In March of 1999 I was asked to lead the the Breitling Orbiter 3 recovery crew to the balloon’s landing site deep in the desert of Upper Egypt after it had completing the first ever manned around the world balloon flight. Using GPS landing coordinates phoned to us the previous evening by the Breitling representative our team set out early the following morning from Giza in four Toyota Land Cruisers and headed 520 kilometers south to Dahkla Oasis located in the center of Egypt and next to the Great Sand Sea. The balloon pilots, Bertrand and Brian had been picked up by helicopter and flown out the previous day and we would be the first and only people to reach the balloon by overland, if we could navigate to its location.

With me were Rami Siag, President of Siag Hotels and Travel, who furnished the Land Cruisers, drivers and provisions. At that time I was the only person in Egypt with GPS experience and GPS equipment and Rami and his drivers were the most experienced off road desert travel experts in the country. Also with us was Sandra Simpson, a Scuba diving instructor who had had much experience with the decommissioning of high pressure air and gas bottles a task that we would likely be facing. In Dahkla Oasis we would pick up Mel James, the Breitling representative, who had chartered a plane and flown down to Dahkla the previous evening. Having gathered our team at a hotel where Mel had spent the night we were ready for the 100 kilometer off road trek up to the plateau and the landing site.

for the 500 km drive to Dakhla Oasis, where we would pick up the Breitling representative, Mel James, before heading up to the landing site on the plateau.

I made a map from and old topo sheet and GPS points on our accent route and labeled each according to what I had put in my waypoint labels at the time. The story of the final climb up the 2nd escarpment is a tale in itself. We found no trails, tire tracks, or any other sign that the top of this plateau had been visited before. As I recall, we had to completely unload each SUV and our drivers did a rapid steep hill climb up a narrow sandy dry stream bed. We realized that we could probably not get back down this way safely when we returned, so when we started home two days later we headed north and found a long (many miles) gently sloping wadi that eventually met the desert road just south of Farafra. “Pots” on the map indicate dumps of broken clay water jugs, probably dating back into antiquity. “Sharp limestone” is where we ran out of fresh tires and had to camp for the night (about 14 hours since we left Cairo). Further on I will explain and show how we carried on without a single undamaged tire left in our small convoy.

Here we have just arrived in the morning, approximately 24 hours after the balloon had touched down and Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones had been lifted off by a Egyptian Air Force helicopter and flown to Cairo. Our convoy consisted of four Siag Hotel and Travel Toyota Land Cruisers. As a team we were me (Jim Sorenson), Rami Siag, Rami’s brother, Mel James, Sandra Simpson and three of Rami’s off road drivers. Rami and I drove lead with Rami driving and me navigating. We arrived around 9am local time from our first campsite on the Plateau.

Here I’m holding up some of the Cameron R650 balloon envelope fabric. W had to leave it up on the plateau and as far as we know it’s still up there buried in the sand or most probably blown east into the Great Sand Sea which lies just below the horizon in the background.

Here I am looking out of the rear hatch window. I noted that the radio mounted inside on the dashboard panel and used for HF and VHF communications was an ICOM IC-706, a radio I had used before as an amateur radio operator in Egypt at SU9AM. It was the perfect radio for this application. They also had a variety of satellite communications gear and state-of-the-art ground sensing radar aboard.

Lunch at the recovery site with and Ramy Siag (President of Siag Travel and Hotels), Rami’s brother (wows first name I have regrettably forgotten), and Sandra Simpson. We are waiting for Mel James who was still busy with the Breitling Gondola. Rami was undoubtedly the most capable and experienced overland desert explorer and outfitter in Egypt at the time. Without the new Toyota Land Cruisers and the extensive off-road desert experience of his drivers, the mission would have been impossible. But wherever he goes, there is always great food and typical Egyptian hospitality. But by the time we reached this point every tire in the group of four vehicles was filled with sand and there were no spare tires left due to the sharp limestone surface encountered on the way up. Although at the time international satellite mobile phones were rare in Egypt, but Rami had had one and used it to call in spare tires which were arrived later in the afternoon by a Military helicopter.

I am sitting at the side of the Breitling Orbiter III after working most of the day helping to prepare the gondola for shipment to Cairo and on to Switzerland.

 Sandra Simpson and Mel James (Breitling Representative). Notice “Rally of Egypt 1999” on the SUV behind. Siag Hotels was that year’s sponsor for this major international off-road rally.

 The spot where the balloon drag rope first hit the sand is shown by the circle in the image above. I later drove an iron stake deep into the hard sand here marking the location with my GPS. Notice the track from the circle out to where the gondola finally touched down. As you can see, after it touched down it was dragged slightly left of center by the wind. What is a mystery to me is why the drag rope seems to have touched earth first ahead of the gondola and against the direction of landing – from the SW.

From the GPS coordinates I took at the time, the sequence of landing looks like this:

Distance from 1 to 2 – 225 feet (Rope touches the ground)

Distance from 2 to 3 – 294 feet (Gondola touches down and is dragged to 3)

Distance from 3 to 4 – 150 feet (Gondola dragged to 4 by an increase in the velocity and direction of the wind.

Marker 1 is where the end of the drag rope first made contact with the desert. Marker 2 is where marks in the sand indicate the gondola first hit the ground before it was dragged by the canopy to Marker 3, which is where it lay upright for at least a few hours after they arrived at 8 am local time until the wind picked up and further dragged it to Marker 4 where we first encountered it resting on its side with the canopy spread out in the SE direction. You still see, I believe, the track in the sand on Google Earth after some 20 years. The horizontal displacement is around 60 feet on the ground which would be the combination of the GPS error (about 30 feet) and Google Earth’s average horizontal worldwide mapping spread of error (anywhere from 14 to over 140 feet).

The desert here appears entirely flat, but the balloon had come down on a relatively small high plateau surrounded by one steep escarpment over another. Even the Egyptian Army Reconnaissance Department was unable to find a way up here and had to turn back after the first escarpment.

The Breitling pilots had been lifted off at about 3 pm after the landing by an Egyptian military helicopter and were flown to a desert base nearby. We were the only group to reach the landing site ‘off-road’ thanks to the very experienced SIAG drivers and some incredibly good luck. Another group of Egyptian military experts flew in a few hours after we arrived to deal with the remaining gas bottles.

Had they not landed at this particular location as they did, the consequences would have been disastrous. The entire area outside of this small flat plateau, only a few miles across, consists of deep wadis, blind canyons, and impassable dunes.

Location Map

The balloon landed in almost the exact center of Egypt and 50 miles from the nearest oasis or town. Had it landed just a couple of miles further east in the Great Sand Sea, efforts to reach it over land would have been almost impossible.

 This gives you some idea of the surface over which we drove which destroyed one tire after another. We started from Dahkla Oasis on the desert floor and followed the old Long Range Desert Group trail up the first escarpment. The kilometer stone markers were still in place from WWII. To reach the top of the 2nd escarpment where the balloon landed, we made our way up slowly by trial and error. Probably, no motorized vehicle had ever been there before and there were no tracks of any kind indicating so.

 Yet another flat.

Ah, but we were able to resort to a wise old Bedouin desert trick of filling our tires with sand to get rolling again. Our Egyptian drivers sat down and filled tire after tire with sand through the tire valves. They take a small sheet of paper construct a funnel and then simply sit in the sand for hours until the tire is full. They earned a lot of extra baksheesh for it of course and saved the day.

Here is Sandra helping Egyptian Air Force techs to bleed off the gas canisters to render them safe for transport back to Cairo by helicopter. She’s wearing her PADI Diving Instructor shirt for the task, being very familiar with pressurized air tanks from her underwater activities as the first ever woman PADI diving instructor to be certified in Egypt. There were also several large pressurized air tanks to be emptied as well.

 After we arrived by SUV, a local Cameron Balloon specialist and a group of Egyptian military technicians showed up by helicopter to dismantle the gondola’s ‘roof rack’ and to bleed off the pressurized air and gas tanks before evacuating the gondola itself. We transported as much as we could carry on our roof racks back to Cairo before turning it over to the Swiss Embassy for return to Switzerland. Mel James, the Breitling recovery representative, had met us at a hotel in Dahkla and joined us for the overnight trip from there to the landing site the next morning. He also returned with us on our 500 km trip back to Cairo.

 On the evening of our first day on the road, we set up the first night’s camp below the second escarpment. It was March and still freezing, but we were prepared for it. As is the custom here in Egypt, Rami’s cook came along and we had a sumptuous outdoor meal rivaling any that one might order in a first-class hotel.

  Sandra at sunset on the first day just before we set up camp.

 In Dakhla, we inquired at a local hotel if they knew of anybody who could lead us to the beginning of the track used by the Long Range Desert Group during WWII to reach the top of the first escarpment to the north. This little guy was on the steps of the hotel. No, he didn’t take us there, but there was one old guy there who did. He saved the day also.

 Because the bottom of the gondola had hit the ground hard against the upward-sloping cliffs before the plateau, there was heavy damage to anything hanging off the bottom. Fortunately, the yellow Styrofoam ground supports were still attached to the gondola and had prevented it from being damaged. Because the workload of the pilots was so heavy upon taking off in Switzerland, they did not have time to release these supports as planned. Here was another twist of fate that added to their luck.

 This banner can be seen today hanging in the Air and Space Flight Center with the gondola.

Here is the gondola tipped up again before we start the dismantling process. The Intrepid Breitling recovery team Mel James, Sandra Simpson, and Jim Sorenson take yet another photo op.

Sandra shows where we assume the gondola first landed before it was dragged further along in that direction and then to the right. You can see the drag rope at the right which leads the eye to its final resting position.

 Sandra taking a break. The yellow-colored Breitling Orbiter 3 ground support and banner sign were not supposed to travel around the earth with the balloon.

 Jim and Mel begin the teardown.

When the balloon first landed, it was upright on the ground. A few hours afterward, the wind dragged it about 50 feet and the pull from the canopy pulled it over on its side. For, some reason that I can’t remember, we put it back in an upright position before the Egypt Air Force showed up on the scene. It was then put back on its side for dismantling and finally put back upright when the helicopter arrived to tow it away.

 I’m afraid we left a mess!

Finally, late in the afternoon, a second helicopter arrives to lift the gondola to a local Egyptian airbase before it is carried by truck to Cairo. The chopper also delivered enough new tires to get us back down the escarpments and back to Cairo.

 Jim with the trusty Garmin GPS that got us there and got us home. They laughed when I brought along two GPS receivers and 5 sets of batteries. I lost one of the GPS receivers and used all five sets of batteries. The trip back to Cairo involved a lot more off-road travel than we had expected.

 Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC

See the Orbiter at the Smithsonian

Sandra and I donated our 39 original photographs to the Smithsonian where they are on file. One can obtain copies if interested by writing to the museum. I had returned to Egypt the previous summer from the U.S. having purchased an Olympus digital camera at great expense. $800 dollars for a digital camera that could only produce images at .8 of a megapixel which seems pretty low tech by today’s standards, but it took all these images and never failed me. Here are the specs.

Product name CAMEDIA C-800LTypeCompact digital camera Released October 1996

Launched in 1996, the CAMEDIA C-800L was the first of the CAMEDIA line. At a time when digital cameras tended to be priced at around 10,000 JPY per 10,000 pixels, Olympus set a new standard by offering a camera with 810,000 pixel resolution for just 128,000 JPY. The C-800L provided superb image quality and yet was as easy to use as a compact camera. It earned excellent reviews in camera magazines and became a major hit product. Olympus launched other in the series, up to the C-860L, with enhancements that included the use of Smart Media cards instead of built-in flash memory, and the improvement of resolution from 810,000 pixels to 1.31 megapixels.

The missing oxygen bottles should still be up on the plateau at the landing site and it may be some time before a desert explorer finds them and perhaps recovers them. We encountered one on our way out of the maze of escarpments and wadis but had no room left to carry it back with us.

As a side note, we later heard a rumor that their computer had been removed from the gondola at some point after the pilots had been taken out by helicopter and before we arrived about 24 hours later. The assumption was that Egyptian intelligence made a second trip to the site after the pilots had been recovered and confiscated it because it was in the interests of national security. As we all know, governments are all very touchy about their air space and there was no time for Breitling to apply for and obtain the many many permits that would have been required to land such a vehicle and its pilots in Egyptian territory. After later reading the Jones-Piccard book about the adventure, I learned that they did leave with their laptop.

We also heard that Brian Jones later quipped (after arriving back home) that it was tougher getting out of Egypt than it was circumnavigating the globe. Only the Swiss could have managed to diplomatically circumvent the mountain of red tape involved that must have piled up at the end of the adventure.

Landing of the Breitling Orbiter III around the world balloon in Egypt – 1998

(A work in progress)

HARD LANDING

BERTRAND

We had trained for the landing on the supposition that I would be flying the balloon as we came back to earth and that Brian would carry out all the tasks that needed to be done outside. This made sense, as | had landed a big Rozier balloon twice before, and he had specialized in the external systems, practicing on the release mechanisms that needed to be operated in sequence from on top of the gondola. But when he woke me for the last time he had already started the descent and was in full control of the balloon’s flight, speed and direction. He wasn’t having an easy time, but he’d got the feel of it, so there seemed no point in taking over from him. We therefore switched jobs, and when the time came I was the one who went outside. It wasn’t the most sensible arrangement because we kept having to give each other advice about what to do next, but at the time it seemed the sensible option.

BRIAN