Review in 
Review in October 2004
By Bill Slocum
Tom Gatch speaks to his friend across a chasm of decades, his voice distorted by radio frequency static, audiotape hiss and the passage of time. Gatch was going to be the Lindbergh of ballooning, a hero to an age that had stopped believing in heroes. Instead in a matter of hours, the intrepid balloonist would be lost in that nether region where a boy’s dreams turn into nightmare.
“I don’t see any lights at all,” Gatch is saying on the tape.
Seven miles above the earth in a wine-dark sky, Gatch believed he was starting to cross the Atlantic. Reaching Europe would have made him the first balloonist to cross the ocean, and in a solo flight at that. Few people today recognize his name, even within ballooning circles. But if he had succeeded, Tom Gatch would have become the Magellan of the Watergate era.
William Armstrong is playing the recording today in the den of his Cos Cob home. As he listens to his own voice from thirty years ago – the voice of a young and audibly eager press aide who squeezes sound bites from Gatch during the flight in February 1974 – Armstrong is pensive and his eyes are red-rimmed, but whether from weariness or something else is hard to tell.
Gatch's voice is curt, impatient: “Is that the end of your transmission?”
Then you hear young Armstrong respond by asking if Gatch’s oxygen is okay. “It was like he didn’t want to stop talking,” says Armstrong as he stops the tape of the transmission.
Gatch would be silent soon, silent forever, His craft, Light Heart, held aloft by nine super pressure helium balloons (a tenth had burst just over an hour into the flight), sailed nearly halfway across the Atlantic before contact was lost less than twenty-four hours after lift-off. The last sighting, two days after its final received transmission, was by a passing ocean freighter, whose crew reported Light Heart drifting limp and ghostly a few hundred feet above the water, well under its target altitude.
Light Hear remains lost at sea. For years, its history has been obscured by time and overshadowed by the successful attempts of those who followed. Now Armstrong is trying to correct the oversight. His recently published book, Just Wind (iUniverse), tells the story of Gatch’s interrupted journey and the man who felt compelled to make it. Armstrong also presents a second narrative, a veritable comedy of errors by comparison, of an ill-fated effort from 1990 to 1994 to circumnavigate the globe in another balloon aircraft, Earthwinds.
Vaunting ambition and ultimate failure are the common threads of the two stories, that and Armstrong, who handled media relations for both expeditions. In his book, he shares his unvarnished version of what happened to the two balloons. Sometimes shocking, occasionally saddening, even funny, Just Wind is the 350-page fruit of Armstrong’s zealous passion for the sport of ballooning.
“Somehow, this idea of flying in a lighter-than-air machine has always been with me,” he says. “When I was in my early teens, I had this desire for getting a cluster of balloons and flying away by myself. My parents were sensible people, and said, ‘Before you do that, get someone else who’s done it, get some lessons and find out how it’s done’.”
It would be more than a decade, February 1973, before Armstrong got to ride on a balloon. He was twenty-four years old by that time, and it was at a balloon rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico, national Mecca for serious airheads.
“I loved it,” he recalls. “I knew I would, and I did. That was with a pilot from Michigan. We went right to 5,000 feet above the ground, getting up high because it was a light-wind day. Albuquerque is nestled in a valley between two mountain ranges, nice and flat in between. You get the cold, calm conditions set up in the valley. You can fly in a very light wind, go high, get a little breeze going on top of a mountain, then come down with the wind cascading off the side of the valley. You can actually fly what they call a ‘box,’ which is a pattern where you go up, over down, and back, ending up exactly where you start.”
Normal winds, unfettered by such topography, do not allow for these navigational flourishes, leaving balloonists at the mercy of the elements. Even more than hang gliding and soaring, ballooning is a form of transportation where steering and speed are beyond one’s control, That’s one reason ballooning attracts more than its share of daredevils.
“Most of us are extroverts, for whom the word headstrong would apply,” admits Glen Moyer, editor of Ballooning Magazine.
Malcolm Browne, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who occasionally covered major ballooning expeditions for The New York Time, put it this way: “All helium heads are a little crazy anyway. There are a lot better and faster and safer ways to travel.”
One of the danger-seekers Armstrong would meet in Albuquerque in 1973 was Tom Gatch, who had just completed his requirements for a pilot’s license, and would help Armstrong do the same. The two men lived in Washington, D.C., Gatch as an Army Reserve officer and Armstrong as a government PR officer. Their shared love of ballooning made them friends, and not long into their relationship, Gatch began to outline his deepest wish: to cross the Atlantic alone in a balloon.
In the early seventies, cross-oceanic travel by air was, of course, commonplace. Lighter-than-air craft known as dirigibles had done it. These motorized balloons transited the Atlantic even before Lindbergh’s 1927 flight. But by 1974, no unmotorized craft had made such a journey. Earlier that decade, three adventurers attempted the flight from Long Island and were never seen again. Gatch proposed to succeed where they had failed and asked Armstrong to handle the publicity.
“As he described it and the people he was contacting, it made sense,” Armstrong recalls. “Obviously, it was a bold thing, and an opportunity for me to help him make news. The opportunity presented by a great adventure like this, something nobody’s ever done, to be the person responsible for telling his story, I couldn’t pass that up.”
Armstrong had been around big news stories before. In May 1970, when he was the editor of his college daily at Kent State University in Ohio, which he chose for its proximity to blimp airbases around Akron, four students protesting the Vietnam War were shot dead by National Guardsmen, sparking a national furor and a cultural pivot point. From there, Armstrong went to work for the Republican National Committee during the 1972 elections, answering directly to George H.W. Bush and chairman Bob Dole and rubbings shoulders with GOP legends of the future like Karl Rove.
Later, Armstrong’s flacking talents were used to handle a new national crisis brought on by the Arab oil embargo. Gas lines were becoming common, the White House Christmas tree was left unlit, and President Nixon formed an energy agency to address the crisis of diminishing resources. The Federal Energy Office, later to become the Department of Energy, fielded a constant barrage of press queries about the scarcity of oil and gas. Armstrong had his hands full as one of four spokesmen. “I didn’t have a lot of free time,” he recalls.
Armstrong worked nights and weekends writing press releases for the launch, which took place President’s Day weekend, 1974. Armstrong had sold the story well: A thousand strong, the crowd gathered around a klieg-lit field in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A team of volunteers, including magazine publisher Malcolm Forbes, helped cart out Gatch’s tiny capsule gondola and its ten balloons. Reporters listened as Gatch and Armstrong had their radio exchange; and Walter Cronkite covered the launch on the next day’s CBS Evening News.
By then, Gatch was already out of radio range of the U.S. mainland and presumably following his path to glory. Even with one balloon gone, he was still able to remain in the stratosphere; by noon the following day, he was making sporadic contact with passing commercial aircraft.
Then he vanished without a trace. What happened is a mystery Armstrong chews over in his book. Some of his conclusions: Gatch’s airtight capsule used a self-made oxygen regeneration system that had not been tested; he had not practiced emergency evacuation procedures, including the seaworthiness of the capsule; he had only about twenty hours of flight time registered, including training runs, for a voyage that, if successful, would likely have lasted three times that.
Don Overs, who helped found an aeronautical club in Akron for which a teenage Armstrong had volunteered his labors, talked with Gatch the day before the launch and later studied the voyage.
“In a nutshell, he lost that one balloon, and he didn’t have enough ballast to compensate for it,” Overs says. A loss in altitude, he explains, had a domino effect on the remaining pressure balloons, which became flabby and less buoyant as warm days turned to cool night. “If everything went right, it should have succeeded. But it was the kind of flight where it could have been just one thing that went wrong, and it would have failed.”
In Just Wind, Armstrong concludes his account of Gatch’s journey with a note of self-recrimination: “Those of us who conferred with Tom while he was planning his trip frankly share at least a portion of the responsibility for his loss.”
In researching material for the book, Armstrong examined Gatch’s early life with the help of family papers and documents loaned by Gatch’s sisters. He discovered a man haunted by the need to live up to his father’s heroic legacy from World War II and shaped by an uncompromisingly rugged upbringing. Gatch’s father tried unsuccessfully to cure his son’s fear of the water by tethering him to a motorboat and dragging him across Chesapeake Bay. Armstrong’s portrait of Gatch is troubling and pathetic: a man who put a greater value on dying bravely than on living well.
At one point in his book, Armstrong records Gatch’s comment about the dangers of the trip: “What a glorious way to go.” Still, Armstrong doesn’t believe the attempt was an elaborate form of suicide. “There was never any question he wanted to succeed,” Armstrong says.
Gatch’s story was kept active for a few weeks after his disappearance while Armstrong and others pushed for a search-and-rescue operation and chased leads that went nowhere. Then Gatch simply receded from public memory. There were some people who remembered the tragic story; most didn’t, not even balloonists. “We tend to forget about history, unless we are reminded of it,” notes Tom Hamilton, editor of Balloon Life magazine.
Michael Fairbanks, whose family is described as the First Family of Ballooning for the post-World War II exploits, recalls keeping a large photo album of his friend Gatch in a box for twenty-five years: “I don’t know why but I didn’t talk about Tom or share the photographs and story with the balloon community until a few years ago . . . . Tom was a very good friend, and his disappearance was a very sad time for the entire family.”
In 1978, Double Eagle II, with a three-man crew that included a young radio operator named Larry Newman, became the first unmotorized, lighter-than-air craft to cross the Atlantic.
When Larry Newman approached Armstrong to handle publicity for his early 1990s attempt to circumnavigate the globe via stratosphere in the lighter-than-air craft Earthwinds, he did so with a warning: “I’m not an easy person to work with, so don’t take things personally.” “I can’t say he didn’t warn me,” Armstrong says today, with a laugh.
Besides Tom Gatch, Larry Newman is the other main character of Just Wind, equal parts King Lear and Tony Montana. Frittering away volunteers and funds with snow-blower intensity, Newman seems the principal architect of his own ruin, as his attempts to pilot the first balloon to circle the globe disintegrate into chaotic madness and recrimination. An alliance with British record and airline tycoon Richard Branson collapses as Newman takes to snubbing his would-be benefactor. Only the check-writing activities of hotel magnate Barron Hilton, chief Earthwinds sponsor and a tireless believer in Newman, keep the project from dying a proper and natural death. There’s a sense of schadenfreude in observing Newman’s failure, and it’s easy to chuckle along with the cocktail waitress who remarks of the final, saggy attempt: “He got it up, but he couldn’t sustain it.”
Newman fired Armstrong midway through the endeavor. “Eventually, Larry regarded him as a spy in the ranks,” offered Malcolm Browne, who covered Earthwinds for The Times. “Newman began to realize that Bill was planning to write a book, and that it would be a book he wouldn’t seek Newman’s approval to write.”
Armstrong insists there was no bitter intent toward Larry Newman in writing Just Wind, that he was just calling it as he saw it. Don Overs, who left Earthwinds after his own disagreement with Newman, is one of several Earthwinds witnesses backing Bill Armstrong’s account. He says of Newman: “He didn’t want to talk about technicalities, especially if there were problems.”
The most lurid tale Armstrong tells of his former boss involves the final launch in January 19784, ostensibly to fly around the world but apparently just to meet sponsorship agreements. Browne is described having breakfast with one Newman associate who lets him in on the big secret: Earthwinds is not going to do anything more than cross into the next state.
Browne confirms the story. “Larry ended an interesting career in ballooning on a very low note,” he says. Browne believes Just Wind is not only accurate in its details of Earthwinds but also a compelling tale. “I’ve never read a book on ballooning as comprehensive as Bill’s,” he enthuses. The Light Heart and Earthwinds episodes are “not wholly comparable,” he adds, “but they shed light together on what ballooning is all about.”
Armstrong spent the next decade making some history of his own. While working as a stockbroker and serving in the Naval Reserve (where he is currently a Captain), he found time to continue his commitment to ballooning. In October 1985, he and his copilot Mike Emich flew from Akron to Northborough Massachusetts, in a balloon inflated with 19,000 cubic feet of hydrogen, breaking a distance record that had been set by the same-size balloon in 1922.
The journey included a harrowing swing 3,000 feet above Lake Erie. “At one point we saw lightning on the horizon,” Armstrong recalls. “Now lightning is to hydrogen as water is to the Wicked Witch of the West. We couldn’t land. There was no land. There was not much we could do. Fortunately, we were moving fast (the craft was in a 60-mph wind current) and we passed it.”
Armstrong stopped his more daring rides when he started having kids, but he still flies several times a year. Friend Bill Swersey recalls a trip they took on an experimental balloon of Armstrong’s own construction. “Usually a balloon basket is built for three or four people, but there’s only room for two on his, which he made with an aluminum frame,” Swersey says. “Frankly, I was nervous just watching him unpack it. But he inspires such confidence. He made me feel there was nothing to worry about.”
It was a balloon that carried Armstrong to Greenwich, during a race to Long Island in September 1979. Realizing the winds were not strong enough to carry his craft over the Sound and not wanting to risk losing his balloon envelope in the open water, Armstrong dropped down on a “spit of land” that turned out to be Tod’s point, touching down for the first time on what would become his hometown.
Armstrong knows of only one other Greenwich man involved in ballooning, as a member of a chase crew that follows balloons by car. But there are two female aspiring aeronauts based here: Armstrong’s oldest daughter, Sarah, a sophomore at Connecticut College, is working on her balloon pilot’s license, and his younger daughter, Anna, a junior at Greenwich High, plans on earning hers before graduation. His son, William III, is a fourth grader at the International School at Dundee, and although not on a pilot-license path yet, has flown with his father.
Ballooning editor Glen Moyer, who wrote a positive review of Just Wind, said the two-part story reminded him of the famous parallels drawn between the assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy. “While they were completely separate, and they happened in separate time frames, there were some amazing coincidences. Both were stratospheric attempts, using unusual balloon designs, and led by remarkably determined men.”
What Larry Newman makes of Just Wind is unclear. He was injured in a parachuting accident years ago and, by all accounts, is out of ballooning altogether. Hamilton of Balloon Life says he spoke to Newman a couple of years ago and found the adventurer a self-described changed man. “He openly admits he was a jerk then,” Hamilton says.
Bill Armstrong is still an active balloonist, when he is not working at his paying career as an executive with The Dilenschneider Group, a Manhattan-based public relations consulting firm. He talks about returning to his days of record-setting distance balloon flights, and helping another generation inherit the skies by encouraging his children’s exploits.
For the moment, he is focused on the success of Just Wind, not only as a culmination of years of effort but as a monument to the many friends he has made while ballooning, in particular one who never returned from his Atlantic crossing thirty years ago.
“I have shelves full of books on balloons, documenting all these great achievements, but none of them said a word about Tom Gatch,” he explains. “I always thought that he deserved a place on those shelves. Now he’s there.”
