After 11 months in North Vietnam, Kittinger was repatriated in a prisoner exchange, but not back to the cockpit of an F4 Phantom. He came out of his war with a promotion to full colonel, a chestful of medals and a desk job. Dispirited, he retired from the Air Force and took another desk job, at the Martin Marietta aerospace company, in his hometown of Orlando. To ease the frustration of being grounded, he took up balloon-racing as a hobby and in pursuing it met Bob Snow, who was to become his mentor in civilian life, just as Stapp had been in his military career.
Snow, an ex-Navy helicopter pilot, Dixieland jazz trumpeter and ballooning enthusiast, created Orlando`s Church Street Station-a boisterous party block of old-time saloons, restaurants and can-can girls-and turned it into Florida`s fourth-largest tourist draw, with nearly 2 million free-spending visitors a year. He said he decided to hire Kittinger to run Rosie O`Grady`s Flying Circus, which, as a function of Church Street Station, specializes in hot-air balloon rides and barnstorming stunt-flying, when he found he couldn`t beat Kittinger at his own game.
”We flew balloons against each other in the Gordon Bennett Race about 10 years ago,” says Snow. ”He came in second, and I came in third. It just seemed kind of silly that we`d be from the same town and be competing against each other. I decided I was never going to beat him, so I`d better join him. The next year we flew together, and we`ve been together ever since. He`s a great politician, though he`s about as diplomatic as a meat ax, but he makes the Flying Circus work, and he`s a hell of a man to have on your team.”
With Snow`s backing, Kittinger in September, 1984, became the first person ever to fly solo in a balloon across the Atlantic Ocean, taking off in Maine and landing four days later in Italy, where a tree limb swept him out of the gondola 10 feet above the ground.
”I hit the only rock in a hundred yards and broke a bone in my foot,”
he says with a rueful chuckle. ”It marred an otherwise perfect flight.”
”Perfect” would be hyperbole coming from anyone but Kittinger. He did manage to set a world speed record with his transatlantic crossing, but along the way his adventure included a few incidents from which most people would just as soon be excused.
”The stove caught fire, and it was burning all around the gondola,” he says. ”I put the fire out and threw the stove overboard. I had a backup system, an electrical heating device, but that broke, too, so I had nothing warm to eat after that. It didn`t endanger the mission. I just had to eat frozen canned goods instead of heated canned goods. It was no big deal.”
Compared with the way he finished the Gordon Bennett Race in 1982, an event he subsequently won three times in a row for permanent possession of the trophy, it probably wasn`t.
The California-to-Montana flight had gone without incident, until Kittinger ran into a blizzard over Wyoming and had to bring his balloon down. ”The balloon just stopped, and then it started going backward,” he says with the air of a man recalling his honeymoon. ”My choice was to go down into that black void or backward, into the mountains. Well, the mountains were 12,000 feet, and the balloon was at 8,000 feet, so it was no contest. I landed it at night, in a blizzard, just outside Cody. The gondola hit a barbed-wire fence at 30 miles an hour. I broke my shoulder, and I guess I would have frozen to death if a rancher hadn`t found me. It cost me the damn race.”
The successful Atlantic crossing two years later, however, was merely a warmup for Kittinger`s ultimate dream, born in months of solitary confinement in North Vietnam, where dreams alone sustained his sanity. He would, he vowed, bring Jules Verne`s classic ”Around the World in 80 Days” out of the realm of fiction and accomplish it, nonstop, in 18.
”Some of the guys built houses,” he says of the mind games men play in solitary. ”Some did mathematical formulas or took trips. Well, my fantasy was, during long periods of isolation, to design systems that would let me fly balloons for great long distances. The first adventure I planned was a flight across the Atlantic Ocean. Well, I did the Atlantic, and now I`m looking at the world.”
All he needs is a sponsor with $1 million. Kittinger`s balloon canopy and pressurized gondola-”actually, more of a space capsule”-have already been designed and can be constructed within six months. His 18,000-mile route, planned for next winter, when a predictable jet stream can be caught at 50,000 feet without peril from the high-ranging thunderstorms of summer, will take him over Europe, the Soviet Union, the Pacific and the United States in an estimated 18 days.
”That guy who did it in 80 days did a lot of kissing and drinking along the way,” he quips in answer to the inevitable reference to Phineas Fogg of the Jules Verne classic. ”But I mean business. This is a serious mission for me.”
In the current Soviet spirit of glasnost, Kittinger is confident the Soviets will give him the permission he already has requested for a flyover of their territory. He has even offered to let them inspect the balloon before launch ”so they can make sure I`m not a spy in the sky.” All he needs to make the dream come true is an angel who doesn`t smoke.
”We did have a potential sponsor, which was a cigarette company,”
he says. ”But I don`t believe in smoking, and I wouldn`t accept their money. I`ll take it from anybody else-unwed mothers, booze, beer-anything but cigarettes.”
Snow has no doubt that Kittinger will complete the trip if he finds the backing. ”I have allocated him engineering and research money,” Snow says, ”and they`re now starting to work on the systems and on the weather prognostications. We`re actively still talking to people for full sponsorship, but it doesn`t have to become totally necessary that we find an outside sponsor because I`m thinking of doing it as a promotion for the opening of Winchester Station (a twin of Church Street Station) in Las Vegas. If we don`t find what we`re looking for, we`re going to do it that way. We were in Phoenix recently, and we sold a 540K, which is a big, supercharged Mercedes we used in the Flying Circus, and we got $205,000 for it. That`s the sort of thing we`re doing to raise the cash.”
In another development, former astronaut Shepard, who sits on the board of directors for half a dozen companies, one of which bankrolled the around-the-world flight of the ultralight Voyager, says he`s willing to propose at least partial sponsorship to Kittinger. Shepard can`t pony up the full million but says he`s willing to go for a piece of the action.
Snow thinks a flight this next winter is entirely feasible. ”Let me tell you about this guy,” he says. ”I fly with him, I fish with him and I hunt with him. Do not bet him who`s going to catch the most or the biggest fish. Do not bet him who`s going to get the most geese. He is a very, very competitive guy.
”Last fall we were up on the Chesapeake in Maryland, and it was nasty. It was cold. It was raining. There was ice coming down, and all we wanted to do was get the hell out of there as soon as possible and go get some crab soup in a nice warm restaurant. A quarter to 12 couldn`t come fast enough, but Joe and I had a little bet on as to who would get the most geese. ”Finally, I jumped out of the pit blind and yelled, `Come on, guys, let`s go get something to eat,` and all the guys came except Kittinger. I yelled, `Come on, Joe,` and he said, `Just bring me a sandwich.` I was one goose ahead of him, and he wasn`t going to give up. He`ll outwork you; he`ll outthink you. He just stays with it and stays with it. He`ll get out there half an hour before you and he`ll stay half an hour later and he won`t go in for lunch. That`s why he`ll make it.”
Ask Kittinger what drives him, and the response is a puzzled shrug, but Shepard, who during the Apollo 14 lunar landing mission hit the first and only golf shot ever made on the Moon, has an idea, drawn from the common bond of the ”no guts, no glory” fraternity.
”I suspect we`re all pretty much the same breed,” he says. ”We`re all driven by the desire to succeed as an individual. We`re a highly confident group, and we`re willing to accept a personal challenge. It is very personal- risking your own life. Of course, every one of us thinks he`s the best pilot in the whole world, or he wouldn`t be any good in the first place. But the test-pilot business is very careful, very analytical, and it requires lots of training now. The old days-when the guys would put on the silk scarf and the goggles, climb into the open cockpit, go up to 30,000 feet and dive straight down until the wings came off-are over. Joe`s probably a lot more cautious than it would appear, and I`m sure he`s doing his homework.”
The image of the test pilot meeting his personal challenge fades, and the showman comes into focus, when Kittinger shifts gears and becomes the P.T. Barnum of the Flying Circus. His business card says he`s Vice President of Flight Operations and Other Things. The ”other things,” surprisingly, given his ”meat-ax” approach to diplomacy, include the handling of much of Snow`s public relations, lunching with bank presidents, city councilmen and other local powers whose good will is essential to the smooth running of Church Street Station, but it is as pitchman and ringmaster that he functions best.
It is 5 a.m., and even the rowdy station, where party time is a sacrament, lies sleeping in the predawn darkness. The street lights, which mirror their gas-fueled ancestors of the 1890s, are out. Rosie O`Grady`s Fun Emporium is closed, and the Cheyenne Saloon is silent. But a one-man alarm clock is about to go off.
Kittinger can`t make more of a fanfare with bagpipes as he and his crew open Rosie`s to their small entourage of tourists. Still befuddled at that early the hour, they are about to be plied with fresh orange juice, hot coffee and tall tales of balloon races all over the world.
They are here for hot-air balloon rides at $125 each, and as takeoff time draws near, apprehension runs high. Kittinger does little to alleviate it.
”In Europe, we still use hydrogen in ballooning,” he says. ”Much cheaper than helium. Our government banned hydrogen after the Hindenburg.”
Jolted to sudden wakefulness by remembered newsreel footage of the great dirigible going up in flames at its mooring mast at Lakehurst, N.J., in 1935, one prospective aeronaut, forgetting for a moment that hot-air balloons are in another league, quavers, ”But aren`t hydrogen balloons dangerous?”
”Only if they catch fire,” Kittinger cheerfully assures her.
”Here, sign this release, and we`ll get this show on the road.”
The release reads more like a last will and testament, absolving Kittinger and the Flying Circus of all blame in the event of unfortunate occurrences, but the tourists sign, and he bundles them all into a limousine and a passenger van, in which he starts to play a tape of ”Up, Up and Away.” Followed by his ground crew transporting gondolas, propane tanks and four nylon balloons folded inside their crates, he heads for the launch site in a field next to a motel in open country several miles from Orlando.
Inflating the balloons is almost as spectacular a sight as their actual flight. From crates the size of steamer trunks, the gaily colored nylon material is dragged out, attached to the baskets and laid out on the ground. Portable fans start the process, and as the balloons begin to swell, a propane flamethrower takes over, making them stand at attention, yearning for the sky. Kittinger knots a red bandanna around his neck, loads his passengers and yodels madly as the balloons lift off into the dawn for a 45-minute dream sequence of silent drifting in wicker baskets only 4 feet wide and 3 feet deep, starting from as low as a yard above the pine-forest floor, where startled deer break from cover, to as high as 800 feet above Disney World and EPCOT Center as the Florida sun breaks over the horizon.
”I don`t know where we`ll land, but I guarantee it will be somewhere in the state of Florida,” Kittinger shouts as light morning breezes, not yet driven by almost daily thunderstorms, catch the towering canopies. All the racket brings motel guests in nightclothes to their balconies, from where they gape in wonder and-it is fervently hoped at the Flying Circus-change vacation plans to include a balloon ride of their own.
The balloons finally come down several miles apart from one another, one in a bog, another in a hotel parking lot and another by the side of a busy highway. The ground crew packs them away, and it`s time for a champagne
(”keep the glass”) breakfast back at Church Street Station, where Kittinger hoists his glass in toast after toast while cameras click like castanets. ”Breakfast of Champions,” he crows, ”Champagne and propane!”
None of the bubbly, however, goes down his throat. He has some very serious flying to do before the day is over, towing 200-foot-long banners with 12-foot-high letters advertising Church Street Station to tourists below. He and the three pilots who work for him make it a point to fly them at the minimum legal limit, 1,500 feet above the castle spires of Disney World, right at parade time so that the maximum number of visitors at Church Street Station`s giant competitor will see it.
Relaxing over a luncheon of raw oysters and gumbo with Snow and several members of his ground crew, Kittinger is bragging about the new aerial billboard he will tow that day.
”It says `Church Street Station-Yahoo!` ” he says.
Snow, who hasn`t yet seen the new banner advertising his establishment, nearly chokes on his drink.
”Yahoo,” he snorts. ”You can`t get the redneck out of him.”
”Well,” retorts Kittinger in mock indignation, ”You taught me how to spell it.”
The afternoon sun has turned the tarmac at Orlando`s Executive Airport, where the Flying Circus is based, into something approximating a close-order drill. Dust devils dance among the heat waves and gulls (”GU-Elevens” in pilot parlance) present wheeling hazards for anything with a propeller. Face plastered with sun block (”With my skin, I burn under a 40-watt bulb”) and a Snoopy helmet jammed over head and ears, Kittinger climbs into the open cockpit of his brown-and-yellow-checked Stearman biplane and takes off.
His 80-pound banner, the drag of which one of his pilots likens to
”driving a water-ski boat with a whale in tow,” lies on the simmering ground, its tow line suspended across two upright stanchions as a target for the grappling hook the Stearman trails for the pickup.
Ten feet above the asphalt runway, Kittinger swoops in, snags the tow line and drives his tiny plane into a near-vertical climb at the very edge of a power-on stall. The gigantic banner leaps like a striking snake into the blue for another day of shouting ”Yahoo” over the Florida landscape.
”We do all kinds of crazy flying here,” says Circus pilot Craig Walko as his boss disappears in a cloud of dust and oil smoke. ”It gives you an excuse not to grow up. You grow up, you grow old. Nobody`s old around this place.”
”I`ve been asked what I`m going to do after that around-the-world flight,” Kittinger says when the day`s flying is over. ”I don`t know yet, but I`ll think of something.”
