Balky Balloon

"This damned thing has gone nuts!" One day last week that remark was radioed down to Earth from a crippled balloon high in the stratosphere. It represented the supreme frustration of three army officers marooned in a purple-black sky at 60,000 ft. Their rubberized gasbag, biggest ever, yawned with an enormous rip.

For months the most intensive preparations preceded the takeoff of the Explorer, second stratoflight in the U. S., seventh since Professor Auguste Piccard's in 1931.* Backed by the Army Air Corps and the National Geographic Society, the stratonauts planned not only to break the world's official altitude record (61,237 ft.) but to amass scientific data. Cost of the expedition was reported to be $1,000,000. In Moonlight Valley, a large natural amphitheatre in the Black Hills of South Dakota, the Explorer's crew had waited weeks for favorable weather. To inflate the envelope with 210,000 cu. ft. of hydrogen had taken nine hours. Perched on the surrounding cliffs, 35,000 spectators had watched all night while a ground crew of 120 U. S. cavalrymen, working under cinema floodlights, swung into place the airtight gondola with its ton of scientific apparatus and 4,200 Ib. of buckshot ballast. In climbed the crew: Major William E. Kepner (pilot & commander), onetime assistant navigator of the Los Angeles, winner of the 1928 Gordon Bennett international balloon race; Capt. Albert W. Stevens (scientific observer), famed aerial photographer; and Capt. Orvil A. Anderson, longtime lighter-than-airman.

The Explorer, resembling a gigantic exclamation point, took off at 5:45 a. m.. and behaved badly from the start. Sluggish, she took two hours to rise 16,000 ft., then dropped to 14,000 ft. and "stalled" for two hours. After developing what Major Kepner described as "a hell of a list," she began to rise rapidly and by mid-afternoon had reached 60,000 ft. There she balked.

Suddenly, for no good reason, the bottom of the bag ripped open with "a noise like a deep grunt." Leaking hydrogen, the Explorer bounced up & down for a half hour before she began to fall at a good clip. To bail out was impossible. "If we get out up here," radioed Major Kepner, "we will blow up like paper bags."

Plunging down 500 ft. a minute, the balloon ripped itself to shreds. At 12,000 ft. Major Kepner decided to abandon ship. First to leave the gondola was Capt. Anderson, at 5,000 ft. Capt. Stevens went next. Major Kepner waited until he was within 500 ft. of the ground before jumping with his parachute. All three landed safely. The gondola crashed on a farm near Loomis, Neb.

Said Capt. Stevens: "Everything worked perfectly except the balloon."

*First stratoflight was made in 1862 by two Britons, Glaisher & Coxwell, who landed safely after fainting at 37,000 ft.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.