Bertrand Piccard

1958-

Swiss Psychiatrist and Balloonist

On March 21, 1999, Swiss psychiatrist Bertrand Piccard and British balloon instructor Brian Jones (1947- ) became the first men to circumnavigate the globe in a balloon. Their voyage aboard Breitling Orbiter 3, a high-tech hot-air balloon, took 20 days.

Born in 1958, Piccard comes from a distinguished family of adventurers. His grandfather was Auguste Piccard (1884-1962), a Swiss physician whose inventions included the pressurized cabin. Aboard a pressurized balloon in 1931, Auguste Piccard and Paul Kipfer become the first men to enter the stratosphere. Jacques Piccard (1922- ), son of Auguste and father of Bertrand, invented the bathyscaphe, a type of submarine made for extreme depths. Aboard the bathyscaphe Trieste in 1960, he and Donald Walsh descended to a record depth of 35,800 feet (10,916 meters) in the Marianas Trench of the Pacific Ocean.

Bertrand Piccard has pursued a dual career as a psychiatrist and adventurer in various forms of flight. At the age of 16 in 1974, he was one of the world's first notable hang-gliding enthusiasts, and he became the European aerobatics champion. He also invented several new aerobatic figures and set a world altitude record for hang-gliding. As an adult, Piccard was not only a hang-gliding instructor and paraglider, but a qualified ultra-light flyer as well.

Piccard made his first hot-air balloon flight in 1979. Later, with balloonist Wim Verstraeten, he won the Chrysler Transatlantic Challenge in 1992. In January 1997 Piccard made his first attempted around-the-world balloon flight, with Verstraeten aboard the Breitling Orbiter. (Breitling, a Swiss watch company, sponsored this and Piccard's two later flights.) A fuel leak forced them to bail out over the Mediterranean, just hours after beginning their flight. Again in January 1998 Piccard, Verstraeten, and Andy Elson got as far as Myanmar (Burma) in the Breitling Orbiter 2 before a loss of fuel, combined with China's refusal to let them cross its air space, forced them down. They had, however, set a record for the longest amount of time aloft in a balloon: nine days, 18 hours.

Piccard and his companions were certainly not the only balloonists who had unsuccessfully attempted the circumnavigation of the globe. Starting in 1981, more than 20 crews had tried to circle the Earth, and just a week after Piccard and Jones began their historic flight, another crew failed: Elson, this time with Colin Prescot aboard the Cable & Wireless, had been plunged into the Pacific Ocean after a thunderstorm tore their balloon apart. (The two men survived.)

Piccard's and Jones's flight had already been delayed for several weeks as Swiss officials worked to obtain permission for them to cross China; finally, at 9:05 a.m. local time on March 1, 1999, they set sail from the village of Château-d'Oex, in the Swiss Alps. Initially they backtracked, flying in a southwesterly direction, though in fact their entire route had been carefully planned. Thus they sailed toward Morocco, then headed northeast to catch a jet stream, high-altitude winds that typically move from west to east.

Moving at a speed of 60 mph (97 kph), Breitling Orbiter 3 and its two-man crew hastened toward India by way of the Red Sea and the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. On March 10 they spent 15 hours over Chinese airspace, crossing that nation in the extreme south due to an agreement whereby they would not stray north of the 26th parallel. Over the Pacific Ocean they encountered their most serious difficulties, when they lost contact with mission control for four days. Also during this time, a heater broke, dropping the cabin temperature to just 46 degrees Fahrenheit (8 degrees Celsius). But after crossing Central America, they caught a 100-mph (161 kph) jet stream over the Atlantic Ocean, which sped them toward Africa. On March 21, 1999, they landed safely in Egypt at 5:52 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).

Piccard, who wrote about his adventure in the September 1999 issue of National Geographic, is married and has three daughters.

JUDSON KNIGHT