If At First You Don't Succeed

Steve Fossett's 3rd Attempt to Fly Around the World in a Balloon may have been his Last.

by Glen Moyer

New Year's Eve 1997. Steve Fossett's silvery balloon lifts majestically into the night sky from St. Louis' Busch Stadium. This is his seventh long distance Rosier flight, his fourth attempt to be the first to fly a balloon around the world. His previous attempt had carried him more than 10,000 miles - halfway around - before he fell victim to politics and too little fuel. Still the success of that flight had left him, in the eyes of many, the odds-on favorite to win what the media now called The Great Balloon Race.

"There were three problems with my previous attempt," says Fossett, "too little fuel, faulty cabin heaters and the lack of necessary overflight permissions. We knew we had the same situation on overflight permissions - that is, not all countries will issue them. Some deliberately want to wait until your close and definitely coming over while others are just tough and are not going to make an advance decision. So there was no improvement on that count, but we thought we had enough fuel this time and we thought we had solved the cabin heater problem, but we didn't."

Still the launch and the early hours of the flight went so well they seemed almost routine. Fossett had beaten rival Kevin Uliassi into the air by a matter of hours on this first leg of the Great Race. While Uliassi aborted a few hours into his flight with a ruptured balloon, Fossett set sail for yet another crossing of the Atlantic. It would be one of the fastest crossings of the ocean by balloon to date, at times Fossett's Solo Spirit reached speeds of 165 miles per hour and an altitude of 27,000 feet.

"I have a standard that I have to be really confident of the Atlantic crossing," says Fossett, "because if you don't make it across the Atlantic it's very dangerous. These systems are designed to be landed in the ocean, but I don't want to try it out."

Fossett demands a solid Atlantic crossing to begin his attempt because he says the ocean crossing and continuing on through Europe or North Africa are the most challenging meteorological steps. "So what I want to do is, I want to get a definitive crossing of the Atlantic and set up how I am going to get through Europe." Ironically it would be the "and" part of the equation that eventually spelled failure for Fossett's fourth attempt.

Having crossed the Atlantic Fossett ran into deteriorating weather near Ireland. It was at this critical juncture where he needed to fly almost directly south, turning nearly 90 degrees from his previous track, to join the subtropical jet stream that would carry Solo Spirit over North Africa and on around the world.

"We had trouble making that transition, from the Atlantic crossing to - well, we couldn't make the transition from the Atlantic crossing to the subtropical jet.

"We got tripped up. Libya issued a denial (to transit their airspace) while we were still over the Atlantic so we made our plans to avoid Libya. To do this I had to take a radical step descending from 27,000 feet to 15,000 feet, slow down and get into another airstream avoiding Libya. In the process I overdid it, dropping into an even slower airstream and heading off toward the Black Sea." It was also while making this transition, turning south to avoid being blown into the North Atlantic, that the decision was made to jettison two fuel tanks, a decision Fossett called the turning point of the flight.

Libya's denial, then approval to enter its airspace had received much of the blame for the failure of Fossett's third attempt at an around the world flight. Now he was confronted with the same problem, or was he?

"I could have just been more confident that they would change their mind as they did the previous time, but the problem was I was entering Libya from the Mediterranean, whereas last year I was entering from Algeria. I didn't feel I could wait until the last minute because I didn't want to land in the Mediterranean. I felt I had to know in time to land in Italy so we had to divert much earlier than we did last year. If I hadn't been trying to plan that far ahead, because again we did get permission, I could have stayed in the main airflow and possibly made the transition."

Does Libya shoulder the blame for this failure? "No, I wouldn't say that," says Fossett, "because they did give us permission, probably in what they thought was plenty of time, almost a day in advance, but in fact it wasn't early enough for me."

In fact by the time these decisions were being made, Fossett had already known his flight was in danger. "I noticed the missing of the burners, that is the solenoid problem, during the first day - so I knew there was a vulnerability there, even though I didn't have an outright failure until I was over Bulgaria."

Another problem was also developing. Those pesky cabin heaters which had failed on every one of his previous flights were failing again. While they functioned well at 20 to 24,000 feet, once the Solo Spirit climbed higher, the temperatures dropped and the heaters failed. "The capsule ranged at night between 26 and 34 degrees Fahrenheit in the middle, but down on the floor if was more like 10 to 15 degrees. It really wears on you, to be sitting in an environment that cold," Fossett said at a news conference after the flight.

In retrospect Fossett says the problem with the heaters is that they are mounted outside the capsule - which naturally cools them, and the super-thin atmosphere at 27,000 feet just doesn't reflect heat as efficiently as air at lower altitudes - in effect a one-two punch that made the heaters all but useless.

The burner problems are still being discussed. One theory is contaminated fuel that over time plugged the solenoids until they stopped working. The failed solenoids meant Fossett had to climb out of the capsule, into the cold, to fire his burners before returning to his equally cold capsule.

Together with the jettisoned fuel, the failing burners, failed heaters, and his own decision to avoid Libya, Fossett found himself drifting ever more slowly and faced with the obvious decision, it was time to land. The flight of the Solo Spirit came to an end in a muddy wheat field near Krasnodar in southern Russia.

Will he try again?

"I'm becoming worried as to our ability to fly at unpressurized capsule altitudes and make it around. If it requires a pressurized capsule to do this flight, I'm not sure I'm willing to spend the several years it would take to test out a new capsule."

Would it be like starting over to make the move into a pressurized capsule? "No because this is my seventh flight in a Rozier balloon. although all with an unpressurized capsule. I already have the team so if we wanted to make the switch we could probably do better than the other teams, that is we could get to a working system faster, but still I think it is unrealistic to expect to make it around the world on your first attempt with a pressurized capsule.

"We've evaluated where we stand, but we aren't going to make a decision until we see the final two flights this season - which is presumably the British and the Swiss. I'd like to learn something from the other teams. I'd like to see them make some good flights to give us some insights as to the proper equipment.

"I was actually very disappointed to see the Global Hilton flight go so badly because I wanted to see if they were on to the right capsule system for pressurized flight. That's part of what I want to learn and then make our decision in light of that understanding.

"I think some of the teams have been unrealistic in their expectations of being able to fly around the world with the amount of testing they've done. In the early stages of this around the world competition there was somehow the feeling that if you could just get a balloon up in the right air stream it would make it around the world. We now know that it is much more difficult than that; I think we have all underestimated that difficulty."

Almost incredibly, in the wake of the Solo Spirit flight and the aborted flights of the J. Renee and the Global Hilton, there has been much discussion in the ballooning world about who the "real" balloonists are in this Great Race. Some have suggested that if he were successful Steve Fossett might never pilot a balloon again. How does Steve Fossett answer that criticism?

"I am primarily an adventurer, and I haven't even thought about what my plans would be if I made it."

True to form, Fossett is already training to assault a different adventure - a 100+ mile cross country snow skiing record from Snowmass to Aspen, Colorado.