The Breitling Orbiter 3 balloon was less than one day’s flying time Friday night from achieving what had thwarted balloonists for two centuries: a non-stop voyage around the world.
The big balloon’s pilots–Dr. Bertrand Piccard, a Swiss psychiatrist, and Brian Jones, a British balloonist–radioed a message to their ground crew headquarters at Geneva Airport that for the first time during their 19 days aloft, they had begun to relax. It appeared virtually certain they would accomplish their goal.
The balloon team’s meteorologists forecast that the balloon, now over the Atlantic Ocean after crossing Europe, Asia, the Pacific Ocean and Central America, would arrive over the western Sahara early Saturday morning. Forecasters said that by about 2 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time (8 a.m. CST) Saturday, the balloon would reach 9 degrees west longitude, achieving the global circumnavigation that began in the Swiss Alps.
But Alan Noble, the flight director of the project, said at a news conference Friday night that the balloon might have enough fuel to continue on to Egypt, perhaps even to a landing near the Pyramids at Giza.
“Brian would love to land at that impressive place, and we would like it too, because there’s a good network of roads in the Nile Valley, and that would help us reach the landing site quickly,” Noble said.
At least 20 attempts by balloonists to circle Earth have been made in the last decade alone, and all but this one fell far short. Besides a place in the record books, the two balloonists will stand to claim a $1 million prize and the Budweiser Cup offered by Anheuser-Busch Brewing Co. to the first balloonists to circle the world non-stop.
Piccard disclosed in his radio message Friday that on Thursday he and Jones had come to believe they too would fail and would be forced to make a landing at sea near the coast of Belize before heading out over the Atlantic Ocean.
“The wind was slow and blowing in the wrong direction,” he said. “We were cold, very tired and feeling sick. Nothing was going right.”
But then Piccard, who had been unable to sleep for days at a time, used a technique of auto-hypnosis he had developed while practicing psychiatry to put himself to sleep for a while. The two men’s spirits began to pick up.
The Breitling Orbiter 3 is the third balloon sponsored by the Breitling watch company. All three were built by a British company, Cameron Balloons Ltd., and piloted by Piccard. The first, on Jan. 12, 1997, was forced to land after only a few hours because of a kerosene leak. The second balloon, in February 1998, ran out of fuel and had to land in Myanmar after setting a new balloon endurance record.
This time, more experienced and helped by technical improvements, Piccard broke all endurance and distance records.
Piccard, 41, is the son and grandson of two other breakers of historic records. His grandfather, Auguste Piccard, was the first balloonist to reach the stratosphere in a pressurized crew capsule. He also built the Bathyscaphe, a man-carrying submersible capable of reaching great ocean depths.
Bertrand Piccard’s father, Jacques Piccard, set a depth record in the Bathyscaphe, descending 35,815 feet to the bottom of the Marianas Trench in the Pacific, the greatest depth ever reached.
Friday night, the Breitling balloon was cruising eastward some 34,000 feet high in the core of a jet stream carrying it along at about 100 m.p.h. Piccard said he did not foresee further problems.
The Breitling balloon, like most of its recent competitors in the round-the-world race, is a hybrid type called a Rozier, which gains lift from helium and hot air. At night, when the air cools, the helium also cools and contracts, losing lift. But burners fueled by propane or kerosene are used to heat air and thus make up for the deficit in helium lift.
