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Brian Jones was the Mr. Fix-It of the expedition. He was quietly overseeing the construction of the gondola for Cameron Balloons when he was nominated to be a reserve pilot in the Breitling attempt. "Of course, reserves in any activity assume they will always remain reserves," he says. But he found himself, as he puts it, "in the hot seat" when Piccard had a falling out with his first co-pilot, Tony Brown. "He's not an adventurer," says Joanna Jones of her husband. "He's a professional pilot who approaches things in a judged manner." Jones quickly fell into a comfortable rhythm with his copilot. Brian "made me a cup of tea while I was preparing his bed," said Piccard.
As pioneering craft go, the Breitling Orbiter 3 outclasses the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria--and the Spirit of St. Louis, for that matter. It is a high-tech combination of hot air and gas, equipped not only with simple necessities like a bunk, toilet and desks but also with a fax machine and satellite telephones. The journey began on March 1, Piccard's birthday, in the snowcapped mountains of Chateau-d'Oex, Switzerland. Piccard and Jones cruised toward Italy at an altitude of 21,000 ft., crossed over the Mediterranean at night and enjoyed a meal of emu. On a satellite phone, Jones chatted with his wife, who spent most of her time at mission control at Geneva's Cointrin Airport, which was manned around the clock by a meteorologist and an air-traffic controller. Piccard's wife Michele preferred to stay at home with their three daughters.
The pilots headed toward Morocco, over Mauritania and then turned northeast to catch a jet stream blowing toward India. In theory, balloons can't be steered, but pilots improvise by dropping up and down between different altitudes in search of the right wind pattern. Like surfers trying to catch a wave, balloonists try to ride jet streams, high-altitude currents that usually move from west to east. "It's magical what pilots can achieve," says balloonmaker Don Cameron. "In competitions with hot-air balloons, they'll set a target 10 miles away and ask pilots to drop a marker on it, and the pilots will get within a meter of it." The Orbiter 3 crew hit its target on the fourth day of the journey and sped along in a jet stream at 60 m.p.h. They ventured outside the cabin once, when the balloon descended to 10,000 ft., so that Piccard could chip away at ice that had formed on the cables and the capsule. There were few surprises, and the only irritant was a mysterious buzzing in the cabin. On Day 5, Piccard located--and dispatched--its source: a stowaway mosquito.
On March 7 Piccard and Jones heard of a misfortune--and it was good news for their quest. On that day their competitors, the British team of Andy Elson and Colin Prescot, ditched over the Pacific Ocean. After setting an endurance record of 17 days, 18 hrs., 25 min. aloft, the duo, in the Cable & Wireless balloon, was knocked out by what amounted to a one-two punch. First, peeved that Branson's December flight had infringed upon its airspace, China denied entry to his countrymen, forcing them to follow a more convoluted route. And then, while traveling over Thailand, Elson and Prescot were hit by a thunderstorm that shredded their balloon's envelope. They survived, after a harrowing dunking in the Pacific.