Around the World in 20 Days: The Story of Our History-Making Balloon Flight Book

On the 9th of March, 1999, eight days into their flight, Brian Jones and Bertrand Piccard were approaching Myanmar's air space. They had the following exchange with an air-traffic controller: Air traffic control: Hotel Bravo-Bravo Romeo Alpha, what is your departure point and destination? Brian Jones: Departure point, Château d'Oex, Switzerland. Destination, somewhere in northern Africa. Air traffic control, after several seconds' silence: If you're going from Switzerland to northern Africa, what in hell are you doing in Myanmar? Twelve days later the Breitling Orbiter 3 made a hard but safe landing in the Egyptian desert. Their successful circumnavigation, the first, put Piccard and Jones into the record books for distance (25,361 miles) and duration (477.47 hours aloft). Around the World in 20 Days tells the story of their flight, and the obstacles--both natural and manmade--they had to overcome. Struggling to get the balloon back into the jet stream when they had strayed too far south was one thing, but negotiating with dozens of countries for the right to fly in their air space was just as challenging. Even choosing a landing site was problematic: "Mali is mainly desert, and has lions, leopards etc.," while the Nigerians were hesitant, the Libyans wouldn't allow rescue planes to be brought in, and Egypt gave the balloon permission to overfly its borders but not to land. On the ground, the team's support system spelled out the situation to the Egyptians: "Listen--the balloon is running out of fuel. If the pilot doesn't have permission to land, he'll have to declare a full emergency, and you'll be obliged by the international rules to deal with it." The Egyptian controller replied, "In that case, I give you permission." Readers looking for edge-of-their-seats adventure may be disappointed; the authors tend to downplay the amount of danger they were often in. Indeed, the good humor in the cramped gondola camouflaged much of the scrambling taking place on the ground as the support crews worked to ensure the safety of the pilots. Sometimes the narrative, told in alternating passages by Piccard and Jones, descends into technical detail about flight levels, wind speeds, and directions. ("The required flight level will be between 260 and 280, with tracks between 093 and 098, and speed around 35 knots until 00:00 Z.") More often, however, the book glides along as smoothly as these two men who, in Piccard's words, "took off as pilots, flew as friends, and landed as brothers." --Sunny DelaneyRead More