Breitling Orbiter 3's logbook: Day 1,2 and 3.

3rd of March 1999...Breitling Orbiter has been flying for three days...

Here's my logbook.

Day 1

First problems, first fears...

Six hours after take-off... I keep the balloon between 7000 and 8000 m. The envelope's thermal insulation is so effective that it cuts out the effect of the sun. If I have to heat not only at night as planned, but also during the day... we risk running out of fuel before we reach our goal!

Our first real problems came at sunset: the fax machine stopped working and, outside, the satellite telephone aerial froze, rendering it unusable. But the most worrying thing was that we were consuming too much propane. As the sun disappears behind the horizon, it doesn't heat up any more and we're forced to use our burners even before it's completely dark. To top it all off, our pilot lights start working erratically. These little high-pressure flames on the roof of the capsule are supposed to automatically light the burners, which are themselves controlled by timers on the dashboard. As their name suggests, the pilot lights should never go out, but they do, forcing us to constantly use an electronic igniter to get them going again. Regularly, one of us has to leave our seat, take two steps backwards and reach for the button on the burner control panel, fixed to the wall of the central corridor next to the fuel gauges. More than exasperating when you're forced to heat every 10 seconds for six seconds, i.e. 60% of the time! Brian Jones and I look at each other, and we're thinking the same thing: "We're in big trouble!

?We can repair the fax machine. As for the antenna, it will eventually thaw out. But the manual ignition is a real nightmare. And this fuel issue is raising the spectre of running out of fuel in the very near future. Previous calculations have given us a range of 12 to 24 days of fuel. At the current rate, we'll run out of fuel in less than a week... We haven't even been flying 24 hours and already our chances of success seem seriously compromised.?

All of a sudden, we don't know where to turn. We spend our time relighting the burners to balance the balloon while reprogramming the fax machine and trying to establish radio communications with the air traffic controllers on the C?te d'Azur. The Marseille control tower, overwhelmed by the intensity of the air traffic, insisted that we maintain our cruising altitude. But our burner problems are causing us to dive or climb by as much as 1,000 metres. While we wait to stabilise, we ask Marseille to allocate us a wide enough corridor for our dolphin jumps.... I go to bed at 7.45pm without being able to get any sleep... The aggressive sound of the propane jets intermittently lighting up wakes me up every time I'm about to fall asleep. I'm obsessed with our fuel consumption and my sleep remains light and restless. At one point I think I feel a sudden drop in altitude and I imagine that Brian must have switched to the next pair of tanks. If we've used up two tanks out of 32 before the end of our first night's flying, we're lost. It all started so well... Less than 24 hours after departure, it was all doom and gloom.

Day 2

Throughout this second day, we continue to have problems with the burners. We solve them by trial and error, adjusting the timers so that the residual flame from one burner stroke can ignite the next stream of propane despite the malfunctioning pilot lights. Much more worrying is the formation of ice on the fuel control unit, located on the ceiling, very close to the upper window. Between 7000 and 8000 m, it's -35°C outside...

Breitling Orbiter 3 may be the most sophisticated balloon ever built, but this is its maiden flight. The manufacturer has developed its future behaviour through countless computer simulations, but no one has ever been able to test it in real flight conditions. The real test comes now. On the afternoon of the second day, we reached a speed of 49 knots. That's our record. With our eyes glued to the GPS, we watched for the moment when we would break the 50-knot barrier! At that precise moment, the control centre calls out: "Slow down! Slow down!". In spite of ourselves, we obeyed and descended from 8000 to 5000 metres. Our speed then dropped to 31 knots, then to 25... It's hard to accept slowing down voluntarily when you're trying to circumnavigate the world! "If you go any faster, you'll be heading for the Black Sea and entering China in the wrong place...". We hate the feeling of being remote-controlled... but we soon get into the habit of comparing our trajectory calculations. It's up to us to stick to the ideal route by raising or lowering the balloon. The clouds don't help us assess our speed or direction: they just sit there, behind the windows, moving at the same speed as us. Only the GPS, which tells us our heading to the nearest degree and our speed to the nearest knot, allows us to navigate accurately. On the evening of the second day, accompanied by a sumptuous sunset, we crossed the Mediterranean east of Gibraltar and entered Moroccan airspace.

Day 3

We're still heading south-west, according to the strategy defined by our meteorologists to enter China at the level of the thin corridor where we've received flight clearance. The balloon is making good progress and I only have to warm up for three and a half seconds every 16 seconds: less than 25% of the time! I've switched off all the automatic alarms and I'm keeping a close eye on the operation of the burners for constant fear of a breakdown. At sunrise, it's not without a touch of anxiety that I discover that, during the night, stalactites have grown all around the bottom of the envelope and that the cables are sheathed in ice. The ice accumulated on the balloon is in danger of weighing us down... It starts to melt under the sun, but the resulting water falls on the capsule and freezes again... Naturally, we're anxious to turn east and accelerate. Finally, in the evening, we begin to turn degree by degree exactly as the meteorologists had predicted at 22:30. We're at 6000 m on a 115° trajectory, but at only 22 knots. The considerable lead of our competitor Andy Elson, who set off well ahead of us and is currently somewhere north of Bangkok, is making us even more worried about not moving fast enough...

Stay tuned...