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Days after Bert Padelt completed a history-making 2,852-mile balloon journey from Maine to Europe across the Atlantic Ocean, the whole experience still felt like a blur.
The closet-sized basket where he and his co-pilots endured torrential rain, snow and freezing temperatures was packed up, its voluminous canopy deflated, but the world record-holding American balloon builder couldn’t believe he had finally accomplished a lifelong dream.
“I kept waking up thinking, did this really happen?” Padelt said in an interview with the Bangor Daily News from Luxembourg, where the Atlantic Explorer landed on June 7. “It’s now starting to sink in, and it has turned out better than I ever thought it would.”
Padelt — who is from Pennsylvania — alongside fellow American Peter Cuneo and British explorer Alicia Hempleman-Adams, are now the first people to cross an ocean in a hydrogen-powered open-basket balloon, and just the 20th team ever to mount a successful trans-Atlantic balloon flight.
The trio spent more than 70 hours in the air after taking off from a Presque Isle field early June 4, traveling as fast as 90 miles an hour and as high as 25,000 feet as they navigated strong winds and a storm above the open ocean. They set down near the city of Diekirch in northeastern Luxembourg on a “very peaceful” morning, a stark contrast to the conditions they had faced earlier.
“It was almost like we were on another flight altogether,” Padelt said. “You could hear birds chirping, roosters crowing, cows mooing. You saw fog in the valleys, which was indicating calm winds. Our final hour in the air was an extremely peaceful, wonderful moment.”
The Atlantic Explorer set off from Presque Isle after hours of delays from high winds. The delay prevented the team from getting ahead of bad weather that would catch up to them later, Padelt speculated.
The first day went well, he said. All their equipment functioned perfectly and the balloon flew well. The team crossed New Brunswick, then Prince Edward Island over the first 12 hours, surpassing where the Atlantic Explorer had been forced down in its previous two attempts due to bad weather and a gas leak.
By that evening, they cleared Cape Breton Island and headed for Newfoundland, the last landmass before the open ocean. A few hours later, Padelt, Cuneo and Hempleman-Adams committed to the crossing and ventured out over the Atlantic.
Atmospheric conditions on the second day meant the team had to drop more ballast — jettisoning sand bags from the basket to gain altitude — than they wanted to.
“We basically knocked off two days of duration [of] ballast,” Padelt said. “But the saving grace is we knew that the speed was going to pick up, so we weren’t all that concerned.”
Then came the storm.
“It was a surprise,” Padelt said. “We knew the weather was there with the hopes that it was going to be south of us.”
With little more than a thin rain cover, the Atlantic Explorer battled heavy precipitation through the night. It rose into the clouds, where temperatures dropped as low as 17 degrees below zero and snow built up on top of the balloon, forcing it to sink. The snow turned to rain and then the process repeated itself.
“This continued probably for about four hours or so,” Padelt said. “But when the sun came up, it was a bright blue sky above us and [the storm] was beyond us.”
The pilots had projected a successful flight would take four to six days averaging around 35 miles per hour. But as the wind picked up and the sun beat down on the balloon the morning after the storm, the Explorer topped 90 miles per hour. The balloon crossed the open Atlantic Ocean in approximately 37 hours.
They passed over the beaches of Normandy along the French coast on the evening of June 6, the 82nd anniversary of the D-Day invasion, when the Allied forces used hydrogen powered barrage balloons to prevent German aircraft from attacking their position from a low altitude.
They flew inland overnight, crossing into Luxembourg as the sun rose on June 7, and landed in a field.
Besides being the first hydrogen-powered trans-Atlantic trip, the journey set a world distance record for the size and type of balloon. Hempleman-Adams, once the youngest person ever to visit the North Pole, also became the first woman to cross the Atlantic in a gas-powered balloon, and the second to do so in any type of balloon.
The balloon’s chase team reached the site within an hour. That group included Padelt’s wife, Joanie, with whom he built the Atlantic Explorer.
“All the times I’ve been thinking about this flight and how I wanted it to end, I wanted it to end with a stand-up landing with my wife there to see the balloon,” Padelt said. “The odds of that are very slim when you think about how far you’re flying … but as it turned out, it worked. And so when she arrived, there were some strong emotions, for sure.”
Members of the Cercle Luxembourgeois de l’Aérostation, a nearby balloon club, also arrived to help the crew deflate and pack up the balloon.
As their successful crossing drew attention, the royal family of Luxembourg invited the group to the Palais Grand-Ducal — the country’s royal palace. Padelt, Cuneo and the chase team met with the Grand Duke Henri, whom they presented with one of their final two bags of ballast from the flight.
“He was very, very interested in the flight and how it turned out,” Padelt said. “He was asking quite a few questions and so forth and went to great efforts to welcome us to Luxembourg.”
The crew headed back to the U.S. on Thursday, capping off an adventure Padelt had dreamt of since he was awed by the first trans-Atlantic balloon flight. That balloon, the Double Eagle II, launched from Presque Isle in 1978.
As the Atlantic Explorer took off from the same city last week, hidden in the canopy was a 1978 silver dollar, both a good luck charm and an homage to the Double Eagle II, as a new group of balloonists made history.
“I knew it would be hard. So there were no surprises,” Padelt said. “But the sense of reward afterwards is exactly the feeling I was looking for.”
