Reach for the Skies Read online

  Steve did not have children. He had only his own life to lead, so he led it. Among the projects left unfinished at his death was a submarine. He’d been chasing the world depth record. Steve did not have a death wish. He had the exact opposite. His appetite for life was so strong, it outweighed all fear. So what if his choices shortened his life? His choices filled his life, and enriched the lives of those around him.

  In October 2008, in the trackless desert that swallowed him, another adventurer—a weekend hiker—stumbled upon the wreckage of Steve Fossett’s plane. The fuselage, wood, and fabric, looked little different, after a year in the mountains, from the remains left by pioneers who vanished a century ago.

  This book covers more than 200 years of adventures in the air. Steve is part of that story now. The history of flight is full of remarkable people, and Steve’s adventures would have been understood and appreciated by every one of them.

  Steve was part of a tradition, and the tradition survives him. It lives on.

  Part One

  The Rising

  Escape plan: Daedalus makes wings for his son, Icarus (frieze c. A.D. 200).

  one

  Walking on Air

  A few stories to begin.

  The first, from Greek mythology, you probably know already: how Icarus, wearing wings made of feathers and wax, flew too close to the sun; how the wings melted, and he came to a sorry end in the Aegean Sea.

  Actually, the story, as it grew over the centuries, got better than this. It got more believable. Icarus was the son of Daedalus, a talented but irascible inventor, constantly at odds with his patrons and jealous of anyone with the talent to rival him. Daedalus’s sister sent him her son, Perdix, to be his apprentice; but Perdix was too smart for his own good. He was always wandering off, beachcombing, collecting, and observing. He studied how nature worked. Inspired by the workings of a snake’s jaw, he invented the saw.

  Daedalus, whose inventions included the ax, the plumb line, the drill, and glue, felt he was being upstaged. He made sure to accompany his nephew on his next walk, led him up a tall tower to catch the view—and pushed him to his death.

  He didn’t get away with it. Daedalus was exiled to Crete and set to work by King Minos, building a labyrinth for the royal family’s least favored son: the monstrous half-human, half-bull Minotaur.

  Down but not out, Daedalus kept half an eye on his work and the other half on Naucrate, one of Minos’s mistresses, and soon enough he had a son, Icarus. Not content with cuckolding his patron, he then gave away the plans of the labyrinth to Minos’s daughter so that she could escape with Theseus, a foreign adventurer and thief imprisoned there. Minos, when he found out, threw Daedalus and his son into the labyrinth themselves.

  This is where the wings come in. Daedalus made two pairs: one for himself and one for his son. Together they would fly to Sicily, over the heads of King Minos’s soldiers and his fleet of many ships. Like the nephew he murdered, Daedalus took inspiration from nature, tying feathers together in order of size to produce curved flying surfaces, just like the wings of real birds. He secured the larger feathers with thread, the smaller ones with wax, and warned Icarus to keep them out of the water and away from the heat of the sun.

  The way we usually hear this story, Icarus is the tragic hero: a romantic figure, overcome with the thrill of flying, who yearned for the sun and died for his trouble. We all too easily forget the upshot of the tale: his father made it.

  Daedalus flew successfully across the sea and landed in Sicily. There he built a temple to Apollo and secured the patronage of the local king. When Minos finally tracked him down Daedalus, with his patron’s assistance, murdered him.

  Of course, it’s just a story. But it comes from somewhere. The people who told and retold it knew something about where ideas come from. They knew the importance of observation and study; when they described Perdix’s saw and Daedalus’s wings, they showed how engineering takes its inspiration from nature. They knew the kind of ego and self-confidence you need to craft and invent new things, and somehow get paid for your trouble. They knew how easily patrons fall out with their designers and how resentments and broken loyalties can ruin the finest plans.

  Another story. On eight or nine occasions between 1630 and 1632, Hezârfen Ahmed Çelebi flew over the pulpit of Okmeydani in Istanbul with eagle wings, “using the force of the wind.” The sultan, Murad IV, was so impressed he gave Hezârfen a sack of gold coins for his trouble. Then he declared: “This is a frightening man. He is capable of doing anything he wishes. It is not right to keep such people”—and Çelebi and his new wealth were courteously, but promptly, escorted into exile in Algeria.

  History is chock-full of projects for full-scale, people-carrying flying machines, and while none of them ever got off the ground in any meaningful or sustained way, it wasn’t for lack of knowledge. Some of Leonardo da Vinci’s fifteenth-century flying machines would have flown, had he only had access to lightweight materials. They wouldn’t have had to be very sophisticated materials, either: the right varnished silks and papers would have been enough to fill the skies of Renaissance Florence and Milan with hang gliders and personal fliers.

  Leonardo da Vinci’s designs for flight featured this rather dubious-looking parachute.

  They wouldn’t have been the first to fly, either: hang gliding existed in China perhaps by the fourth century A.D., and certainly by the time of Emperor Wenxuan of Northern Qi (reigned A.D. 550–59), who used condemned men as test pilots for his man-flying kites. One startling book, written a good two centuries earlier, even contains a description of a rotary-wing aircraft: “Some have made flying cars with wood from the inner part of the jujube tree, using ox-leather [straps] fastened to returning blades so as to set the machine in motion.”

  Tempting as it is to imagine people riding around in these contraptions, more likely they were models—which brings us to our next story.

  “Gentlemen,” Hardy Krüger announces, “I have been examining this airplane.”

  Never mind the sterling performances and brilliant cast, headlined by James Stewart and Richard Attenborough; I think The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) is one of the most profound and important movies about aviation ever committed to film. No small claim, that. The film is, after all, a simple adventure story, transferring to cinema an equally simple (and equally gripping) novel by the prolific, now rather neglected novelist Elleston Trevor.

  It’s the mid-1960s. An old Fairchild cargo plane is carrying oilmen out of the Sahara when a sandstorm blows up. One engine clogs and dies. Sand overcomes the other, and the plane comes down, far off course, in the middle of the most arid, inhospitable, and unfrequented part of the desert. That’s before the credits. What follows is the really interesting bit. A neat early twist means that no one knows the plane is missing. The survivors can’t walk out of the desert. All they can do is wait for death. Meanwhile, a young, arrogant, and thoroughly unlikable young German (actor Hardy Krüger’s finest performance, I reckon) is wandering around the plane, round and round, constantly burning his fingertips on the sun-baked fuselage, stroking, prodding—he’s driving everyone crazy. What is he trying to do? Dorfmann is an airplane designer, and he’s been dreaming up an escape vehicle. He reckons there are enough serviceable parts left over from the crash to build a new airplane. If the effort doesn’t kill them all, their gimcrack escape vehicle surely will; but working themselves to death is better than waiting for death, so they begin. Only there’s something Dorfmann forgot to mention: all he’s ever designed are model airplanes. He’s had no experience of “the real thing.” Dorfmann’s defense, when finally this prickly fact comes to light, is a delight. Sweating and terrified, he delivers a speech—too long and broken to repeat here—that is, in short, a history of aviation. All the great advances in aviation have come from models, he says, and he lists them.

  The lovely thing about this speech is that it’s true. Model aircraft have been flying for a lot longer than people. Was there
ever a time when children did not play with model aircraft? The African-born writer and judge Aulus Gellius, writing in the second century A.D., finds several sources to confirm the story of Archytas (428–347 B.C.), friend of the philosopher Plato and inventor of mathematical engineering: “For not only many eminent Greeks, but also the philosopher Favorinus, a most diligent searcher of ancient records, have stated most positively that Archytas made a wooden model of a dove with such mechanical ingenuity and art that it flew; so nicely balanced was it, you see, with weights and moved by a current of air enclosed and hidden within it.” If true, Archytas’s “pigeon” is the first artificial, self-propelled flying device we know of: a bird-shaped, steam-driven model plane!

  In medieval times, the spread of windmills inspired toy pinwheels, and they, in turn, inspired the kind of toy helicopter first seen in a Flemish manuscript dated 1325. When the Wright brothers were little, the toy shops were packed with toy helicopters. Powered by rubber bands, they rose as high as 50 feet into the air. And as we’ll see when we meet the spaceship designer Burt Rutan, models are as important today as they always were, and just as inspirational.

  A toy helicopter entertains a child in Pieter Breugel’s painting from 1560.

  Most people hanker for a view of Earth from space. I should know: I’m one of them. A ticket for a forthcoming Virgin Galactic flight into suborbital space will set you back $200,000. But a sense of the oneness of Earth and its peoples does not have to come at such expense. I’d love you to join us on Virgin Galactic one day, and we’re working hard to make it affordable for everyone; but first, go treat yourself to an £89 balloon ride.

  Balloons have been around for a long time, but even when I was a boy, public joyrides were hard to come by. Balloons were the playthings of the rich until around 1960, when an American engineer called Ed Yost found a way to build safe hot-air balloons more cheaply, using nylon fabric for the canopy and propane cooking gas as a heat source. A Bristol Aeroplane Company engineer called Don Cameron brought Yost’s ideas to Europe, and his first hot-air balloon, Bristol Belle, rose into the air above RAF Weston-on-the-Green on July 9, 1967. Balloons based on those original Yost and Cameron designs are the kind you see floating through summer skies. Ballooning “fiestas” bring enthusiasts together from miles around. Most are local affairs. The biggest and most famous is at Albuquerque, New Mexico, where several hundred balloonists sink lakes of Budweiser beer and re-create the sort of airborne display that made headlines back in the nineteenth century.

  The ballooning fraternity are a proud and close-knit bunch, and they’re a bit reticent around the rich adventurers and corporate sponsors that stage major world-record attempts. They take their sport seriously, and they don’t like being upstaged. Sport ballooning is an absorbing and serious business, and its competitions follow precise, complicated rules. It’s no small achievement to fly ten miles in about an hourand pass within a few feet of a predetermined goal, with only the winds at different altitudes to steer you. A handful fly helium-filled balloons in long-distance races. The most famous of these is the Gordon Bennett Cup, started in 1906 by James Gordon Bennett Jr. the publisher of the New York Herald and the man who financed Stanley’s search for the explorer Livingstone. Hot-air ballooning and gas ballooning are quite different sports, as we’ll see, so each category of ballooning sets its own records and salutes its own champions. It can be dizzying for a newcomer.

  “Someone bet me that I would not fly across the airfield by the end of the year. They knew I would not be released by the flight surgeon to return to flying status by then. In December I made a makeshift balloon and flew it across the runway.”

  Per Lindstrand

  I came at ballooning from a different angle again. Until the balloon designer Per Lindstrand phoned me, the nearest I’d ever been to a wicker basket was watching the actor Cantinflas lean out of one to scoop snow from the side of the Matterhorn to ensure that David Niven’s champagne was adequately chilled in the film of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. (In the book, Fogg used every vehicle imaginable to circle the earth, and his balloon flight was a disaster: they went backward.)

  Per’s engineering career took off in the Swedish air force, and his first balloon flight—in the early 1970s—lasted just a few seconds. “I’d been removed from flight status because of a medical condition,” he remembered in a 1998 interview by Tom Hamilton, of the journal Balloon Life. “Someone bet me that I would not fly across the airfield by the end of the year. They knew I would not be released by the flight surgeon to return to flying status by then. In December I made a makeshift balloon and flew it across the runway.”

  Per went on to work at Saab and Lockheed. When a neighbor in Sweden bought a state-of-the-art balloon from the United Kingdom, Per couldn’t believe his eyes. This was the state of the art? One look was enough to tell him that he could do better. How much better would reveal itself as the 1980s dawned.

  Per’s balloons were sophisticated machines, but it was the fabric he used for his envelopes that fascinated me. They were made of this crazy plasticized, metalized stuff—a constantly evolving recipe that he never discussed in public. It was unbelievably thin and light and strong. Given what he wanted to use it for, it would have to be: Per reckoned he could get us both across the Atlantic Ocean by balloon.

  He phoned me in 1986, mere days after I’d won the Blue Riband, propelled across the Atlantic Ocean faster than ever before on Virgin Atlantic Challenger II—a boat that was some sort of infernal marriage between speedboat and intercontinental ballistic missile. (Having got away with that, I was still half inclined to believe that I could get away with anything.)

  Before I could fly with Per, I had to get my balloon pilot’s licence, so I headed to Spain and placed myself under the watchful (and ever more exasperated) eye of my teacher, Robin Batchelor. I carried two impressions away from that day, both vivid, and each contradicting the other. I was, from the very first, captivated. I was amazed at how peaceful, how natural, it was, to rise through the air without motors, without sound. How refreshing, to be able to escape the rigors and irritations of earthbound life and give myself up to the mercy of the winds! Crossing over the Spanish countryside, I found it easy to imagine that the winds were transporting me through time as well as through space, to a gentler, kinder corner of history.

  At the very same moment, I was feeling absolutely wretched. Why was this person shouting at me? It was like being back at school! Why on earth was I putting myself through this? I had been my own boss since I was 15 years old, and my whole life to that point had been dedicated to never taking another bloody exam for as long as I lived. And now look where I was: marooned with a teacher! Being shouted at! Again!

  I learned ballooning the way I’ve learned everything else in life: by doing it. Robin Batchelor’s lessons got me started, and Per kept a very close eye on me at first. Neither man would ever say that I was a natural in the air. I learned on the job. Most balloonists, and most pilots, acquire their skills by degrees over several years. My story is different. Working with Per, virtually all my experience was gained during epic voyages lasting several days. As a consequence I became, very quickly indeed, one of the world’s more experienced balloonists.

  I love balloons, and I still have one of my own—just a simple hot-air balloon with a wicker basket. If you want to escape the world entirely, it’s all you need. Nobody can trouble you. Nobody can stop you. You can’t even give yourself a hard time. You’re not in control. You have given yourself up to the air, and the winds are taking you where they will. My world-record attempts were about as choreographed and preplanned as balloon flights ever get, and still, under all that anxiety and effort, I got a tremendous sense of joy from being superbly powerless: human chaff, borne who knows where by the wind.

  Today, could you trust me to carry you up, up, and away? You might want to remind me of how I’m supposed to talk to traffic control. (I can’t for the life of me remember the rigmarole you ne
ed to safely overfly an ordinary airport.) Otherwise, you’re in safe hands. So let me take you for a ride.

  We’re standing in a wicker basket, firmly anchored to the ground. Above us, attached to the basket with strong cords, is a gigantic inverted teardrop made of thin fabric. This is our balloon’s “envelope.” The bottom of the teardrop is open, and now and again I fire a burner—a sort of propane stove. This fills the envelope with hot air and is our only means of control during our flight. So how (you may be asking, as the minutes of preparation tick by) are we going to get off the ground?

  This was a considerable mystery to the pioneers of flight, who were strapping their balloons together out of whatever they could find or make. Pioneers like the Montgolfier brothers and Jean-Pierre-François Blanchard didn’t have clean, safe propane burners. Oh, no: these daredevils filled their balloons with air rising from roaring fires of chaff, wool, tinder, and even old shoes! If filling one of these early balloons sounds like a mucky business—well, it was. Early balloonists weren’t entirely sure what it was about heating air that was making their balloons rise. Maybe it was the smoke filling their balloons that was making them lighter than air—in which case, the more smoke the better! Only later did people realize that the smoke itself was irrelevant—that it was the heat of the air that was making the balloon rise.

  Here’s why. Gases expand to fill the space they’re given, and as they expand, they get thinner and thinner. The air we breathe would go gushing off into outer space forever if it weren’t for gravity. The earth’s gravity holds the air close to the surface in a thin mantle: this is our atmosphere. “Air pressure” is simply the total weight of the air above us at any one moment; and the higher we go, the less air is pressing on us. The air pressing on us at ground level weighs a lot: nearly 15 pounds of air presses against every square inch of our bodies.