Balloonists break another record
Landing scheduled for Baja California this morning
If all goes as planned, at about 5 a.m. today, Two Eagles pilots Troy Bradley and Leonid Tiukhtyaev will have descended to 10,000 feet and started searching for a landing site on a beach on the west coast of Baja California, near the town of San Isidro.
“Right now, our plans are to come in low, deploy trail ropes in the water and then actually land on the beach” sometime around 9 a.m., said mission director Steven Shope during a Friday afternoon briefing.
But the two pilots had already accomplished their mission by early Friday — breaking the 5,208-mile distance record and the 137-hour duration record.
At the time of Friday afternoon’s briefing, the balloon was 370 miles southsouthwest of San Diego, at an altitude of about 15,000 feet and traveling at 53 mph.
“We’ve looked at the area on Google Earth, and there’s a lot of sand dunes, and very sparsely populated area. It looks like an ideal landing spot,” Shope said.
Balloonists and volunteers from San Diego and in Cabo San Lucas, at the southern end of the Baja peninsula, already were en route to the potential landing area and will be ready to secure the balloon once it lands and transport it back to the United States, Shope said.
Also present at the Friday briefing were Leonid Tiukhtyaev’s wife, Irinia, and their daughter, Margarita Shmidt.
“Leonid calls me once or twice a day from the balloon and reports on how they are doing and their well being,” Irina Tiukhtyaev said through a translator. “The first couple of days were very tough despite preparation, and it was very difficult to move and operate during that time. But afterward, it became easier and now they don’t use oxygen as much and have gotten used to the conditions.”
Irina Tiukhtyaev told the crowd gathered outside the mission control room that she and Leonid have been together for almost 40 years and have “done everything together, traveled together, written books and worked together — but I am very afraid of flying,” she said to laughter.
Shmidt told the crowd that her children, ages 7 and 5, missed their grandfather and wanted to be there to greet him when he lands. Told they couldn’t go because they didn’t have tickets, the children reminded her that there were enough balloons in the house to inflate and fly there.
On Thursday shortly before 3 p.m., Bradley, of Albuquerque, and Tiukhtyaev, of Moscow, tied the existing 5,208mile distance record and surpassed it by 1 percent just over two hours later. On Friday at about 7:30 a.m., they broke the 137-hour duration record.
The distance and duration numbers still have to be verified by ballooning authorities in the United States and Europe before being entered into the official record books. The process could take up to one year.
Also reflecting on this week’s feat was Louis Abruzzo, whose father, Ben Abruzzo, was among the crew that set those long-standing records in 1978 and 1981.
“I hope Troy and his partner have a safe landing, and I know if my father was here he’d be cheering them on,” he said in a telphone interview Friday.
Louis Abruzzo, 59, president of Sandia Peak Ski and Tram and a licensed balloon pilot, said he was following the progress of the Two Eagles pilots with a twinge of sadness that the 37-year-old duration and the 34-year-old distance records have been broken.
“Of course, you think about it, but the flight my father took in 1978 in Double Eagle II was to be the first to cross the Atlantic in a gas balloon, retracing the 1927 flight of Charles Lindbergh, and the 1981 flight in Double Eagle V was to be the first to cross the Pacific in a gas balloon,” he said.
“Nothing will change those firsts. The records just came, but that really wasn’t the point of the flights. The fact that they stood for 37 years and 34 years is amazing.”
Ben Abruzzo was killed in a 1985 crash of a small airplane in Albuquerque.