Forbes explained how he had enough mylar in stock to make more balloons.

There is nothing on this planet quite as fantastic as an ocean voyage made by riding a small, free air balloon. Balloons today have become merely an anachronistic tribute to the days of horses, bicycles and country fields. But as recently as the close of the last century, they were considered the only way to go. It was this 19th century fantasy — the engineering and courage of the balloon stories like the Andree expedition to the North Pole — that made me drive up the freeway from San Diego to Santa Ana. My estranged wife Dot and I, along with our two young sons David and Andy, boarded her old Chevy station wagon at 2:30 a.m. one cold January morning to see the famous publisher Malcolm Forbes and a balloon physicist named Tom Heinsheimer start on their own balloon voyage aboard the Windbome. They hoped it would become the first free air balloon to carry men across the Atlantic Ocean.

It was just before 3:00 a.m. as we passed Oceanside, and the hot water warning light glowed its customary but unloved glow in friendly contrast to the record-setting southern California cold. “What time are they supposed to actually lift off?” Dot asked, pretending not to notice that the warning light was on (as her car mechanic I’m sensitive to critical comments).

“The public affairs people at the air station said only that they would launch sometime between the hours of two and four a.m., so we may miss some of the launch preparations,” I said. This was disappointing since it was the prelaunch atmosphere I wanted most to see. But if we got there in time to see the launch itself our trip would be successful.

My family and I had traveled across the continent to see the night-time launch of Apollo 17, and it troubled me that this balloon voyage record too could be broken with the same precise and indifferent technology that had put men on the moon. It was just one more case of future shock, I decided. Two men were now gearing up to take off across the Atlantic Ocean from my back yard, and I had to be there to wish them good luck. History showed that they would need it.

“Do you think you’ll get to talk to them?” Dot asked. I said no, but the idea of not being able to get up close to them bothered me the most. I wanted to see the men’s faces, to see their eyes and feel for a moment what they were feeling. I thought of the man I’d seen up close jump off Torrey Pines cliffs one day in his hang glider, his eyes as big as quarters. It had been easy to feel his fear and joy as he flew off above us. I thought about the two balloonists and wondered what they’d be doing now, how they might appear to me as they prepared their balloon for the long dangerous voyage.

Malcolm Forbes, 50-year-old publisher of Forbes Magazine and owner of a 170,000 acre Colorado ranch, a French chateau, and the 1957 Republican party nomination for the governorship of New Jersey, took his first balloon ride in 1972. The next year he formed his company’s Balloon Ascension Division and flew across the North American continent in one of the company balloons, setting six official world records in the process. Meanwhile, 35-year-old Dr. Thomas Heinsheimer, an atmospheric scientist and expert in deploying small unmanned high altitude balloons, became interested in the use of his thing to break the Atlantic Ocean balloon record. Himself a politician (City Councilman and Vice Mayor of Rolling Hills, California), Heinsheimer was introduced to Forbes by telephone in early 1974 by a South Dakota balloon manufacturer. They’d been talking about Thomas Gatch’s flight (Gatch and his balloon were last seen 100 miles west of the African coastline in his 1974 attempt) and were both thinking of using his idea to make a try themselves. In March 1974 the Forbes Magazine Atlantic Project was born.

They decided to use Thomas Gatch’s idea to ride the jet stream to Europe or North Africa in a pressurized gondola suspended beneath a vertical stack of several small mylar balloons. And they added two elegant ideas of their own. Windbome would be crammed with enough space-age communications and life-support equipment to permit them to launch from the Pacific coast, thereby giving them 2 days of overland equipment checkout time before committing themselves to flight over the ocean. Moreover, they would carry a multitude of electronic experiments designed by Heinsheimer’s academic colleagues. But with such expensive precautionary measures as sending Forbes’ own DC-9 jet transport (named the Capitalist Tool) to follow them aloft throughout the seven-day duration of the flight (“riding shotgun in the sky”), the Forbes Magazine Atlantic Project was a far cry from the home-made effort of its predecessors. True, after 12 consecutive failures and seven deaths it looked like it was the only way to go if you had the money. But I couldn’t help but be a little bummed out as we drove up that morning. It seemed obvious that such massive organization would rob the voyage of its traditional romanticism, and what I feared most was that at the site of the launch instead of anxious men’s eyes I would find only computer dials and meters.

The sentry at the gate at the Santa Ana Marine Corps Air Station told us that the launch had been cancelled just an hour before. Apparently the jet stream was not behaving normally and the team had decided to wait for a more favorable time. The guard permitted us to drive on, so we followed the dark road up to one of the two huge hangers built to house Navy blimps. Peering through a small hanger door against a rush of exiting reporters we saw a strange assemblage. Fourteen partly-filled balloons were anchored to the hanger floor and. towered a hundred feet or so above the vast floor space like giant punching bags in a world turned upside down.

“Sir, could you clear out please. We’re clearing the hanger of all personnel now,” a curt marine told me. So we drove around the hanger looking for some action. There on the concrete ramp, alone in the glare of a huge spotlight, sat the balloon gondola mounted on a flat bed cart. Inscribed on the sphere’s equator in large handwritten letters was the word “Windbome.” Ten to fifteen people, mostly newsmen, were, milling around the 8-foot diameter silver sphere. They looked like the early cavemen swarming around Kubrick and Clark’s black monolithic stone, and as we walked quickly over, one could almost hear the voices of Ligeti’s Requiem (“scary music,” my estranged wife calls it) coming from the darkness all around.

Moving quickly about the gondola and occasionally stopping to answer someone’s question was a curly headed man in a turtleneck sweater whom I recognized from the newspaper photographs as Dr. Tom Heinsheimer. There was nothing to stop me from talking to him now. So while his children and mine hung around fretfully complaining about the cold, we talked. I introduced myself by saying that I was a man his own age, who, like he, worked with fluid turbulence and was very much interested in his balloon flight. He was most gracious, and began explaining some of the scientific systems to me. After a brief technical foray I turned to my main interest, the voyage itself.

“You know, what I like most about your attempt at crossing the Atlantic Ocean is the idea to launch from the Pacific coast and ride the jet stream across the continent before heading out over water. Whose idea was that?” I asked.

Part-way through my question he grinned appreciatively and then turned serious again. “Well, that idea really is basic to the whole concept of space systems we’ve been using all along. We got it, of course, from the Apollo concept where you first go into earth orbit and check out all the systems before committing yourself to real space flight.” He explained how they would have one or two days to make sure all the communications and life support systems were working properly before heading out over water, and spoke in the easy manner that one does to a stranger when he knows he has something good.

Somewhere in the middle of the conversation I became impatient with the technical talk and interrupted. “Are you scared?” I asked in mid-sentence. “No” he replied without hesitation and continued explaining. Obviously the subject of fear was inconsequential and probably had by now become a nuisance to him. After five minutes or so he begged off to get back to his balloon. I looked around a bit more and wished him good luck as I was leaving. He thanked me and even patted me on the back as I walked away.

The next morning we drove onto the base at 2:30 a.m. while David and Andy, now fortified in all their back-East attire, hid beneath a blanket in the back (they did not have the necessary press passes). Everyone else waited in the warm car as I went into the hanger to watch the initial launch preparations.

Inside I found a crowd of over 100 people milling around a roped off comer of the hanger. Beyond us loomed the balloon assembly now arranged into its pre-launch configuration. Six clusters of balloons, arranged in single file, hovered 100 feet above six desk-sized carts to which they were anchored. The long train stretched all the way from near where we stood to a point hundreds of yards back into the hanger void. At the end of the train, on the seventh cart, sat the gondola alone in the dark. While about fifty launch , crewmen waited for some word to I begin, I tried to find out what had been happening.

Shortly thereafter the crowd’s attention turned toward the center I of the hanger where three men appeared together out of the darkness and walked toward the crowd. It was Forbes, Heinsheimer and the French space scientist in charge of the launch, Jean Pierre Pommereau. They were making a last appearance for the photographers before the two balloonists would board the capsule and be sealed off from view. All kinds of cameras whirred and clicked as the three stood close to the ropes and talked busily with the launch personnel who suddenly seemed to be all over them. Then, just as Heinsheimer started walking back toward the gondola I reached out my hand and said, “good luck man.” He looked at me for a moment, shook my hand, and said thanks. His eyes showed no obvious signs of fear, but he appeared to appreciate the gesture as if he was aware of what he was about to do. Then he walked away.

Soon the large hanger doors were opened and the slow process of moving the balloons and gondola 'out to the launch site began. Each cart with its towering load of one or three balloons passed the group of onlookers at intervals of ten or fifteen minutes so that the entire process took about an hour. Watching the ghostly procession of mylar balloons spotlighted against a background of stars I flashed back onto a silvery abstract of the New York Macy’s Department Store parade. (People standing in line in the cold air looking upward at the passing balloon floats). Now this too, like London Bridge, had been reincarnated in southern California. But it wasn’t just a parade, it was the start of an Atlantic balloon crossing. I ran back to the car to tell Dot and the boys that the show was about to begin.

“Please step back behind the line, sir. Sir, please stay behind the line,” the voices of the marine guards moved up and down the onlooking crowd. We were roped off near the hanger about 1000 feet from where the balloons sat in line next to the spotlighted gondola. I stood next to some guys from ABC Wide World of Sports who carried a portable radio receiver that picked up Heinsheimer’s conversation with the launch crew. While the crew began the difficult “staging” process of elevating one balloon cluster at a time to a vertical flight position above the next cluster in line, Heinsheimer’s voice could be heard asking for equipment checks. Everyone seemed to have forgotten the cold and was eager to see how this massive assemblage would take form and lift off into the sky. Things proceeded reasonably well, but by the time the first single balloon had been staged the space age complexity of the project had been forgotten and I wondered only how long it would take them to get the mother safely into the sky. It was almost four o’clock when the first sounds of disaster ripped across the dark concrete night.

Suddenly the second balloon cluster just undergoing staging ripped loose from the handling lines and' tore upward momentarily unrestrained. The mylar surface of the four partly-filled balloons crackled loudly around the upward rushing helium bubbles and then stopped as they reached the end of the now vertical lines attaching them to the third balloon cluster. Everything appeared to be all right, and the balloon crewmembers who were to ride the DC-9 expressed casual surprise but showed little concern about the incident. Everything stopped while the ground crew determined that nothing had been harmed, and soon the incident was forgotten in favor of the cold.

A ground wind started to blow, further delaying the staging process. It was all right, my technical friends told me, but the lowermost balloons rustled vigorously beneath the still motionless staged balloons high above and I began to feel a little impatient while the ground crew waited for the wind to subside. After some delay, the staging was resumed, and I walked into the hanger to get some literature I’d just been told about.

On my way out onto the ramp I heard the crackling noise once more and looked up to see the first three clusters, seven balloons in all, rushing upward as before. This time, however, as all seven balloons reached the end of their mooring lines tied to the fourth cluster, this cluster, too, tore loose from the cart and added its group of three balloons to the runaway vertical train. In a few seconds the chain had reached the gondola, and aided by the sidewise force of the ground wind, the impulse of their momentum dragged the gondola with its prelaunch-added weight off of the cart and onto the concrete ramp. In a fraction of a second it was all over as the fourteen balloons suddenly popped loose from their reluctant load and again were free to continue their upward rush.

Men ran toward the gondola, which lay on its side. Moments later the radio said that the men were safely out, so I ran over to give Dot and the boys the news. Dot was visibly shaken at the thought that someone could have been killed or injured by the runaway beast, and the boys were grim faced and silent. Everyone was okay I told them, so like everyone else we stood looking up at the spotlighted balloons crackling upward into the predawn night, a jumbled array that took with them the Atlantic Expedition and hence spelled the 13th consecutive failure at an attempted balloon crossing of the Atlantic Ocean.

Minutes later Forbes and Heinsheimer surrounded by shoving reporters pushing against a band of marines walked together from the launch site toward the hanger. I pushed in close because I had to see their faces and hear their remarks on the accident and on their plans. I could see everything standing no more than 5 feet from them now. Forbes wore a tired but commanding expression while Tom Heinsheimer appeared to be frustrated but alert, looking like a naturalist who’d just seen something interesting to write down and couldn’t find a pencil.

“Mr. Forbes, could you please make a statement?” “What are your plans now Mr. Forbes?” “What happened, Mr. Forbes?” the reporters’ voices shouted, and Forbes, speaking without the aid of a microphone, explained good naturedly that things had not gone well for them. Standing on a small flat-bed cart pulled up by a few reporters Forbes introduced Jean Pierre and said that he could best explain what had happened regarding the launching accident.

Our attention was now on the Frenchman, who, standing next to Malcolm Forbes, looked very sad indeed, for he obviously felt the weight of the failure rested on his shoulders. In a faltering monotone aided with the use of his hands he explained how some of the balloon anchoring materials had not performed according to his expectations. His eyes were downcast, and he looked as if he were about to cry. It was very quiet when he finished his half-minute faltering monologue. No one asked him any questions.

Forbes then explained how he’d planned for the contingency by having enough mylar in stock to make more balloons in a thirty-day period, and that if the gondola were not damaged they might be able to try again before the jet stream turned unfavorable in late February. As the questions about his plans began trailing off, Forbes then invited Heinsheimer to speak. Heinsheimer quickly bound up onto the cart between Forbes and Jean Pierre and made what was probably the finest speech of his career.

“Getting back to the launching accident I just want to point out that when the string of balloons started to go, Jean Pierre, at great risk to himself, tripped the emergency release mechanism letting the balloons go. If he hadn't managed to pull the release line in time the capsule could have disintegrated and we would have been destroyed beneath it.” He put his arm around Jean Pierre while the press actually applauded. Jean Pierre looked at the crowd and smiled. It was a speech right out of a 1950s Superman film. A little old fashioned maybe, but a hell of a speech to end an attempted balloon crossing of the Atlantic Ocean.