I had just struggled to lift and pour down the capsule’s side the last four 50-pound sacks of play sand. I was out of breath despite the copious oxygen which had for the entire flight been streaming from the mask pressed uncomfortably against my face. Exhausted, I slumped onto the bunk below and pulled the hatch above my head closed against the night’s frigid air. With my elbows propped on my knees to brace me up, Steve and I began what I knew for me, at least, would be an uncomfortably long wait.
We watched the altimeter’s climb slow as decreasing pressure of higher altitude forced helium out of the balloon envelope. Soon the upward momentum of the balloon pushed us above the altitude we would have enough lift to maintain, and we began the long descent. The spare set of flight instruments propped in front of me showed us drifting steadily down at 500 feet per minute. Our altitude unwound slowly towards where I knew the full weight of the atmosphere would eventually banish this gnawing seasick feeling. The sudden and extended low pressure of high altitude flight had made me altitude sick, and I wanted the queasiness to stop.
But why am I here in the first place?!
It all started several years ago when a guy I had never heard of phoned me and
said he was planning to fly a balloon across the Atlantic Ocean. Don Cameron had told
him I could build him a balloon autopilot. Would I do this, he wanted to know? After a
quarter century in ballooning, I figured I had at least heard of everyone who might fly
the Atlantic, but I was polite regardless. I guess that’s what got me where I was
now.
The guy on the phone, of course, was sports adventurer Steve Fossett, and I’ve since helped him with all his long distance balloon flights—his Atlantic flight with Tim Cole, his world’s longest distance ever solo Pacific flight, and his disappointing not-so- round-the-world flight of this past January from South Dakota.
To fly a balloon non-stop around the world requires special equipment able to cope with altitudes and conditions not normally encountered in ballooning. Regardless of what anyone might believe, Steve’s last round-the-world attempt ended prematurely not because of bad weather, but because of equipment problems. Most of these failures occurred because we were trying new designs to overcome problems encountered on prior flights. British team member Andy Elson had tested individual components such as the new electric generator and burners at high altitude in a hot air balloon, but even this had failed to show weaknesses that would later plague the January round the world flight from the Stratobowl in South Dakota.
After the initial disappointment of the January flight, we realized that some good had come from the flight. For example, we had finally deposited the solar array and generator where they had always belonged—the bottom of the Bay of Fundy. Now we would give up on these troublesome devices and develop an alternative, reliable source of electric power for the next flight.
More troubling to me was the problem Steve reported having with my autopilot. After I had early in the development of this device corrected a few simple programming bugs, the autopilot had worked near perfectly on all of the many subsequent flights. I had exhaustively tested this device in both hot air balloons and on the Roziere flight Ed Heltshe and I made in October 1995 from Aspen, Colorado to near Ed’s farm in Pennsylvania. On that flight I had slept soundly for more than five hours at a time while Ed simply watched the autopilot fly us through the night. (See Tranquil Voyager, December, 1995.)
After the January disappointment, but before Steve had admitted to himself or anyone else that he would try again, I was sure he would. Steve is not a quitter. For Steve to fly around the world alone, the autopilot must work. But just why couldn’t Steve get the autopilot to engage during the January flight? For many reasons I knew I must find the answer to this question.
During the spring and early summer, as each of us on Steve’s small team emerged from our individual reality checks, Nick Saum and I began to develop a plan for an equipment test flight. Of the four or five of us working with Steve, Nick and I have probably worked together the most closely. Several years ago, after having just signed on to help Steve with his solo Pacific flight, Nick and I had replanned the flight in Seoul, Korea in the final weeks before the launch. We had made many equipment changes, and had created a special fuel mixture which we believe made the difference between Steve going down in the sea and making it to dry land.
Nick has done more in ballooning than is possible to describe here. He has designed and built balloons, including the Roziere in which he set world altitude records a few years ago. He is the world’s only ever Roziere world balloon champion. He’s also a Ph.D. geologist with a career in geologic exploration under his belt.
Nick and I agreed that being able to solve any additional equipment problems we found would be worth the considerable cost of the test flight, and the flight would give Steve a chance to get valuable additional flying experience. Practice does make perfect, but left on his own Steve tends not to practice much. Finally, Nick and I felt that Steve might be able to learn a few things from whichever one of us would go along to observe how all this equipment was working, or more important, how any of it was not working right (The Flight of the Pacific Peregrine, April 1995). Steve agreed with the plan, and Nick suggested I accompany Steve on the flight.
That’s how I found myself roaming around a vacant part of the airplane tie-down area of Tri-County Airport just east of Boulder, Colorado on the evening of Saturday, September 21, hardly noticing summer turning to autumn. Friends Tim Cole and Dennis Brown were helping Nick inflate Ed Heltshe’s Cameron R-77 envelope above Steve’s Cameron-built carbon-Kevlar fiber round-the-world capsule. The air was cool, the sun was slipping below the nearby Continental Divide, and helium was roaring into the balloon.
After checking final details and donning many layers of high-tech warm clothing, I turned to spooling up this complex balloon system for flight. Capsule power on, computers on, Inmarsat-C on, VHF radio on, liquid oxygen quantity checked and oxygen system pressurized...
The last equipment to be—literally—fired up is the vaporizer, followed by the heaters and pilot lights, to which the vaporizer provides fuel vapor. The vaporizer uses a small flame entrained in a fiberglass pad to heat and vaporize fuel. Sometimes it doesn’t light on the first try, so when it didn’t seem to light I blew a puff of air into the inspection port and again pressed the igniter button. Bam! I saw the shaft of hot blue flame rake the right side of my face, and instantly felt the pain of a bad sunburn.
Our planned take off time of 9 p.m. approached, and Steve and I climbed aboard and prepared for the lift off. Nick’s expert weigh off left us climbing out on the burner with no need to ballast. As always before a flight like this, I had spent much of the hour or so before take off getting my head into the flight. There would be so much to remember to do—piloting, equipment testing, observing, training.
Within 25 minutes we were at 18,000 feet, our initial air traffic control assigned altitude. This put us squarely in the middle of a layer of cold and clammy stratus cloud, so Steve requested Flight Level 200, or 20,000 feet pressure altitude, and we were soon headed up there. I was standing in the open hatch as we broke out of the top of the cloud. I could almost touch the great mounds of cottony cloud glowing dimly in the light of the half-moon. The big dipper hung above the clouds to the north. Most flights are packed full of beautiful sights, but this would be the last such sight on this flight.
It was several productive work hours later that Steve noticed a sheet of flame flowing from the entire circumference of one of the electric solenoid valves on the burner above our heads. These valves turn the autopilot’s commands into fuel flowing to the burner. I later surmised I should have let Steve deal with this—for practice—but instead I leapt through the open hatch atop the capsule, threw the correct valve handles to isolate the flaming solenoid valve from the fuel system, and blew out the flames. Blew out the flames? It turns out that even at a mere 20,000 feet above sea level it’s hard to sustain a flame. The bad news is that its tough to make a burner burn reliably; the good news is that uncontrolled fires are less of a problem than down where the air is thick and rich.
The loss of this burner meant reconfiguring the fuel system. Soon I was hanging out into the darkness wrestling to connect a recalcitrant TEMA quick disconnect fitting into the fuel manifold. After exhausting myself to no avail at this task, I finally completely bled the fuel line, made one last big effort, and got the connection made. This was the first time I found myself collapsed on the bench regaining my strength.
Once, after I had concluded I was immune to seasickness, I violated all the rules and got seasick. Then, as now, I was responsible for orchestrating the journey and could not afford to be distracted by illness. Well, tonight I soon found myself feeling about half seasick, a feeling that would gradually worsen throughout most of the rest of this flight.
I had first noticed a slight headache sometime before the solenoid valve fire, but two aspirins had dealt with it. Now, several hours later I noticed the pain again and began to suspect I should have taken Steve up on his suggestion to take acetazolamide, the medication which prevents, or at least mitigates, the effects of altitude sickness. I had used this medication on the transcontinental flight with Ed, but this flight would be short, and we would be breathing plenty of oxygen for the altitudes we were at, so I unwisely decided not to use it this time. After all, I had flown a hot air balloon to over 30,000 feet just a little over a year ago without it with no problem.
I remember at 3 a.m. realizing unhappily that we would be flying at least two more hours before, according to the flight’s plan, we would drive the balloon even higher in a run for the maximum altitude we could achieve. I didn’t know how I would feel by then, but I did know going higher would not help.
Several weeks before the flight Steve had mentioned to me that the plan I had laid
out for this test flight would put us higher than anyone had ever flown a Roziere
balloon, so we would be breaking the world altitude record for all sizes of Rozieres. I
don’t consider this altitude record to be particularly important, since it seems to me that
the Roziere altitude record should be as high as the pure gas balloon altitude record—
not only a quarter as high. But then, we aren’t the U.S. Air Force, no one had ever
flown a Roziere as high as we would, and a world record is a world record, so Steve
organized the sanction for this.
Sometime before the final climb Steve broke a long silence to volunteer that he thought he finally understood why he hadn’t been able to get the autopilot to engage on the last round-the-world flight. In order to make the autopilot able to fly any hot air or Roziere balloon, I had designed a learning period into the computer program that controls it. Admittedly, sometimes the delay in engagement requires enough minutes to try the confidence of all but me, the unit’s designer. Steve explained that he now understood all this, and he had already demonstrated his adeptness with the unit on this flight. Whew! No more wondering, grasping for farfetched possible explanations of the unit’s mysterious apparent failure on the last flight!
Steve and I calculated we needed to start the climb to peak altitude at 5:10 a.m. MDT. This should get us down to the surface for a landing not long after sunrise, in high pressure and calm conditions. The moment came and I again positioned myself in the open hatch, ready to wrestle the last 200 pounds of our ballast up from Steve in the capsule and over the side. A few burns with various of the burners at 25,000 feet started us up at 500 feet per minute. I followed this by pouring bag after bag of play sand over the side to keep us going up at this rate, until there was no more sand and I slumped onto the seat for the short remaining ride up and the long ride down.
It takes a long time to descend the more than five miles to where we would start our landing approach. I knew from the literature on altitude sickness that I should quickly feel better once lower, but I would also need to orchestrate the landing of all this valuable and vulnerable equipment. We had compressed this flight into one night to assure landing in the calm of sunrise to protect the round-the-world equipment. Now it was time to do this landing.
Somewhere below 10,000 feet a downpour began to drench the capsule. Coming out of a clear sky, this seemed odd. It turned out to be the frost on the base of the gas cell melting in the warmer air, running down to the bottom center, and cascading onto the capsule. We knew we would soon need to open the hatch and stand in this downpour, but then, you do what you have to do.
As we stood in the open hatch at 900 feet above ground, Steve did not need to tell me the GPS was showing us going 36 knots. I already knew the fields were going by far too fast, and confirmation of this only unsettled me more. After incredible speeds during the final descent, we made a clumsy touch and go landing in what turned out to be moderate surface winds. As we bounced back into the air with the reluctant trail rope finally deployed by the impact, a familiar voice from somewhere below called out. “Bruce Comstock! Steve Fossett!” It was fellow round-the-world team member Bo Kemper, along with another friend of Steve’s, having somehow found us in the empty plains of Kansas, 425 miles from where we started.
Had I been a little more alert I would have realized that we had descending through a low level jet stream. This meant the surface wind would not be strong, nor would it become strong later. Working from his home location of Omaha, team meteorologist Lou Billones had given us the calm inflation and takeoff and calm enough landing conditions we needed to protect the precious equipment from damage.
Despite the occasional problem, like the flaming solenoid valve, the equipment performed well. When Steve lifts off from Busch Stadium in St. Louis on the real round- the-world attempt he’ll have with him some equipment improved and some added as a result of this flight. Another result of this flight will be our claiming a new world altitude record for Roziere balloons of almost 28,000 feet.
This was not a beautiful flight, but I feel lucky to have been able to go. Flying with Steve on a flight so similar to a real round-the-world attempt helped me to appreciate how remarkable this unassuming, self-effacing guy is. This kind of flight is much more difficult than even experienced balloonists can imagine. The world above 20,000 feet is inhospitable at best. It’s cold and dark and uncomfortable, and everything is much harder to do than it seems it ought to be. Things go wrong. Plans must continuously change in flight.
Many balloonists have doubted Steve’s ability to make the most difficult flight ever attempted. After all, he flew hot air balloons just enough to get a license in his pocket. But after flying the Atlantic with expert gas balloonist Tim Cole, he took on the Pacific alone. There he made the first solo crossing of the Pacific and the longest distance balloon flight ever made. Exhausted at the end of that flight, he made his first ever approach and landing of a gas balloon—a perfect standup landing in Saskatchewan, Canada.
Many have questioned the wisdom of anyone trying this flight alone. Steve can reel off a whole list of good reasons to make the flight solo, but I think his motivation is that he simply likes to do these things alone. There is a valid place in everyone’s life for solitude. Steve seems to like to combine solitude with adventure. Remember also he need have no concern over disharmony amongst the crew during the flight—something which has had a damaging impact on many previous voyages.
Perhaps most important, Steve’s tremendous success in his professional life has resulted from his ability to dispassionately and expertly assess risk. While that was financial risk and this is physical risk, the principles are the same. In fact, it might even be that Steve is much better prepared to make a round-the-world flight than us hot-shot experienced balloonists.
