March 21, 1999
The first nonstop flight around the world by balloon came to an end in western Egypt. The pilots and sole passengers for this record-setting journey were 41-year-old psychiatrist Bertrand Piccard and 51-year-old English balloonist and former Royal Air Force pilot Brian Jones.
They landed the helium-and-hot-air balloon, which was named in honor of Swiss watchmaker Breitling, in an area of the Egyptian desert that is 50 miles (80.5 kilometers) north of the oasis settlement of Mut. (Piccard comes from a family with an especially notable pedigree in transportation; his grandfather Auguste piloted the first balloon to make it into the stratosphere and invented the bathyscaphe that took his son Jacques [Bertrand’s father] to the deepest point on Earth – the Mariana Trench in the Pacific.)
Piccard and Jones began their globe-circling flight in the balloon known as Breitling Orbiter 3 on March 1, 1999, in the Swiss village of Chȃteau-d’Œx. Heading south, they caught favorable winds in the vicinity of the equator and went on to pilot the 180-foot (55-meter)-tall balloon around the world from east to west. This flight took a total of 19 days, 21 hours, and 47 minutes to complete.
During the course of this flight, the Breitling Orbiter 3 soared up to 36,000 feet (10,973 meters) and moved as fast as 105 miles (169 kilometers) per hour. The Féderation Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), which monitors and maintains world records for aeronautical activities, calculated that – when subtracting various airborne twists and turns en route – Piccard and Jones traveled a total of 25,361 miles (40,814.6 kilometers).
“French novelist Jules Verne fantasized the exploit in a book called ‘Five Weeks in a Balloon,’” reported the Associated Press. “But Piccard and Jones did it in less than three, combining space-age technology with the oldest of human motivations: guts and a quest for glory.” The balloon’s bright orange gondola (shown in the accompanying photo) included two bunks; a toilet; and the instruments and controls that used Piccard and Jones for operating the entire craft.
After touching down in the desert on March 21, both men waited for more than seven hours before an Egyptian Army helicopter arrived to transport them to Mut. While describing the barren terrain where they landed as beautiful, Piccard also acknowledged that their time marooned there was not exactly stress-free due to the strong winds blowing through the region. “We had to run around the balloon with our knives to make holes to keep from being dragged across the desert,” he said after they arrived in Mut “The balloon is a bit of a mess.”
Piccard also looked ahead to the future. He asserted, “My next exploit will be something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, which is sit with my wife and daughters and father in front of a warm fireplace and tell them about this trip.”
Just a little over six months after the end of their milestone flight, Piccard and Jones were in Washington, D.C., for the donation of the balloon’s gondola for permanent display at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution. During this event, FAI officials presented the aviation pioneers with papers formally confirming that the flight set world records for both distance and duration.
Jones put all of the praise lavished upon both him and Piccard at the museum into perspective. He said, “When people use our names in the same sentence as John Glenn, Neil Armstrong and the Wright brothers, we still look over our shoulders to see what they’re talking about.” Jones added, “There is a sense of disbelief which pervades still and, I think, will last a long time.”
Photo Credit: Public Domain
For more information on the recording-setting flight of the Breitling Orbiter 3 in 1999, please check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breitling_Orbiter and https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=nwMzAAAAIBAJ&pg=6551%2C6104094
Transportation History 
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