Reviews Reviews
In modern ballooning there have been two holy grails: first to fly a balloon across the Atlantic, and second, to be the first to circumnavigate the world by balloon -- the former first envisioned in the 1830s and the latter in the 1980s.
Most of what we learn about adventure flights like these comes from media coverage. After the fact, participants will often write tomes that place the best spin on their accomplishments. Seldom do we get an insider’s view of what really transpires.
Just Wind by Bill Armstrong brings us not one but two adventures. Not just the story, the inside details of very challenging endeavors. Armstrong, an accomplished journalist as well as a veteran record setting balloonist himself, didn’t have to reconstruct the stories after the fact. He was an integral part of both teams. This rare glimpse from the inside is what makes Just Wind a riveting read.
Tom Gatch’s Light Heart was a cluster of scientific balloons. With little aviation or balloon experience, he cobbled together a major aviation attempt on a shoestring budget with help from friends, a catalyst for disaster. Consider that manned long distance balloon flight was still just a dream in the early 1970s. Little weather data or even solid forecasting was available. Gatch and the other early trans-Atlantic aeronauts were inventing the wheel of long distance balloon flight.
Armstrong provides us with an enlightening insight to one man’s solo attempt at glory. He labored to build a system and a team that would carry him safely across the Atlantic.
Gatch didn’t succeed, and we will never know why. But Armstrong gives us a road map to the problems he encountered with a low budget project where there is almost non-existent prior information. The logistical and operational challenges that Gatch faced are lessons for those yet to come to learn from.
As Armstrong relates Gatch’s life and his attempt we long for him to succeed. An underdog, the good guy. He took a calculated risk. Did he err? With the technology available to Gatch in 1974, would you have tried to make the flight?
Twenty years later equipment and information make an Atlantic crossing attempt look like a Sunday morning pleasure flight. The attention of adventure balloonists has turned to trying to be the first around the globe. Among the early contenders is an arrogant, inexperienced balloonist by the name of Larry Newman. Newman bought his way into the successful Double Eagle II trans-Atlantic flight. He was part of the first trans-Pacific flight team, Double Eagle V.
Newman’s Earthwinds project was well financed. Undoubtedly riding the coattails of his association with the late Ben Abruzzo, Newman raised millions of dollars and made numerous high profile attempts to be the first around the world. Each flight attempt ended quickly in failure.
While the balloon community has speculated at great length over whether or not Newman’s balloon system designs could ever succeed, it is his mismanagement that dooms the attempts before they ever get off the ground.
Again, Armstrong provides us with a unique perspective: an insider’s view of a project that is fraught with infighting and little solid vision. The cast of characters continually entertains the reader as they waste away large sums of money.
The logistical and management case study lessons the Earthwinds section present are worth the price of the book by themselves.
Just Wind is about two very different people and two very different balloon projects. Armstrong has provided a spellbinding read. From each we gain knowledge in planning and human behavior. Add this book to your balloon library. You will not regret it.
-- Tom Hamilton, editor, BALLOON LIFE MAGAZINE
January 2005
Bill Armstrong, a former reporter and a long-time balloon pilot offers an insider's perspective on two pioneering American ballooning projects. In 1974, Tom Gatch took off from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in Light Heart, a cluster balloon, intending to be the first to cross the Atlantic. He disappared mid-ocean and no trace of him or the balloon was ever found.
In the 1990s, Larry Newman's Earthwinds project aimed to make the first round-the-world flight. Despite numerous attempts, the double, hour-glasss shaped balloon never made it outside the borders of the USA.
Gatch's flight was self-financing and low key. Newman's attempts were enormously expensive and heavily marketed.
Both felt that the pressurised type of scientific balloons were they key to success, as they could stabilise their flights at a fixed height. They both believed that their individual designs would eliminate the age-old problem experienced by long-distance balloonists -- balancing the resources of gas and ballast.
Twenty years apart, both invited Armstrong to publicise their projects. In this book he answers many outstanding questions: what motivated these men? How did they carry out their work and what became of their efforts?
There were many parallels in their stories. Newman succeeded in crossing the Atlantic four years after Gatch failed. The first cicumnavigation of the globe was successfully achieved four years after Newman failed.
The book also reflects the amount of time spent on each project with Gatch's Light Heart taking up the first 80 pages and Earthwinds hogging more than 200. But both stories are fascinating. Gatch used a cluster of ten super-pressure helium balloons and a sealed capsule of his own design. Newman used a wholly-new double balloon -- with a helium balloon for lift above the sealed capsule (which he designed himself) and a pressurised balloon hanging benath for ballast. Gatch flew alone; Newman's balloon carried three different people on each attempt.
Armstrong takes us behind the scenes to give us a clue to what ultimately could have caused each attempt to fail. He shows us the flaws of Gatch's plans, his dismissal of any need to land in water, his brush-off of the Canadian air traffic controllers, his concession to fly higher than he had initially intended.
He also shows us Newman's single-minded drive, his treatment of his crew, the in-fighting and hasty decision-making and the publicity driven mistakes made by the Earthwinds contingent.
We learn a lot of the technical detail and organisation that goes into such an enormous undertaking and see what conflicts can arise when the stress gets too much. Over the years, Neweman dismissed hundreds of volunteers and staff. He fell out with his project managers, technical experts and his crew and he suffered health problems. Finally he alienated too many sponsors and that was the end of the story.
Just Wind is a tale of lofty ambitions, of people who have bitten off too much to chew but who are driven by their dream to be the first, to fly the furthest, no matter what the cost. Newman's Earthwinds project stacked up millions of dollars but Gatch paid the price with his life.
-- Liz Meek, editor, Aerostat
In the quest for ultimate achievement--the scaling of the highest peak or a descent to the deepest ocean trench, for example--even heroic efforts often fall short of victory. The losers, alas, usually end up as forgotten footnotes to history.
But monumental failures can be as fascinating as successes. Although Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay went into the record books in 1953 as the first climbers to conquer Mount Everest, climbing fans will forever remember an earlier failure: the fatal attempt on Everest's summit in 1924 by George Leigh Mallory, who disappeared a few hundred yards short of the mountain's mist-shrouded peak.
Bill Armstrong's Just Wind brilliantly chronicles two of ballooning's magnificent failures--the ill-fated 1974 attempt by Col. Tom Gatch to be the first balloonist to cross the Atlantic Ocean, and the struggle by Larry Newman and his Earthwinds balloon team two decades later to circle the earth non-stop.
As a long-duration balloon pilot himself, Mr. Armstrong was a close friend of Col. Gatch. He also served as spokesman for the Earthwinds group, and his insider's perspective endows this book with rare technical details and insights into the sometimes bitter human conflicts that often characterize big-league ballooning.
For any reader awakened to the heady thrill of long-distance ballooning, this book is a must.
-- Malcolm W. Browne, The New York Times
Although there have been many books about ballooning, none of them detail the failed expeditions of aeronauts Tom Gatch and Larry Newman. In his new book, Bill Armstrong, himself a balloonist, chronicles what went wrong with their flights.
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.
-- Bill Slocum, Greenwich Magazine
The Greenwich Magazine feature review of JUST WIND appears in the October 2004 issue. Full text of review
As an author, Armstrong brings unique credentials to the telling of these stories, calling on both his ballooning experiences and his unique position as Media Director for both projects. The result is an incredibly detailed accounting not just of the day-to-day operations, but also of the (until now) unseen conflicts between crews, staffers, volunteers, sponsors, media and others. Through his own personal observations Armstrong also opens a window into the souls of these two adventurers.
JUST WIND is a must read for any student of lighter-than-air flight for its historical value alone. Coupled with its unique behind-the-scenes view, the reader is rewarded with not only rare technical detail but also with a true sense of the human conflict and drama that most certainly must have been a part of all of the attempts to be first across the Atlantic, and then first around the world.
In the end JUST WIND is a well-written, factual account of two remarkable ballooning expeditions where once again, drawn by the siren's song of adventure, man accepted the challenge of the unknown to expand his frontier of knowledge, even if among the consequences were failure and, ultimately, death.
-- Glen Moyer, editor, BALLOONING
Bill Armstrong provides a compelling look from the inside at the dreams and efforts of two men to expand the world of ballooning.
His book is the definitive and detailed inside story of two aerial expeditions and the men and women behind those dreams. It is a book for those who care about expanding aerial frontiers and humans working to overcome challenges.
-- Bob Downing, Akron Beacon Journal.
As an experienced balloonist himself, Bill Armstrong brings unique credentials to the telling of these sagas. He successfully combines a strong factual account of events with his personal observations on the motives and methods of those who sought to make ballooning history. JUST WIND fills an important gap in the chronicle of balloon history in America, and I highly recommend it.
-- Eric Brothers, editor, Buoyant Flight