Reach for the Skies Read online

  On March 31, 1989, Virgin invaded Planet Earth. The glowing flying saucer—in reality, a balloon equipped with an internal lighting system—brought motorways to a halt and brought thousands of early-morning London motorists out of their cars to stare as we floated over the city. Studying the prevailing winds, we had hoped to land in Hyde Park; in the end, we came to rest in a field near Gatwick, on the city’s outskirts. The loneliness of the landing site, and its nearness to the airport, only doubled the concern of the authorities, spooked as they were by dozens of phone calls warning them of an alien invasion.

  The police arrived on the scene with admirable speed: one brave constable crept toward us through the early-morning fog, truncheon at the ready, as the craft popped open and I stepped out in a BacoFoil space suit and a fishbowl helmet. The whole affair was very foggy, very cold, and very, very odd, so it says nothing against the policeman that he ran away, very fast.

  “Hang on!” I shouted, removing my helmet. He turned and visibly sagged with relief: “Oh, am I glad to see you!”

  We were in the aviation business because we loved flying. We weren’t just another boring airline: we were looking for new things to do in the air. In 2001, we set a world speed record for airships, and Mike Kendrick, who ran our airship operating company, was always on the lookout for new ideas and opportunities. He dreamed up an airborne mine-clearing system and deployed it in Bosnia, and when he left Virgin he set up the charity Mineseeker to develop the idea further.

  World events overtook our plans and dreams for the Virgin airship. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, blanket bans were put in place that prevented airships from overflying most major cities. It pretty much wrecked this tiny industry. (An airship’s visibility is, and always has been, a key selling point.) So we sold the Virgin blimp—and, yes, I still miss it.

  I wish I could think of a way to return airships to our skies. I think they’re beautiful and dramatic and ingenious. I believe our cityscapes would be immeasurably improved by the spectacle of fleets of airships. It’s an Englishman’s instinct to champion the underdog, I suppose, but I reckon airships tug at the heartstrings in a way that other aircraft don’t. More than once, the airship has been hailed as a world-beating commercial idea—and each time, developments in heavier-than-air flight have elbowed it aside.

  The airship was once safer and more reliable than the airplane. Those days are long past. Once, airships could fly much farther than planes. Today, at least one plane—the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer—can circumnavigate the earth without even refueling. Fans of the airship mostly praise it for being an environmentally friendly form of transport. Given the composite materials available to aircraft designers and the number of exciting “green” fuels being developed—not to mention the number of solar-powered microlight aircraft out there now—I can’t imagine that even this perceived advantage will last much longer.

  I still nurse one hope: that airships will find a niche in the tourist market. I cannot imagine a more enjoyable, more cost-effective way of viewing African game than from the gondola of a blimp. Anyway, I remind myself that, as new materials are developed, the aviation landscape changes dramatically. In a hundred years’ time, who knows what strange craft will have succeeded our GlobalFlyers and White Knights? Who knows which old ideas will merit another look?

  The Rozière

  After crossing the Pacific with Per Lindstrand in 1991, all I wanted was a drink and a roaring fire, but I could see a gleam in Per’s eyes. He said we’d broken all these records and now it was time to try for the last one—a flight around the world. I thought he was mad at first. But when I thought about it some more, I realized that for all the horrendous moments—and there’d been plenty of them!—these flights had been the greatest adventures of my life. So I let Per persuade me.

  On December 18, 1998, Per Lindstrand, Steve Fossett, and I launched our final bid to circumnavigate the earth in a balloon. We expected to be airborne for anything up to three weeks, flying at altitudes that would require us to travel in a heavy, pressurized capsule. For such a feat, there was only one kind of balloon we dared put our trust in. In 1987, when we started our adventures together, Per’s genius had gotten us across the Atlantic in a hot-air balloon; but for a circumnavigation of the earth, only a rozière would do.

  Pilâtre de Rozier, who “put flame to powder” and came to grief so spectacularly while trying to cross the Channel, believed that a combination gas-and-hot-air balloon was a natural choice for long-distance flying. He was right. Once its flammable hydrogen could be replaced with helium—a safer, nonflammable gas that was almost as light—the rozière became the balloon technology of choice. The modern rozière was designed and tested in the 1980s by Don Cameron, the Scottish hot-air-balloon pioneer who now runs Cameron Balloons, the world’s largest hot-air-balloon company. (He’s also, incidentally, one of very few balloonists ever to have been awarded the prestigious Harmon Trophy for “the most outstanding international achievements in the arts and/or science of aeronautics.”) The rozière balloon is normally a sphere of helium gas with a hot-air cone underneath. In daylight, the helium warms and expands, squeezing hot air out of the envelope. By night, when the helium cools and shrinks, you light a burner, heating and expanding the air in the inner envelope. You don’t need to vent any helium in the day or replenish it at night; and you don’t have to heat the entire envelope in order to stay airborne. The fuel consumed by your modest burner is relatively small, so the length of your voyage is pretty much up to you and the weather. How comfortable do you want to be? How much food do you want to take? And—the big one—at what height do you want to fly? A pressurized cabin weighs around three tons, putting Nadar’s Le Géant to shame; but a rozière can keep it in the air for weeks at a time.

  Ours was one of the more terrifying flights I’ve ever experienced: a catalog of near brushes with death. I remember us flying along a narrow land corridor between Russia, Iran, and Iraq, expecting any moment to be blown into hostile airspace. I remember dashing off frantic communiqués to Libya and China as we strayed right into their air-defense networks. I remember us hurtling toward Everest and K2, in a wind so fierce, the turbulence could have dashed us against the lee of either mountain (a phenomenon that goes by the none-too-comforting name “deadly curl-over”!) and passing, with incredible ease, right between them. The balloon, Virgin Global Challenger, performed magnificently, right to the end, when, at last, our luck ran out and the record fell from our grasp.

  Bob Rice, our meteorologist, informed us that the subtropical jet stream carrying us across the Pacific was about to fail abruptly. Our survival chances were bleak. The Pacific is big. It’s relatively featureless: there are a handful of islands, but none to offer the castaway a realistic chance of being saved by a land-based rescue. In the Atlantic, you can ditch near a boat. Ditch in the Pacific and you’re as good as dead. But miracles do sometimes happen. The next we heard, Bob Rice had found us winds that would take us straight toward the only islands for thousands of miles: Hawaii! We ditched some 60 miles offshore, bouncing off wave tops as we summoned the courage to abandon the capsule and jump into the sea. Helicopters rescued us.

  The years 1998 and 1999 were great years for long-distance ballooning—perhaps the greatest. There can never be another “world first” like that achieved by Swiss psychiatrist Bertrand Piccard and British pilot Brian Jones in March 1999. After a 20-day flight—itself a staggering endurance record—they became the first to circumnavigate the earth, in Breitling Orbiter 3—a rozière, of course, designed by Cameron Balloons.

  three

  “To Fly Is Everything”

  “To invent an airplane is nothing. To build one is something. But to fly is everything.”

  Otto Lilienthal

  Saturday, July 5, 2003.

  “They keep telling me I should learn to fly, but I’ve never bothered,” I told assembled journalists. “Right now, I wish I had.”

  I was standing in a field a
t Brompton Dale, near Scarborough, in the northeast of England. I was dressed as a coachman and was preparing to restage man’s first-ever controlled flight.

  Sir George Cayley, a prolific engineer (and, for three years, Scarborough’s member of Parliament), was the first person in history to explain aerodynamics using proper Newtonian physics. Born in 1773, Cayley spent an active and happy life devoted to the study of manned flight. By 1853 he had worked out how to build a “flying parachute”—a confusing name for something that was, in fact, very like a modern airplane.

  Cayley was not on board when it flew. He was a baronet, a man of means, 80 years old, and no fool: he gave his coachman John Appleby a few coins for his trouble. The Cayley Flyer flew 200 yards, and by the time it came to rest, none too gently, on the other side of the dale, Cayley had lost a loyal servant. “Please, Sir George,” said Appleby, “I wish to give notice. I was hired to drive and not to fly.”

  Standing in front of our replica, I knew how he must have felt. I was 53, and I still hadn’t got around to getting my pilot’s license. The glider ace Allan McWhirter had tried to give me the basics, but by the end I was still about as clueless as the Flyer’s original pilot.

  Above our heads, the Red Arrows screeched past. A Virgin 747 was due overhead any second. Three generations of Cayleys were on hand to buttonhole the press, explaining excitedly how their ancestor was responsible not just for the airplane but for tank tracks, prosthetic limbs, the spoked bicycle wheel, the first polytechnic school . . . I looked around for my coachman, cursed the fact that I didn’t have one, and climbed aboard.

  Not bad for a schoolboy doodle: young George Cayley’s sketch for a flying machine.

  “They keep telling me I should learn to fly, but I’ve never bothered,” I told assembled journalists. “Right now, I wish I had.”

  I’m not the only Cayley nut out there. So—at a remove of 50 years—were the Wright brothers. The Wrights studied Cayley’s writings closely. In later years, deluged by legal actions, they found that Cayley was one of the few forerunners they could acknowledge without weakening their patents.

  Cayley was the first true aeronautical engineer. Only a couple of years ago, his school notebooks turned up (they’re held in the archive of the Royal Aeronautical Society Library in London). They reveal that even at school he was developing theories of flight.

  Cayley studied the anatomy of birds. He spent hours watching them in flight. Seeing no easy way to simulate the flapping of a bird’s wings, he developed fixed-wing gliders that relied on some other form of propulsion. Typically, they were models. Later, full-size gliders were hauled down hills by a rope until they attained enough speed to take off. The gliders were successful in carrying people over short distances. Arguably, Appleby’s laurels for being the first aviator belong to others: a nameless ten-year-old boy, or maybe Cayley’s grandson George John Cayley, both of whom covered a few feet in an earlier prototype.

  By happy coincidence, the centenary year of the Wright brothers’ first flight was also the 150th anniversary of Cayley’s achievement. We could leave it to others to look after the splendid Wrights, but Cayley, like his Flyer, needed a shove. We had talked with friends at BAE Systems, put some money together—about £50,000 ($83,000)—and oversaw the reconstruction of Cayley’s invention. Together, BAE engineers and the local branch of the Royal Aeronautical Society had done a bang-up job. Now all I had to do was fly the thing without breaking it—or myself.

  Perched on a wooden plank over a hollow canvas hull (no comfy cockpit here) and clinging, more for balance than anything else, to the primitive controls, I gave the signal, bumped down the hill, and—glory be—rose 50 feet into the air.

  Even before there were planes, there were airlines. The logistics and economics of passenger flights were worked out before anyone even knew how to fly, and investors were plowing their capital into airline companies a generation before Orville Wright left the ground.

  Born in 1812, William Samuel Henson followed his father into the lacemaking business. In 1840, inspired by the work of George Cayley, Henson and lace-industry engineer John Stringfellow designed a lightweight, steam-driven plane they called an “aerial steam carriage.”

  Henson and Stringfellow were farsighted enough to realize that passenger services were the future of aviation; so they set up an international airline. The Aerial Transit Company launched a massive publicity campaign to raise investment capital. They released illustrations of their carriage in flight over London and exotic settings in Egypt, India, and China. (In much the same spirit, you can find animations of SpaceShipTwo’s maiden flight on YouTube.) They put a bill before Parliament, allowing them to raise funds and operate international air routes. The House of Commons resounded with laughter—a sure sign that they were on to something! The press responded with incredulity and enthusiasm. Caricatures of their airplanes flying over Egypt’s pyramids promptly appeared in Punch and in the newspapers.

  William Samuel Henson’s vision of international air travel. Sadly, his plane couldn’t fly.

  The Aerial Steam Carriage (“Ariel” for short) was to be made of bamboo and hollow wood and braced with wires. It was to be powered by a stripped-down steam engine driving two six-bladed propellers. To call Henson’s craft prophetic is to undersell it. There was virtually nothing about his design that wasn’t later adopted in real aircraft. There was only one problem: it couldn’t fly.

  Henson built a scale model, which did manage to hop off its guide wire. A larger model, with a 20-foot wingspan, never left the ground.

  The besetting challenge of all heavier-than-air flying machines is how to fit enough power into a light enough vehicle. Ariel was never going to get off the ground, because the more power Henson added, the heavier his machine became. The only motors available to Henson were steam engines!

  Surprising as it seems, as the years went by, steam-driven prototype aircraft did become almost feasible. In 1877, in a park in Milan, Enrico Forlanini’s steam-driven helicopter rose to a height of 42 feet and hovered there for 20 seconds—a surprisingly light and elegant machine, with its fabric counter-rotating sails. Clément Ader’s invention of 1890 was a sort of mechanical bat powered by a four-cylinder steam engine driving a four-blade tractor propeller. During its 150-foot trip it rose to an altitude of eight inches. Don’t laugh: Ader—coincidentally, the inventor of broadcast stereo—went on, as I mentioned earlier, to achieve manned heavier-than-air flight a full 13 years before the Wright brothers, in machines that look like conceptual sketches for a Batman movie (although, if his achievements have been sorely neglected, it may be because his every public demonstration ended in a crash).

  By the time Orville and Wilbur Wright were paying close attention to aviation, it was clear that you couldn’t use powerful engines to simply thug your way into the air. What you needed was a better sort of wing.

  Clément Ader’s “Bat” was powered by a steam engine. It very nearly worked.

  Orville and Wilbur ran a chain of bicycle shops in Dayton, Ohio. They didn’t gamble, smoke, or drink, and they had precious little to do with women. They didn’t hanker for distractions, and they didn’t need entertaining. They had each other. “From the time we were little children,” Wilbur wrote in 1912, “my brother Orville and myself lived together, played together, worked together, and in fact, thought together. We usually owned all of our toys in common, talked over our thoughts and aspirations so that nearly everything that was done in our lives has been the result of conversations, suggestions and discussions between us.”

  The idea of flight obsessed the brothers from the moment their father brought them home a helicopter from one of his business trips. The toy, made of cork, bamboo, and paper, was powered by rubber bands and could rise 50 feet into the air. This was a treat, as their mother usually constructed the boys’ toys herself. The daughter of a carriage maker, Susan thought nothing of knocking together simple household appliances. Her example was the solid foundation on which her boys�
�� love of mechanics grew.

  The Wright boys’ obsession with flight was not unusual or eccentric. On the contrary, they were growing up in an age captivated by new engineering ideas, new materials, and the possibilities for manned flight. Just as today’s young engineers are drawn into climbing and kite surfing, so the brothers’ love of new technology led them into the cutting-edge technical sport of their day: cycling. Bicycles were transforming small-town life in America. Orville and Wilbur loved the work, and they were very successful: had they stayed in the business they would by now probably deserve more than a footnote in the history of the bicycle. Instead, they stumbled upon news of a death.

  “My own active interest in aeronautical problems,” Wilbur Wright recalled in 1901, “dates back to the death of [glider pioneer Otto] Lilienthal in 1896.” He had run across a report of the death of Lilienthal in a newspaper while reading to his brother Orville, who was laid up—indeed, dangerously ill—with typhoid fever.

  Of all the men who attacked the flying problem in the nineteenth century, Lilienthal was easily the most important. Since childhood, the German engineer had been fascinated with the flight of birds, and that interest, as it matured, produced arguably the most influential book on aeronautics ever published: Birdflight As the Basis for Aviation. Lilienthal’s book, published in 1889, contains reams of original data on the effectiveness of different sorts of wings. Though the book itself was not translated into English for many years, its tables and figures were exchanged in letters by flight pioneers all over the world.