it is an incredibly difficult thing to achieve - to get a balloon to fly around the world.
This had never been done before.
And yet it was the oldest form of flight. And there was a kind of an empty
page in the history books. It was the ultimate challenge for a balloon.
The morning of takeoff was difficult in many ways actually, because we didn't
know what was going to happen.
Of course we couldn't fly around the world in the
basket not at the altitudes that we were thinking of, so we needed a pressurised capsule.
We tried to make things as comfortable as possible. "So this is breakfast, on 11th March, at 8 o'clock in the morning."
We had a little modesty curtain where the toilet
was at the back of the capsule and we would go behind the curtain then and
wipe ourselves down with these baby wipes.
For the first 11 days, which took us out beyond Taiwan, the balloon performed
really well and we were very happy with it.
I think that was the most satisfying time that I found in the whole flying,
where I felt that I could make this thing dance.
Then things started to go wrong. We lost communications, we lost three of our six burners
And then the third thing was the issue of looking ahead at these storms and seeing them there,
not knowing how high they were, and not knowing whether we would actually
fly into them. Because we were pushing the balloon as high as we possibly could,
we lost our heating system. Now everything was covered in ice inside and outside.
We were terrified actually.
"We're still nearly 2,000 miles away from Hawaii. So we're right out in the
middle of nowhere and not going very fast."
It was not an easy situation for those four five nights over the Pacific.
When we got communications back, there was a huge relief. We'd managed to get
across the Pacific and exactly as Luke our meteorologist said, this jet stream
wind was born and life was getting a little better for us.
"The balloon, now traveling at around at 90 miles an hour, has climbed into the jet stream
air currents they hope will carry them to their target just beyond the African coast."
We were doing 160/170 miles an hour. I mean in a balloon, which is extraordinary.
We were so excited,
So we cross the finish line and our team said;
"OK, now we get serious. We've got to get the balloon down in one piece."
We came down and we landed in Egypt in the middle of the Egyptian desert with the final dregs of our fuel.
We were just incredibly relieved, really tired
and I was kind of just kneeling down, feeling the sand and letting it run through my fingers.
And just thinking, this is this is really cool.
I don't think it was a foolish thing to do. I mean we were pilots, we were just
flying a balloon and that's what we were doing to the best of our ability.