Reach for the Skies Page 6

  That same year—and inspired, perhaps, by his terrifying Channel crossing, Blanchard conducted his own parachute experiments. He took his dog for a balloon flight, attached it to a canopy of his own invention, and threw it out of the basket. The dog made a perfect four-point landing, ran for the trees, and was never seen again.

  Delighted, Blanchard turned the routine into a public attraction; but after dropping a dog and a sheep to their deaths, he had to abandon the idea. Instead he offered to make a parachute descent himself, playing the violin. Spectators flocked to see Blanchard jump, and so he did—from a height of about ten feet. The disappointed spectators rioted, and Blanchard’s equipment was destroyed.

  It was André-Jacques Garnerin who dreamed up the first frameless, fabric chute. The former physics student had learned ballooning in the French army. On October 22, 1797, he demonstrated his new invention in spectacular style. Riding a smoke-filled balloon 3,200 feet above Paris, he then ordered his brother to cut the cords holding his gondola to the balloon. For a few heart-stopping moments, the chute secured to the gondola stayed furled. “All of a sudden, however, it burst into its proper shape, and the downward progress of the adventurer appeared at once to have been arrested.”

  Garnerin’s descent was far from smooth. The small gondola began to pendulum wildly. At one point it swung above the canopy, and spectators feared for Garnerin’s life. After 12 minutes of drunken, spinning descent, the gondola landed, and Garnerin staggered out, as sick as a dog.

  Air trapped inside Garnerin’s fabric parachute had to spill out at some point along the parachute’s edge, and it was this that had set the parachute and its passenger swinging to and fro. The French astronomer Jérôme Lalande hit upon a solution: cut a hole in the top of the parachute. The hole would reduce its effectiveness a little, but by giving the air inside the dome somewhere sensible from which to escape, it would stabilize the ride. With that small but essential modification made, Garnerin was set: he toured the world, making numerous exhibition jumps, many of them with his wife and niece.

  For most people today, ballooning seems a gentle, contemplative pastime. Nineteenth-century pioneers had other ideas. Some were clearly determined to make it as hair-raising as possible. How many swigs of laudanum does it take, I wonder, before flying among the clouds on a pony seems like a good idea? Charles Green, a London fruiterer turned Britain’s most celebrated balloonist, did exactly that on July 29, 1827—all the while assuring fearful onlookers that the animal had been “especially trained for the purpose.” It must have been quite a training program, because the pony wasn’t the least bit put out by its journey “and ate freely of a quantity of beans, with which his gallant rider from time to time supplied him, from his hand.”

  Nine years later, Green graduated from showman to pioneer, setting a major distance record in the balloon Royal Vauxhall. Flying overnight from Vauxhall Gardens in London to Weilburg in Germany, Green, his sponsor Robert Hollond, and the balloonist Monck Mason covered a distance of 480 miles—a record that stayed unbroken until 1907. They traveled in style, too: Mason’s 1838 account mentions cloaks, carpetbags, barrels, speaking trumpets, barometers, telescopes, lamps, wine jars, spirit flasks, and “many other articles, designed to serve the purposes of a voyage to regions where, once forgotten, nothing could again be supplied.”

  The journey was inspirational. Monck Mason wrote: “In [Green’s] view, the Atlantic is no more than a simple canal: three days might suffice to effect its passage.” (Green was right: Per and I proved his point in 1987. I’m not sure we ever considered the Atlantic a “simple canal,” though!) Mason goes on: “The very circumference of the globe is not beyond the scope of his expectations: in fifteen days and fifteen nights, transported by the trade winds, he does not despair to accomplish in his progress the great circle of the earth itself. Who now can fix a limit to his career?”

  Without a doubt, the most grandiloquent early long-distance flight of the nineteenth century was accomplished by the aptly named Le Géant—the brainchild of the French photographer Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, who went by the pseudonym Nadar. Not content with a wicker basket, Le Géant ’s passenger car was a wickerwork two-story house, 8 feet high and 13 feet long, containing a small printing office, a photographic department, a refreshment room, and a lavatory. On October 18, 1863, half a million people cheered as it rose from the Champ de Mars in Paris, with 13 people on board.

  Le Géant proved such a hit with European sightseers that Nadar had to use wooden trestles to keep gawking crowds from the launch site. (To this day, the Belgians call crowd-control barriers nadars.) Sadly, the balloon failed in its main purpose: to raise funds for a society researching (wait for it) heavier-than-air flight.

  Jules Verne was the society’s secretary; his book Five Weeks in a Balloon was inspired by Le Géant ’s adventures. Nothing in that book equals the drama that unfolded for real, just a few weeks after its maiden voyage, as Nadar’s grand airship crossed into Germany.

  It was evening. “There is,” according to one surviving onboard diary of the flight (quoted at length by Fulgence Marion), “talk about dinner, or rather supper, and night is now fast approaching. Everyone eats with the best possible appetite. Hams, fowls, and dessert only appear to disappear with an equal promptitude, and we quench our thirst with bordeaux and champagne.”

  Nadar’s Le Géant flew only once, in 1863. Jules Verne wrote a novel about it.

  As night fell, however, a heavy fog descended. “The water which had collected on the balloon during its ascent now began to take effect, and caused it to descend with such rapidity into the dark abyss that the ballast, which was immediately thrown overboard, was overtaken in its descent and fell on our heads again.” (You have to wonder how much they’d had to drink.)

  The balloon stabilized, and the voyage continued: “We still continue to pass over fires, forges, tall chimneys, and coal mines at frequent intervals. Not long after we distinguish a large town on our right hand, which, by its size and brilliant lighting by gas, we recognise as Brussels.”

  At an altitude of about 3,000 feet, a storm struck the balloon. Le Géant fell like a stone and then, at the last second, was borne away on a 100-mile-per-hour gale, knocking down chimneys, trees, and whatever else stood in its way. According to a correspondent for Harper’s magazine, “sometimes it struck the ground, then, springing upward, it would rise into the clouds, with the apparent velocity of a rocket, dashing its occupants from side to side with fearful force.”

  At last, near Newburg in Hanover, the balloon, much deflated, came to rest against trees long enough to allow the passengers to escape, “and the wounded, almost crippled travelers, were at length enabled to go home—wiser and sorer people.”

  Balloons have no means of propulsion. They go where the air takes them. Depending upon your mood, and what you’re trying to do, this is either their great charm or a source of great inconvenience. Here are two old faxes from my scrapbook, both from attempts to circumnavigate the world by balloon.

  The first was received on board the Virgin Global Challenger as it neared Algerian airspace on January 7, 1997: “YOU ARE NOT, REPEAT NOT, AUTHORISED TO ENTER THIS AREA.”

  The second was sent on December 23, 1998, after we had received a dispatch from the Chinese government. The dispatch said we had to land the ICO Global as we were entering Chinese airspace. We had no doubt that they would shoot us down if we did not comply. The trouble was that we couldn’t:WE KINDLY ADVISE THAT IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO LAND NOW WITHOUT SEVERELY ENDANGERING THE LIVES OF THE CREW AND ANY PERSONS ON THE GROUND. WE CANNOT STEER THE BALLOON AS IT GOES WHERE THE WIND TAKES IT. WE HAVE FULL CLOUD COVER AND CANNOT SEE THE GROUND. WE CANNOT DESCEND THROUGH CLOUD AS IT WILL CREATE ICE ON THE BALLOON RESULTING IN US CRASHING. WE KINDLY BRING TO YOUR ATTENTION THAT WE ARE DOING EVERYTHING IN OUR POWER TO RESOLVE THE SITUATION AND APOLOGISE PROFUSELY FOR NOT BEING ABLE TO COMPLY WITH YOUR INSTRUCTIONS. WE ARE NOT BEING DISRESPECTFUL TO THE CHINESE AUTHORITIES. WE ARE JUST I
N AN IMPOSSIBLE SITUATION THAT WE CANNOT RESOLVE AT PRESENT WITHOUT ENDANGERING LIVES. WE KINDLY REQUEST THAT YOU GIVE OUR TEAM MORE TIME TO WORK ON THIS PROBLEM.

  You can take it from me: sitting in a pressurized capsule halfway to space, exchanging ever more desperate and heated messages with foreign governments, is a frightening experience. I should count myself lucky that both exchanges ended well.

  In September 1996, two American balloonists, Alan Fraenkel and John Stuart-Jervis, took part in the Gordon Bennett Cup. They had filed flight plans and had received permission to overfly military airspace in the former Soviet republic of Belarus. As they entered Belarusah territory, Alan, an airline pilot with TWA, contacted Minsk air-traffic control. The balloonists received a garbled reply, then nothing.

  Later, a military helicopter approached and tried to contact the ballooning team in Russian. It circled around the balloon for nearly half an hour, then opened fire. The envelope and the basket were hit by 20 bullets. The balloon crashed in a forest. Alan and John were killed.

  Four months later, Steve Fossett was carried over Libya and received this gem: “BECAUSE OUR COUNTRY HAS AN AIR EMBARGO YOU CANNOT COME THROUGH THE AIRSPACE OF LIBYA. YOU SHOULD CONTACT YOUR GOVERNMENT AND ASK THEM TO LIFT THE EMBARGO ON OUR REPUBLIC.” As Steve told it in his autobiography, Chasing the Wind, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi took his finger off the trigger only when his intelligence people learned that Steve was an Eagle Scout.

  There was never any doubt that these “incursions into sovereign airspace” were inadvertent and unavoidable overflights by civilians of goodwill, conducting themselves in a spirit of sportsmanship. Still, balloons seem to be to sovereign powers what red rags are to bulls. (The great and shining exception to this rule was, astonishingly, North Korea, one of the most closed, heavily militarized countries in the world. In 1998, and given no forewarning of the ICO Global’s approach, the government faxed Per, Steve, and me a message of welcome!)

  Many a viable long-distance ballooning attempt has had to be scotched in midflight so as not to antagonize a prickly government. In January 1997, rather than encroach on China, Steve Fossett came down in a remote region of Uttar Pradesh, whereupon a local priest, with unnerving seriousness, greeted him as Hanuman the Monkey God. For years, the Soviet ban on balloon overflights ruled out a good sixth of the world’s land mass and made round-the-world attempts a virtual impossibility.

  From the start, ballooning pioneers were looking for a way to direct their balloons where they wanted to go, rather than where the wind wanted to take them. One of the more remarkable of these figures was Dr. William Bland, who was born in London in 1789, the son of an obstetrician. In January 1809, he became a surgeon, boarded the sloop Hesper, and traveled the world. In Bombay, India, he got into an argument with Robert Case, the ship’s purser. A duel was set for April 7, 1813. Bland won, and Case died. Bland was convicted of murder and transported to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) for seven years. He was pardoned on January 27, 1815. (Australia needed doctors, and Bland was, by all accounts, a good one.)

  For Australian readers, Bland hardly needs this introduction. A farmer, politician, founder, and first president of the Australian Medical Association, Bland is one of the country’s founding fathers. He was also a visionary inventor and one of the great pioneers of the aviation business. Bland designed an airship.

  The steam-powered Atmotic Ship had two propellers and a payload (passengers and cargo) of one and a half tons and could be driven at 50 miles per hour, covering Sydney to London in less than a week. In March 1851, Bland sent his designs to the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London, where they caused a sensation.

  The Atmotic Ship was never built. It was—to borrow today’s term—a “concept aircraft.” Bland designed it to get people talking—and he succeeded. It was hugely influential. Less than a year later, on September 24, 1852, the engineer Henri Giffard built and flew the world’s first successful full-scale steam-powered airship across Paris, from the Hippodrome to Trappes and back—a distance of 17 miles.

  Henri Giffard’s steam-powered airship, which flew across Paris in September 1852.

  The golden age of airships had to wait awhile, however, until lighter, more efficient engines were developed. Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin began drawing up airship designs in the 1890s, and with the launch of the Luftschiff Zeppelin LZ-1 in July 1900, the most successful airship line of all time took to the skies.

  While biplanes were still hedge-hopping, falling apart, and crashing into trees, airships were being constructed to be ever more flexible and weather-resistant. They could go farther than planes, for longer, and—an often overlooked point—they were safer. After all, a faulty motor on a zeppelin can be fixed in the air. An early plane with a mechanical fault simply crashes (a point ably demonstrated by W. E. Johns, creator of the Biggles adventure-book series, who in 1918 contrived to write off three planes in three days owing to engine failure, crashing into the sea, then the sand, and then through a fellow officer’s back door).

  The worst you could say of the great airships was that they were filled with explosive hydrogen. As the century turned, even that objection seemed surmountable. In 1903, oil workers in Dexter, Kansas, hit on an unusual find: a gas well that absolutely refused to burn. Samples of the gas turned out to contain a small amount of an element so rare, it had never before been gathered in any quantity.

  The gas was helium. It was inert: it didn’t burn or react chemically in any way with anything. It had, according to the scientific report on the find, “no practical application.” The most you could say about it was that it was lighter than air. But then, so was hydrogen, and that was much easier to produce.

  Then came the First World War—and a change in the way wars were fought. As had been predicted throughout the nineteenth century, in books by visionary authors like H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, “war from the air” was coming into its own. Germany was sending zeppelins to bomb London. They weren’t very accurate—the first casualty of the bombardment was the coastal town of Great Yarmouth, 117 miles from the capital. Nor were they very effective. There were more German airmen killed than there were British casualties on the ground. (An eerie highlight of Howard Hughes’s film Hell’s Angels has gallant German airmen jumping to their deaths in a desperate effort to keep their zeppelin bomber airborne over London.) Still, the airships of the First World War were a worry: they could fly higher than any plane of the day could reach, and the only way to bring them down was to have pilots fire incendiary bullets at them, to ignite the hydrogen with which they were filled.

  If Germany got hold of helium, then German airships would be effectively invincible. So Britain and the United States hurried to corner the market in the stuff. Britain built the first helium-extraction plant in 1917, and by the end of the war, the Americans had established their own source of supply. Still, we’re not talking great quantities. When the U.S. Navy’s experimental airship Shenandoah was torn apart by winds over Ohio in 1925, around 90 percent of the world’s captured helium reserves were lost to the air!

  The Zeppelin company—for many years the world leader in airship design—had long been planning to swap hydrogen for helium in its aircraft, just as soon as supplies were sufficiently plentiful. Its new flagship commercial liner—the LZ-129 Hindenburg, the largest flying machine of any kind ever built—was designed specifically with helium in mind. However, by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the defeated Germans were to have no access to this new and expensive technology. The designers were hopeful that the Allies would change their minds; in the end, though, they were forced to reengineer the Hindenburg to use hydrogen.

  The Hindenburg over Manhattan: later aircraft couldn’t match it for luxury.

  After five years of on-and-off construction, the Hindenburg was finally completed in early 1936. It offered passengers the most luxurious airborne experience yet: they drifted elegantly from lounge to dining room to study, before levering their way into (admittedly rather cra
mped) private cabins. In 1936—its only full year of service—the Hindenburg made 17 round-trips across the Atlantic, with 10 trips to the United States and 7 to Brazil. It was on its first return from South America in 1937 that tragedy struck. At around 7 P.M. local time on May 6, it approached Naval Air Station Lakehurst in New Jersey. Twenty-five minutes later, the airship caught fire. Possibly an electrical spark ignited the ship’s highly charged, aluminum-coated skin. The skin evaporated and, an instant later, the hydrogen exploded. The Hindenburg crashed, completely engulfed in flames.

  Incredibly, the conflagration spared two thirds of the passengers and crew. Still, the disaster, covered by a live radio broadcast and caught on film, etched itself on the public mind. The great age of airships was over.

  Even when faster, hardier, more maneuverable airplanes succeeded them for most purposes, airships persisted, serving niche markets that exist to this day. In 1909, the suffragette Muriel Matters, aboard “quite a little airship, 80 feet long,” threw political leaflets over King Edward VII.

  Our Virgin blimp, towing one cheeky marketing message or another, never quite achieved Muriel’s level of political notoriety. But it was good for us. We used it to promote the brand. Flying an airship said something about our sense of fun. We teased British Airways when they ran into difficulties assembling the London Eye, flying a banner over the construction site. It read: “BA can’t get it up.”

  The chief measure of our airship’s success was its visibility. Ours were the only airships that lit up from the inside. Once, while one of our ships was filming above an American football stadium during the Super Bowl, we decided to get ourselves some free publicity. The message “CBS’s cameramen are the best-looking cameramen in the world,” scrolling across the envelope of our blimp, secured Virgin many seconds of free network advertising!