing. "I wanted to be near a road just for the ease of packing up the equipment. I came in and did a ‘hot air’ landing using the burner in five knots of wind with absolutely no problem."

As he approached the landing, a stream of local townspeople from Leader, Saskatchewan had begun to follow the balloon. They had heard the news on the radio that a trans-Pacific flight had been made. "I guess I attracted the crowd because I drifted around there for about an hour trying to pick just the right spot to land. And I wanted to do a pretty landing, I didn’t want to embarrass myself after coming all that way, so during that period of time about twenty people gathered below to watch the landing and came rushing up to greet me," says Fossett.

Steve Fossett and the flight of the Pacific Peregrine was a success. He had been aloft for four days, six hours and 15 minutes covering 5,437 miles at a maximum altitude of 26,600 feet. The flight is the first solo crossing of the Pacific Ocean by balloon; it set the new absolute distance record for balloon flight (to be verified by the FAI) and while it established a new operational ceiling altitude for the Rozier balloon, it narrowly missed establishing a new world altitude record for the class. In June, Steve Fossett will receive what will no doubt be the first of many honors and awards for his flight when Malcolm (Steve) Forbes, Jr. will present Fossett with the Coup de Balleroy.