The three aeronauts floated for days on the Double Eagle II(Picture: Bettmann Archive)
Life is all about patience. We have to wait a few minutes in line for our coffee, wait weeks for a new song to drop and wait what can feel like years for payday.
But for balloonists, they had to wait two centuries for one to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Now that’s patience.
On this day in 1978, three Americans landed a huge silvery helium gas balloon, the Double Eagle II, on a field in Miserey, France.
Thousands greeted Ben Abruzzo, Maxie Anderson and Larry Newman, three wealthy businessmen from New Mexico, as they stepped out of the wicker gondola.
That same crowd then legged it to the balloon, ripping its gondola to shreds for souvenirs.
And they had their reason; the men were the first to fly hundreds of miles across the Atlantic in a tiny basket in a journey that took 137 hours and six minutes and covered 3,120 miles, according to the National Air and Space Museum.
Ben Abruzzo, Maxie Anderson and Larry Newman (Picture: Keystone/Getty Images)
The first hot air balloon took to the skies in 1783. Given that a budget airline can take you halfway across the world these days, that might not sound too thrilling.
But to someone like George Washington, this was quite the sight. ‘Our friends at Paris, in a little time, will come flying thro’ the air, instead of ploughing the Ocean to get to America,’ he wrote to his former Chief Engineer Louis Le Bèque du Portail in a letter.
By the early 1900s, people were craning their necks to see aeroplanes soar above them. Ballooning, however, was struggling to catch up, and for decades remained one of aviation’s unconquered challenges.
They did try though. The first attempt to cross the Atlantic in 1873, made it only 45 miles.
Abruzzo and Anderson gave crossing the Atlantic Ocean their best shot in 1977 aboard the original Double Eagle, the 11th attempt to do so. The two were experienced – Abruzzo a balloon explorer who had spent years bopping around the Pacific, and Anderson a record-holding balloonist.
The pair were blown off course by storms and had to leave the gondola off the coast of Iceland. Alarms were raised back on land when a beacon on the bloom, which had been pinging the flying craft’s location to a Nasa satellite, with the Navy rescuing the pilots.
Newman, Abruzzo and Anderson battled the weather to make it across the pond (Picture: Bettmann)
‘Success in any venture is just the intelligent application of failure,’ said Anderson.
Between 1859 and 1978, at least seven balloonists died attempting to float over the Atlantic.
On August 11, 1978, aeronauts Abruzzo and Anderson were joined by mechanical engineer Newman in a potato field on Presque Island, Maine.
The Double Eagle II was slowly inflated and they packed the gondola with food – mainly hot dogs, sardines and bagels – and some oxygen.
Travel essentials also included foldable garden chairs and battery-powered electric socks to fend off frostbite at such high altitudes. And, of course, a hand glider – Newman intended to fly into Paris at the end of the journey.
‘We climbed to an altitude of 18,000 feet with only our instruments to guide us,’ Abruzzo wrote.
The aircraft landed on a farm in Miserey, a village 50 miles west of Paris (Picture: Patrice PICOT/GAMMA-RAPHO
‘At night all we could see was the blackness of the sky and ocean. We fought off sleep and extreme cold as the Double Eagle moved slowly towards Europe at about 60 miles per hour.
‘There were times when we lost radio contact and feared we had failed.’
At one point during the trip, the pilots suffered what they called the ‘Big Drop’. Up above, temperatures can swing from freezing to blistering hot over a day.
This causes the hot air balloon’s envelope to ice over during the night and expand in the sun, with the Double Eagle plummeting to only 4,000 feet before slingshotting right up to 24,000 feet in just one afternoon, National Geographic, which profiled the journey at the time, said.
‘We thought it was all over. We had already thrown over most of our sand and lead ballast; now we tore everything out of the gondola,’ Anderson said.
‘We threw our sleeping bags out; everything. As we plummeted down, we were all scared stiff.’ That sadly included Newman’s hand glider.
The three pilots’ home for nearly six days now measured only 5×7×4½ feet (Picture: Mike Peel)
But they made it. As the Big Eagle II floated towards England, the pilots opted not to land at the French commune of Le Bourget – where Charles Lindbergh had landed after becoming the first person to fly by plane over the Atlantic solo in 1927.
Fearful of crashing into the suburbs, they opted for a barley field instead.
‘After 137 hours in the air, we began our dangerous and difficult descent over Paris, Abruzzo said.
‘When we finally touched down safely, we fell to our knees and cried tears of joy and relief.
Abruzzo, Anderson and Newman had officially entered the history books, something that, for two centuries, had been thought to have been impossible.
‘Our dream of being the first to cross the Atlantic by balloon was now a reality,’ added Abruzzo.
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