BALLOON CREW SETS A RECORD FOR DISTANCE
Two Eagles balloon breaks distance record, on track to break duration record
One record broken — one more to go.
The pilots of the Two Eagles gas balloon on Thursday evening surpassed the distance record set in 1981 by the crew of the Double Eagle V gas balloon.
Troy Bradley of Albuquerque and Leonid Tiukhtyaev of Moscow were about 400 miles north-northwest of San Francisco shortly before 3 p.m. mountain time when they tied the 5,208-mile distance record. They needed to surpass that by 1 percent in order for the record to be considered “broken,” something that happened about 5:16 p.m.
Still to come, the Two Eagles pilots were expected to break the 137-hour duration record set in 1978 by the crew of the Double Eagle II just before 9 a.m. this morning.
The support team in mission control, located in the Anderson-Abruzzo Albuquerque Internation- al Balloon Museum, had a busy evening, mission director Steven Shope said during the Thursday 3 p.m. briefing.
The original plan to take a northern route was scrapped in favor of pursuing a southern route over Baja California. The balloonists are now expected to land some time Saturday morning in the lower part of the peninsula.
The northern route was expected to take Bradley and Tiukhtyaev over Vancouver, across the Canadian Rockies and past Calgary, at which point they would catch a prevailing wind south into the United States.
“In the middle of the night, we had a situation at the top of the high pressure ridge and some doldrums up there, so basically the balloon would have gotten caught in a no-wind situation. So we made the decision to go south to Baja,” Shope said.
There was no way the Two Eagles balloon could
have plowed through the high pressure ridge, he said. The only way to stay on the northern route would have been to fly above the high pressure ridge, requiring the balloon to ascend to somewhere between 30,000 feet and 32,000 feet.
“The balloon can fly that high but we (pilots) don’t have the life support equipment” to sustain them at such a high altitude, he said.
While veering to the south avoids getting stuck in the doldrums, the Two Eagles balloon was not exactly tear- ing through the sky. Shope said the balloonists were traveling at about 20 mph at an altitude of 20,000 feet.
When they finally do land, instruments aboard the balloon capsule will be used to glean information that will be submitted to ballooning authorities in the United States and in Europe for verification. Official confirmation that Bradley and Tiukhtyaev have established new records for gas ballooning distance and duration may take up to a year, said Ray Bair, the National Aeronautic Association observer.