1990 News Abstracts
BALLOON LIFE, October, 1990:
p. 24 -

THE MAN IN THE RED BANDANNA:
Joe Kittinger, Redneck Fighter Pilot and World Class Balloonist

by Glen Moyer

        His resume says it all. "Joe Kittinger has been flying aircraft
since 1949... Command pilot with 11,000 hours of flight time in 62
different types of aircraft..."

        Further reading brings you to the section on world records where
you learn that Joe Kittinger has made the world's highest parachute jump
(from 102,800 feet), that he has the record for the longest freefall (4
minutes and 36 seconds), that he was the first man to exceed the speed of
sound without an aircraft or space vehicle (during the just mentioned
freefall), that he has made the most high altitude balloon flights of
anyone in history (including to altitudes of 75,000 - 76,000 - 86,000 -
96,000 - and 102,800 feet), that he holds a distance record for AA6 & AA7
gas balloons (2,001 miles in 72 hours), that he also holds the distance
record AA10, 11, 12 and 13 gas balloons (3,543 miles in 86 hours), that
he has been awarded two Montgolfier Diplomas and finally that he was the
first man to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean in a balloon. Impressive.

        To say that Joe Kittinger has made an historic flight in his
lifetime is the essence of understatement.  Every time he steps into - or
in some cases out of - an aircraft, he seems to make history. But who is
this man in the red bandanna?  Another writer once said of Kittinger,
"Roll Chuck Yeager and Evel Knievel into one and you get an idea of Joe
Kittinger's thirst for adventure."  After my brief visit with him, l
would add a third name to that list, Indiana Jones. For it seems that no
matter what the danger or personal peril facing him, Joe Kittinger always
manages to reach into an invisible haversack and pull out a winning hand.
No guts, no glory? Joe Kittinger has plenty of both.

A CHILDHOOD DREAM

        Joe Kittinger lives today in his boyhood home of Orlando, Florida
where he is "Vice President of Flight Operations and Other Things" for
Rosie O'Grady's Flying Circus. And what, you ask, is a flying circus?

        "Rosie O'Grady's Flying Circus is the aerial promotion arm of a
dining & entertainment complex here called Church Street Station.  We
skywrite and we banner tow every day here in the Orlando area," Kittinger
explains. "You know we have about 20 million tourists a year that come
to Orlando, through Disney and Sea World, and our purpose is to advertise
our Church Street Station.  We get about 3-1/2 million people a year
through Church Street Station and most of them are attributable to our
aerial advertising.  We have three airplanes that we fly everyday, two and
three times a day.  We fly every day except Christmas day.  That's the
Flying Circus."

        "In conjunction with the flying circus we have hot air balloons
and we do hot air balloon flights too," Kittinger continues. "We have
three Aerostar balloons and we fly about 1,500 people a year on
champagne balloon flights. As a matter of fact, the balloon flying has
been here as part of the Rosie O'Grady Flying Circus for 15 years.  We're
very proud of the flights, we have a lot of fun doing it. After the
flight we take everybody to Lilly Marlene's restaurant and we have a
lovely champagne breakfast right in the complex, so we are constantly
promoting."  Perhaps we should add P.T. Barnum to that list of descriptive
names?

        Like so many men of his time, born in the Golden Age of Aviation,
Joe Kittinger has always wanted to fly. "I'm one of those typical stories
about a kid whose first thoughts were of flying," says Kittinger. "I grew
up here in Orlando and I used to get on my bicycle and ride about five
miles out to the airport and sniff the roses, stare at the airplanes,
wipe the struts down and just dream about being a pilot. Then I'd ride
back home and think about it some more. I just had that dream and I just
kept working at it; I just worked, worked, and worked."

        And the work paid off.  By the early 1960's Joe Kittinger had
joined the ranks of those who were pushing the outside edge of the
envelope, reaching to explore the high frontier.  He had become one of
those who had "the right stuff" - a military test pilot.

        Many of his colleagues of the time would go on to become
household names. Sheppard, Cooper, Slayton and others. Kittinger might
very well have become one of this country's original seven astronauts
had it not been for his devotion to the task at hand, a series of
experimental high altitude parachute jumps. Then another obstacle arose,
the Vietnam War. As a military fighter pilot, Kittinger felt a simple, yet
honor-bound duty to serve, so he volunteered

        He was on his third tour of duty, with 483 combat missions to
his credit, when his F4 Phantom jet was knocked down by an air-to-air
missile in the heat of a dogfight. Kittinger bailed out and fell right
into the waiting arms of the North Vietnamese, beginning an 11 month stay
as a "guest" at the "Hanoi Hilton."  Released in a 1973 prisoner exchange,
Kittinger retired from the Air Force soon after and returned to his home
in Orlando.  It was there that he would launch his civilian career,
including his involvement in sport ballooning. "In 1978 when I got out of
the Air Force, I came back to Orlando and met a fellow by the name of Bob
Snow who owned Church Street Station," says Kittinger. "He said he had
balloons and airplanes and that if T was willing to fly them to please do
so.  Well, I immediately got checked out in his airplanes and started
flying his hot air balloons, so really I got started in sport balloons as
soon as I got out of the Air Force in '78."

        "My first gas balloon flight (post military) was in 1979.1 was
asked by Dewey Reinhard to be his co-pilot and he and I were in the
first Gordon Bennett Balloon Race put on by Tom Heinsheimer. At the end
of the '79 race Bob Snow and I got together, both from Orlando, both
interested in aviation, both of us aviators and he asked me about our
collaborating and flying the Gordon Bennett from then on.  So, I put
together the equipment and we started flying together." That partnership
is still in place today.

        Kittinger would go on to win the GBBR three consecutive times to
retire the trophy to his personal possession. He remembers the last of
those three wins as "one of the hairiest damn flights I've ever been on
in my life."

        "It started off as scheduled with my weather guy saying I'd
probably go across the Gulf of California.   Everything was going pretty
much the way it was programmed," Kittinger recalls, "and I had blown out
over the Gulf of California about 9 o' clock in the morning then got
right over the middle of it and stopped!  Absolutely stopped. I went up, I
went down, I went up and I couldn't get any wind whatsoever, nothing. I
was becalmed over this tremendous body of water and no way to go in any
direction. You talk about a nightmare for a balloonists, that's it; to be
over a body of water with no communications because, you know, in Mexico.
. . Mexico is like being on the moon, there are no communications, no
nothing, you're at the end of the world when you go over Mexico."

        As the sun began to set Kittinger still wasn't moving.  Not
only was the lack of wind a concern but so was the temperature of the
water below.  At about 58 degrees, Kittinger knew that he could survive
for only about 15-20 minutes if he had to ditch the balloon. Another
concern was for the safety of his longtime girlfriend Sherry Reed who was
also on board the balloon.  As night began to fall, Kittinger seriously
considered climbing into the balloon's rigging and cutting the basket
loose. The weight of the basket lost, he hoped the envelope would climb
to a higher altitude where a favorable wind might be found.

        "I guess God was with us," he says, "because at the last minute
we drifted over this island.  I had little or no ballast left and it was
just like the surface of the moon. The name of the island was Guardian
Angel Island and it looks just like the surface of the moon, particularly
at night.  Imagine making a night landing on an island where the surface
is rugged with rocks and mountains and having one chance to get down.  I
ended up landing about 1/4 mile from the ocean.  I made the best landing I
ever made in my whole life."

A GRAND ADVENTURE

        In a lifetime filled with adventure, it's hard to say which was
best, most memorable, most thrilling, the most fulfilling.  For Joe
Kittinger it's easy - his solo crossing of the Atlantic.

        The popular version of the story has it that Kittinger dreamed up
the idea of a long distance balloon flight while in solitary confinement
at the "Hanoi Hilton"  That, he says, is partially correct.

        "The idea originated with me really back in 1958 when I was
stationed at Wright Field," says Kittinger.  "I actually went to a buddy
of mine in the Air Force weather department and I asked him to look at
the world charts to see if it was possible to fly across the Atlantic
ocean and around the world in a balloon.  About a month later he came back
and said that his analysis indicated there were certain times of year it
could be done."

        "So the thought had already been there for all these years.  So
when I was in solitary confinement I went through all these mental
gymnastics of designing the balloon, designing the payload, the
communications, etc. Then I would go through these flights mentally,
from all of the preparation, all the checklists, and I would take off
and fly it. That was my entertainment when I was a POW."

        Once back in the States, Kittinger contacted Ed Yost and told him
of the idea.  Yost felt he could produce a sponsor for the flight and a
meeting in New York followed.

        "I went there and made the presentation and they agreed with it,"
recalls Kittinger, "then they said, you've got to take somebody with
you." Kittinger declined, insisting he wanted to make the flight solo,
for two reasons. First he felt confident in his abilities to fly alone
and second, he didn't want to risk someone else's life.  Had the sponsor
agreed to a solo flight, history might have been written differently.

        Kittinger remained committed and drew even more confidence from
Ed Yost's near successful crossing in 1976 in the Silver Fox.  Finally, in
1984, Kittinger was ready.

        Launching on the evening of September 14th, Kittinger was to fly
a balloon built by Ed Yost;  smaller, yet similar in design to the Double
Eagle II, another Yost-built balloon which had been the first to
successfully cross the Atlantic six years earlier with a crew of three,
Maxie Anderson, Ben Abruzzo and Larry Newman. Kittinger recalls purpose
of the flight...

        "First of all," he says, "our objective was to go as far as we
could go.  Our objective was not to cross the Atlantic Ocean.  Our
objective was to cross the Atlantic Ocean and to go as far as I could go.
I could have landed that morning (September 18, 1984) and been content
with crossing the Atlantic but that wasn't the object, the object was to
go as far as we could go."

        Kittinger not only crossed the Atlantic, but continued to fly on,
on towards the coast of Italy, having already set a speed record for the
Atlantic crossing by balloon.  Now he was after distance.  But Mother
Nature was not willing to cooperate.

        "Because of the pressure patterns, I was going to start hooking
back to the north which meant that pretty soon I was going to reach an
apex of distance and I wasn't going any further, as a matter of fact I
was going to start backing up," Kittinger explains. "As I approached the
coast of Italy a low pressure area started pulling me into it. There were
tremendous thunderstorms out over the mountains and I had no ballast
left. I had been flying for 3-1/2 days. I couldn't go over the mountains
or the bad thunderstorms so I had to land where I was. There wasn't any
choice of me going ahead even if I would probably have had to land
anyway."

        Where he was, was Cairo Montenotte, Italy.  Out of ballast and
with thunderstorms ahead and a forest below, Kittinger took what he
considered the best option. . . land in the trees.

        "The trees were very high and because the wind was blowing very,
very fast, about 30 knots, the trees were a damned good place to land
because you brush across the top of the trees and get deeper and deeper
into them, and that's actually what happened. So even though I landed in
the mountains and the trees it was probably the best place for me to
land, particularly since all I had in front of me were higher mountains
and a thunderstorm."

        "Unfortunately, I hit one tree which knocked me out of the
gondola and I fell about ten feet landing on a rock and breaking my
foot."  A painful end to an otherwise grand adventure.

THE ULTIMATE CHALLENGE

        Few realized it then, and perhaps many still do not know that the
solo crossing of the Atlantic was merely a warm-up for Kittinger's
ultimate challenge - a solo flight around the world by balloon.

        "First of all it would be a grand adventure solo, " says
Kittinger, "I mean, that would really be the ultimate flight, to do it
solo, and number two, you don't need two people to do it.  The main reason
is because in a gas balloon, once the sun sets, the balloon gets very
stable, extremely stable from about 10 at night to about sun up. So what
I would do would be to have an automatic flight control system and an
emergency system and at ten o clock at night I'd go to sleep.  I would
sleep until 3 or 4 o' clock in the morning or when the sun started up.
Physically there'd be no problem doing it solo, and to me it would be a
much greater adventure.  And, it would be much safer to do it with one
person rather than two because with two you've got to double the life
support systems, double survival equipment, you've got to double
everything.  To me the way to do it is solo and I'm a fighter pilot and
I'm used to doing things by myself.  Some people are bomber pilots and
they're used to doing things with a herd of people, I'm not; I like to do
these things by myself."

        Kittinger's had the flight planned for several years now. It
would be in a gas balloon of about 2-million cubic feet in volume
carrying an 8-foot diameter pressurized gondola. The flight would
be made at altitudes of near 35-40,000 feet to take advantage of jet
stream winds. Although insistent that the flight be made solo, Kittinger
is equally insistent that one man be on his support team - Bob Rice of
Weather Services, Inc.  Rice is, according to Kittinger, simply the best
meteorologist in the world. It was Rice who served as meteorologist for
Yost's Atlantic attempt, for the Double Eagle II crossing and for
Kittinger's solo crossing among other historic flights.  Unlike the Jules
Verne adventure, Kittinger says the journey should only take 10-12 days.

        After all of his lifelong successes, why would Joe Kittinger want
to tempt fate yet again?  "I just enjoy adventure, I enjoy challenges, I
enjoy working with people that make these things happen," he says. "You
know, I have a wonderful team of people that I work with.  That's what
makes it.  People make adventure, people make it fun.  To fly across the
Atlantic and then be able to sit down with a glass of champagne with my
buddies, the people who made it happen, that's what the enjoyment is. That's
what adventure is about. People make it possible."  And maybe a lucky red
bandanna?

        "Oh, I'm just a redneck from Orlando, Florida and all rednecks
wear red bandannas," Kittinger chuckles.  "When I was flying fighter
airplanes, when I was doing test flights, when I was flying experimental
airplanes, everybody else was wearing silk scarfs, I wore a red bandanna
'cause I'm basically just a redneck fighter pilot."



Sources:

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