Reach for the Skies Read online

  By the Same Author

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  Business Stripped Bare: Adventures of a Global Entrepreneur

  CURRENT

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  Published in 2011 by Current, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Richard Branson, 2010

  All rights reserved

  Published by arrangement with Virgin Books Limited, part of The Random House Group Limited

  Illustration credits appear on pages 325–328.

  For permission to reprint copyrighted material, the author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the following: Extract from Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, translated by William Rees (Penguin Books, 1995, first published as Terre des Hommes, 1939). Translation copyright © William Rees, 1995. Reproduced by kind permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Branson, Richard.

  Reach for the skies : ballooning, birdmen, and blasting into space / Richard Branson. p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-51421-4

  1. Aeronautics—History—Popular works. I. Title.

  TL515.B666 2011

  629.1—dc22

  2010052340

  Set in Optima

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  This book is dedicated to lost friends and vanished acquaintances: to the aviators and adventurers whose friendship enriched my life and who later paid the ultimate price for their dreams.

  Prologue

  When I was a young boy we used to spend our summer holidays with my aunt Clare in the county of Norfolk. She was a close friend of Douglas Bader, a Second World War fighter ace who had lost both his legs in a plane crash. We would often go swimming in the millpond at the bottom of her garden. Douglas would unstrap his legs and haul himself into the water. Seizing my chance, I used to run off with these tin legs and hide them in the rushes by the water’s edge.

  There are few things more thrilling for a small boy than to be chased by a decorated war hero. Even better, I knew I could not be caught—or so I thought. I was about to learn that years of combat experience are a powerful weapon against horrid little boys. Legs or no legs, victory comes to the pilot who tumbles out of the sun upon his enemy, holding his fire until the last possible second. I ran around the corner of my aunt’s mill house—and stopped dead, horrified, as this great barrel of a man, growling and gnashing his teeth, bounded toward me on powerful arms. I screamed for help.

  From her deck chair, Aunt Clare shot me a look that, had it been directed at an airplane, would have seen it plummeting into the ground. “Good God, Richard! Would you give Douglas back his legs!”

  If, in my life, I have associated ideas about ambition and achievement with dreams of flight, it is thanks to Douglas Bader, who used to take my aunt out flying and, true to form, would hurl their plane through all these daring aerobatic maneuvers. (I think he fancied her.) With his example before me—one of the great flying aces of the Second World War—was it any wonder that I turned out the way I did, always reaching for the skies? I wasn’t the only child of my generation to be inspired by his example and his story. (Paul Brickhill’s biography of him, Reach for the Sky, later to become a film starring Kenneth More, is the classic to which this book pays homage.) “Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that you can’t do this or that,” he once said. “That’s nonsense.”

  As far back as stories go, pioneers have reached for the skies. In the past 200 years, they have mastered the air and made the modern world possible. Today they are bringing outer space within our reach. They’re inventors and toy makers, amateurs and adventurers, visionaries, dreamers, and, yes, crackpots. Some have called them irresponsible, even dangerous. But I have met many of them. I have worked with them, funded them, and flown with them. I admire and trust them, and I think they and their kind are our future.

  Some paid the ultimate price for their efforts. Richard Ellis taught me to fly, or tried to. Alex Ritchie, a brilliant engineer, and Steve Fossett, an aviation pioneer, were friends. Fumio Niwa was a gallant and charming rival as we strove to balloon across the Pacific. In 2006, I climbed aboard an English Electric Lightning supersonic jet with the South African pilot Dave Stock. We were attempting to break the world vertical speed record, rising from a standstill on the runway to an altitude of 29,000 feet in less than 102 seconds. We missed the record by only 2 seconds, and Dave went on pushing the boundaries. In November 2009, at the Overberg Air Show in South Africa, Dave’s Lightning failed.

  “Hydraulic malfunction,” he announced, cool and professional to the last. “I’m bailing out.” A second later he said, “I have ejector seat failure.” Dave died with his plane as it crashed to the ground. He was in his forties and had two children. Dave and the others were all my inspiration as I assembled this history. In these pages you will find tales of heroic rescues; of records made and broken; of incredible feats of endurance and survival, including some of my own adventures, as well as developments in the future of air (and space) travel. It is a story of pioneers, and of course it includes the world-famous Montgolfiers and the Wright brothers, but I also want to describe some of the lesser-known trailblazers—people like Tony Jannus, who in 1914 created the first scheduled commercial flight in the world, flying his passengers over the waters of Tampa Bay at an altitude of just 50 feet; the “birdman” Leo Valentin, who in the 1950s jumped from 9,000 feet with wooden wings attached to his shoulders; and my friend Steve Fossett, who dedicated his life to breaking records and having adventures.

  This is their story. It is also, in a small way, my own.

  Introduction

  In Memory of Steve Fossett

  IT was a freezing January evening in 1997. At the old Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Missouri, a man by the name of Steve Fossett was about to attempt a solo circumnavigation of the world by balloon. Since we were competitors, and I had not met him before, I decided to wish him luck and wave
him off.

  To this day, the newfangled world of extreme aviation is sustained by a very old-fashioned spirit of sportsmanship, and I was looking forward to shaking my rival’s hand. When I arrived and saw the balloon, however, incredulity pushed every other thought out of my head: what madman, I wondered, would put his life at risk in this tub? It appeared to me to be one of the most primitive and gimcrack contraptions I had ever seen. This was no jet-stream surfer. This was a balloon built to suffer the outrages of regular, low-altitude weather. He expected to get around the world like this? In this? I got to chatting with one of the ground staff and was just about to comment, not too favorably, on the whole enterprise, when a TV crew approached. Since the cameras were running, I reined myself in a bit.

  “You know,” I said, “this guy must be even madder than me.”

  The man nodded. “Yeah.” He sighed. He reached out his hand. “I’m Steve Fossett,” he said.

  Steve was in his mid-fifties, and had enjoyed a hugely successful career as a floor trader in Chicago, when he decided to see what he was capable of. “There was a period of time where I wasn’t doing anything except working for a living,” he told me: “I became very frustrated with that and finally made up my mind to start getting back into things.”

  Between the mid-1990s and his death in 2007, Steve broke about 130 world records, 93 of them in planes, balloons, and airships, 23 of them in yachts. He climbed most of the world’s highest mountains. He swam the English Channel. He learned to glide and, with copilot Terry Delore, broke 10 of the 21 open-class glider records. He learned how to fly a balloon and was the first man to sail one around the world single-handed.

  Steve had a hunger for the world and for finding out how the world ticks. His curiosity was insatiable. The technical and theoretical aspects of his adventures consumed him. He understood, and took great pride in, the technical advances his adventures inspired. By 2007, he was looking for ground suitable for his new car: a jet-powered behemoth that he hoped would carry him to a new world land-speed record. The shakedown runs had proven the car’s stability. The Target 800 MPH team, under project director Eric Ahlstrom, said they were good to go. So, on September 3, 2007, Steve borrowed a plane (a Bellanca Decathlon, a single-engine stunt plane, its fuselage and wings made of steel tube, wood, and stretched fabric—technology as old as manned flight itself) and took off from the Flying-M Ranch in western Nevada on a three-hour scouting flight.

  “You know,” I said, “this guy must be even madder than me.”

  He did not come home.

  His disappearance triggered one of the biggest manhunts in history. The Civil Air Patrol, the National Guard, sheriffs’ departments, and volunteer fleets flying from Minden-Tahoe and the Flying-M Ranch scoured the area for signs of Steve’s plane—and after six days with no result, the search effort was extended even further. Peter Cohen of Amazon.com parceled out fresh satellite footage to computer users across the Web. Now that Steve had volunteers all over the world looking for him, he was bound to turn up. That was what we thought. Hoped. Prayed for.

  We told each other stories of miraculous rescues of the past; of surprising feats of endurance and survival. It would be just like Steve to walk his way out of the High Sierra. Had he not, as a student, swum his way to Alcatraz and back? It would be just like him to survive against all odds, the way he had survived, in 1998, a five-mile drop into the shark-infested Coral Sea.

  In the desert, miracles sometimes happen. In 1927, executives at MGM Studios staged a stunt flight across America for “Leo,” the lion whose roar opens the company’s films. (The lion’s actual name was Slats; it came from Dublin Zoo.) They took a single-engined Brougham—much the same sort of plane that Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic—and installed a cage directly behind the cockpit.

  Marty Jensen was hired to ferry Slats from San Diego to New York. Five hours into the flight, he was lost, grounded, the plane’s wings and landing gear ripped off, trapped inside a ravine with steep rocky sides and no exit—with a lion.

  Jensen gave the lion some milk, water, and half his lunch and set off on foot for help.

  Four days later, nearly dead from exhaustion, he was rescued by cowboys. As soon as he could, he called the film company.

  Their first question was: “How’s the lion?”

  We waited, and we told each other stories.

  Seventeen thousand square miles.

  Slats was rescued unharmed: he carried on touring for a while and died in comfortable retirement in 1936.

  Forty-four thousand square kilometers.

  The desert is big, but it is far from empty. The longer the search went on, the more wrecks the searchers discovered. Within the first couple of weeks, rescue teams had identified six crashed planes. Who had their pilots been? Had they been young or old? Had they had families? Who had mourned them? What had they left behind?

  We may never know. The desert is riddled with inaccessible canyons. No one who knows the desert is prepared to estimate the number of other wrecks that may be out there.

  I suppose this is where the book you’re holding was born. It occurred to me that no matter how many books are written, the history of aviation—the real history of aviation—is limitless and, for the most part, unrecorded. In this book I want to tell you my version of the history of flight—the story that matters to me. It’s about the people who have inspired me, and it says something about what I’ve done and what my friends and family have done; about what happened to us and why. Everything in this book is true enough—but it doesn’t try to tell the whole story.

  Not every pioneer is a well-funded trailblazer. When the First World War ended, the United States found itself with an embarrassing amount of surplus equipment. You could buy a set of flying lessons and they’d throw a plane in for free. Amateur pilots flew from town to town selling five-dollar rides at county fairs. They lived hand to mouth, flying so they might eat.

  Not all pioneers leave the ground; they also serve who simply sit and think. The Swedish physicist Svante August Arrhenius published Worlds in the Making, the first-ever account of the greenhouse effect, in 1906. When SpaceShipTwo takes its first astronauts into space, among them will be James Lovelock, a man who worked out how the earth’s rocks, winds, and oceans sustain life on this planet. He did it by studying Mars.

  No pioneer works alone. Joseph was a maverick and dreamer; Étienne was severe and responsible: together, the Montgolfier brothers ushered in the modern history of manned flight. The Wright brothers were equally dissimilar, equally inseparable: together, they invented the movable wings that made today’s planes possible. Today, the Rutan brothers enjoy something of the Wrights’ notoriety. Before he turned his attention to spaceships, Burt Rutan wove extraordinary airplanes together out of exotic resins; his brother Dick flew them and set world records.

  Not every pioneer succeeds. Clément Ader achieved manned heavier-than-air flight well more than a decade before the Wright brothers, but his every public demonstration ended in a crash. In the 1990s, Larry Newman spent two solid years running himself ragged—not to mention every backer, volunteer, and friend—in his desire to get his radical Earthwinds balloon around the world. On its last flight, Earthwinds traveled 100 miles.

  Most important of all: passengers have been pioneers, too. Explorers, rescue parties, doctors and scientists, geologists and mapmakers were among the first passengers to take to the air. But the very first passengers were pleasure seekers, men and women with an insatiable appetite for seeing the world in a new way. Ultimately, they bankrolled air travel as we know it today, and we have them to thank for the transformation of our world.

  I spend a great deal of my life on airplanes. I’m sometimes exhausted by the routine, as much as the next business traveler. But there isn’t a flight goes by when I don’t stare out of the window and thank my stars for what I’m seeing and feeling. I know a lot about air travel, and something about aviation, and because of this, flying fills me with excite
ment. If this book makes your air journeys just a little bit more magical, just an edge more miraculous, then I will have done my job. The skies are full of wonders.

  This has been a daunting book to write. As I’ve gone on, however, I’ve gained confidence. I’ve discovered and rediscovered the stories of men and women far more driven, far smarter, and far, far braver than I am—and at the end of it all I realize that I am part of this story. I’ve won more than my fair share of competitions and set a handful of records. Like so many before me, I have plummeted into the sea and been fished, half frozen, from the water. I know frostbite. I know the wrench you feel in your gut as a balloon rises to where the air is too thin to breathe comfortably. I know what an altimeter needle does when you fall from the sky. I know what it is to take the controls of an untested plane, fly on exotic fuel, and crash a dubious and homemade flying machine.

  “There isn’t a flight goes by when I don’t stare out of the window and thank my stars for what I’m seeing and feeling.”

  Best of all, my success in business has given me the chance to help realize the ambitions of adventurers, engineers, scientists, and visionaries of every stripe. I have met some remarkable people. None was more remarkable than Steve Fossett. At an age when many people are easing up and looking back on their lives, Steve dedicated himself to breaking records and having adventures. If this is what you make of your life, day in, day out, eventually your luck will run out. Though none of his friends could have predicted the manner of his death, we all assumed Steve would go out in spectacular style, sooner or later. When his luck finally did run out, he was at the controls of a light airplane he knew like the back of his hand.