The Race That Turned to Ruin
April 03, 2025 at 03:30PM
Nick Davidson | The Atavist Magazine | March 2025 | 2,300 words (8 minutes)
This is an excerpt from issue no. 161, “The Balloon That Fell From the Sky.”
ONE
The winds were fast and the skies clear for the two days and nights that Mike Wallace and Kevin Brielmann had been airborne. The Spirit of Springfield, Wallace’s 1,000-cubic-meter hydrogen-gas balloon, drifted eastward over Poland at around 5,000 feet. It was already the longest flight either pilot had endured. The Americans had launched from Wil, Switzerland, on Saturday, September 9, crossing Lake Constance in the moonlight alongside a muster of 14 other balloons representing seven nations.
Each balloon carried two copilots vying to prevail in the 1995 Coupe Aéronautique Gordon Bennett, ballooning’s oldest and most prestigious aeronautical race. The goal was to travel the farthest distance possible before landing. Only the world’s most daring and decorated aeronauts could claim a spot in the field. The race typically lasted one or two days, and occasionally stretched into a third. No Gordon Bennett balloon had ever flown a fourth night, but favorable weather and a stretch of newly opened airspace now made that feat attainable for the first time. “It was fabulous, and we knew it,” said Martin Stürzlinger, a member of the ground crew for a balloon called the D-Caribbean.
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By noon on Monday, September 11, the race’s third day, only ten of the 15 balloons remained aloft. The rest had flown as far as they could before landing in Austria, Germany, or Poland. From the air, Wallace and Brielmann knew only that their friends Alan Fraenckel and John Stuart-Jervis, who raced under the U.S. Virgin Islands flag, were still flying nearby in the D-Caribbean. The two teams had remained within a couple dozen miles of each other for the race’s duration. Riding the same winds, they’d been in frequent radio contact to check in, share weather data, and trade friendly banter. On the ground, Wallace and Brielmann’s chase crew, tasked with keeping tabs on their whereabouts and relaying weather information, navigated a maze of Polish roads, ready to retrieve them wherever they landed.
Fraenckel radioed Wallace early that evening. “What altitude are you guys flying?” Fraenckel asked. The two men were close friends—they had raced together as copilots—and they used a private radio frequency to communicate. Wallace told him that they were plodding along at four or five thousand feet and struggling with a tenuous inversion, a stable air mass where warm air sits atop cooler air.
“Spend some sand,” Fraenckel said, “and come up to 11,000 feet. Got a really solid inversion here. You can sit on it all night.”
The hydrogen that fills the spherical envelope of a gas balloon is what powers its lift. To climb the wind’s layers, aeronauts toss out spoonfuls of sand from the dozens of cloth bags hung outside the basket, a technique called ballasting. Wind flows in diverse directions at different altitudes, and pilots steer by ascending onto these invisible roads.
The Spirit of Springfield rose to join the D-Caribbean, and over the course of several hours, it surged ahead of Fraenckel and Stuart-Jervis. Six of the remaining Gordon Bennett balloons continued on a northeasterly path toward Lithuania, including the Colombus II, containing the young German star Willi Eimers and his copilot, Bernd Landsmann. The wind that the Spirit of Springfield and the D-Caribbean caught in Poland, however, had turned them southeastward. Along with the Aspen following somewhere behind them, piloted by two formidable American aeronauts on a winning streak, they now cruised at a rapid 19 knots toward Belarus.
Each balloon in the race bore a yellow banner on its gondola identifying it as a Gordon Bennett participant. Race organizers had secured permission for the pilots to pass through any country the winds might carry them over, barring Russia. Just seven weeks prior, the country had scrambled fighter jets when a Virgin Atlantic passenger flight crossed Russia on a new route to Hong Kong. The jets threatened the plane with gunfire and forced it to land—even though the airline had cleared it with authorities. The organizers considered the country too unstable for competitors to enter its airspace, making the Russian border the hard eastern wall of the race. Any balloon that approached would be required to land or face disqualification.
Belarus and Ukraine, however, were young nations rendered independent by the Soviet Union’s collapse not quite four years prior. Both had agreed to open their skies to the race for the first time. The Cold War’s embers had darkened, and Wallace, for one, found the idea of more room to fly enticing. He felt good about their prospects as they entered a third night with plenty of ballast to spare. Behind them, Fraenckel and Stuart-Jervis were faring just as well.
Brielmann had better eyes than Wallace, and he performed most of the navigation aboard the Spirit of Springfield once the sun set. Night flying was serene if disorienting; Brielmann enjoyed it. He took occasional 20-minute naps, the sky illuminated by a full moon, and the night passed without incident.
At 6:40 a.m. on Tuesday, September 12, as the Spirit of Springfield and the D-Caribbean flew south of Bialystok, a Polish weather probe ascended 60 miles to the west and, for a time, followed the balloons’ course. Both teams crossed into Belarus nearly an hour later.
At 9:34 a.m. local time, a Belarusian border guard in Brest looked up and noticed an object drifting through the skies 40 miles to the northeast, heading toward the town of Pruzhany. The guard wasn’t sure what the balloon was but thought it might pose a threat. He picked up the receiver and dialed the antiaircraft command post.
When it was a few hundred feet away, the Hind veered sideways, affording a menacing view of its machine guns and the cannon mounted in its turret.
James Gordon Bennett Jr., the eccentric playboy and newspaper magnate who ran the New York Herald in its heyday, founded the Gordon Bennett Cup in 1906. Bennett was an avid sportsman who, among other endeavors, won the first transatlantic yacht race on a drunken bet in 1866. He also initiated a long-distance auto race that would morph into the Grand Prix, but by the turn of the century his interests had shifted to the skies. The Coupe Aéronautique’s aim was simple from the outset: The world’s finest gas balloonists would compete to fly the farthest distance from the launch field to claim the trophy. Each race commenced in the previous winner’s home country.
Bennett’s cup was wildly popular. At the inaugural 1906 race in Paris, 16 balloons set off from the Tuileries Gardens over a crowd of one million spectators. It was a risky endeavor. Gas ballooning demands skill and nerve. A balloon filled with hydrogen is lighter than air and travels at the wind’s mercy, borne along it like a leaf on a river. To pilot one for long distances, aeronauts must understand the peculiarities of wind, which can shift speed and direction as altitude changes. Catching a desired current requires expertly managing ballast to stay aloft as the supply of gas—1,000 cubic meters of hydrogen in the Gordon Bennett—slowly leaks from the envelope. Expansion and contraction with the sun’s rise and fall sends the balloon on a roller-coaster ride through the troposphere. All while the pilots dodge storm clouds, mountains, electrical wires, trees, and church spires, and submit to the sometimes violent whims of nature.
Before cars, GPS trackers, and smartphones were widely adopted, pilots were largely on their own. In the 1910 race, which launched from St. Louis, Americans Alan Hawley and Augustus Post were presumed dead when neither surfaced after a week. They had landed in the Canadian wilderness and trudged through dense forest in a snowstorm before stumbling on a French-Canadian fur trapper’s hut, whose inhabitants mistook them for apparitions and fell to their knees in prayer. Hawley and Post had secured a new world distance record in the adventure.
Hawley and Post were lucky; others were not. Since the race’s inception, nine pilots had perished from mountainside crashes, unexpected plummets, or rogue lightning storms. Mike Wallace faced his own harrowing journey during his second Gordon Bennett, which began in Lech, Austria, in 1991. Fighting a 103-degree fever and a storm, Wallace hung his balloon briefly on a ski-lift cable—and in stew-thick fog grazed the top of Grossglockner, Austria’s tallest mountain—before making a rough landing.
Early on Tuesday, September 12, Wallace and Brielmann spotted the eight-story D-Caribbean in the early-dawn light 12 miles behind them. It was the fourth day of the Gordon Bennett. The sun warmed the Spirit of Springfield’s envelope, swelled its hydrogen, and gradually carried it to 12,000 feet. Fraenckel and Stuart-Jervis remained some 3,000 feet lower.
The night had been especially frigid in the cramped wicker basket, and Wallace’s back ached from an old injury. In 1966, he was working as a civilian in Vietnam when the military helicopter he rode in was shot down. The fiery crash burned 80 percent of his body and broke his back, his neck, 14 ribs, and a clavicle. He received a Purple Heart for the ordeal, at a time when civilians were still eligible for the award. By late morning, the Spirit of Springfield and the D-Caribbean had been airborne for more than 60 hours and 750 miles. Both balloons were well positioned for victory. Fraenckel radioed Wallace to see how he and Brielmann were faring.
“We have 12 bags left,” Fraenckel said, “and all our water”—meaning the emergency ballast that could be dropped to stay afloat even longer. “We’re going for a fourth night.”
Twelve bags of sand was more than Wallace and Brielmann had. The D-Caribbean stood a good chance of winning and would almost certainly set a record if it stayed aloft. Its chase team, though, was having car trouble in Germany, which meant that the D-Caribbean would be stranded if it outstripped the Spirit of Springfield’s chase car.
“If you can’t find your crew,” Wallace joked, “you could still land if you want. My guys are right under you.”
Fraenckel laughed. “I don’t think so, Mikey.”
Fraenckel was a rising star on the competition circuit, and he was immensely popular. A handsome man of 55, with a bright smile, dapper mustache, and generous nature, he was an accomplished aeronaut and an airline pilot for TWA on the New York to Cairo route. He’d learned to fly in the Navy. His copilot, 67-year-old John Stuart-Jervis, cut a more reserved if still charming figure. An Englishman, he had run off during the Second World War, lied about his age to join the Royal Navy at 16, and became a pilot with the Fleet Air Arm. During the 1956 Suez Crisis, he was shot down in the Gulf of Suez, and a French cruiser plucked him from the water. He and Fraenckel met at a cocktail party in the Virgin Islands in 1989 and decided to join forces.
Wallace and Brielmann were talented pilots in their own right. This was Wallace’s sixth Gordon Bennett and Brielmann’s first. Despite his lack of competitive experience, Brielmann, who was 43 and from Connecticut, had been flying longer, was savvy with electronics, and, as a machinist and balloon repairman, approached the endeavor with an engineer’s sharp mind. Wallace was a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants sort. A 54-year-old Massachusetts lawyer and real estate developer, he couldn’t afford to fly conservatively. Gas ballooning, similar to jockeyship, favored lightweight pilots, who could stock their baskets with more sand. Compared with his slighter opponents, Wallace’s six-foot-five, 240-pound frame meant that the equivalent of three additional 30-pound bags of sand weren’t available for ballasting—a margin that could keep a balloon flying an additional night.
Despite the Spirit of Springfield’s apparent lead, Wallace had an inkling about Fraenckel’s plan. The crew of the D-Caribbean would simply keep eyes on their friends, watch them land when they ran out of options, and overtake them for the win. Wallace had formed his own plan to counter that possibility. Given the Spirit of Springfield’s southeastern track, they would most likely enter Ukraine, then aim for the Derkul River on its border with Russia, the race’s easternmost boundary. If Wallace could stay up another night alongside the D-Caribbean, he’d land on the riverbank so Fraenckel couldn’t leapfrog him. “We’ll have to damn near put it in the river or they’re gonna hop over us,” he told Brielmann.
Though the two balloons had been in visual contact since dawn, a hazy scrim of clouds now obscured the view, and Wallace and Brielmann could only see the ground 12,000 feet below. They rode the currents in silence. Over the next two hours, Wallace made repeated attempts to raise Fraenckel on the radio, to no avail. Maybe Fraenckel had switched frequencies or decided to remain silent late in the race, even if doing so would be unlike him.
Around 2:30 p.m., the thrum of a helicopter circling below them broke the stillness. Two microlight planes and a chopper had already scouted them back in Germany; curiosity among fellow fliers was common for balloonists. Wallace, having spent his early career arming military gunships, recognized the camouflaged Mil Mi-24 Hind—a sophisticated Russian chopper also dubbed the “devil’s chariot”—as it made close, aggressive passes at them. Wallace waved their permit papers at the Hind and pointed to the yellow Gordon Bennett racing banner. The pilot signaled for them to land and disappeared.
Minutes later, he returned and sped directly at the Spirit of Springfield. When it was a few hundred feet away, the Hind veered sideways, affording a menacing view of its machine guns and the cannon mounted in its turret. “That’s an awesome thing to see,” Wallace said.
Wallace had last reported the Spirit of Springfield’s position to Annette Hockeler, who led the balloon’s chase crew, an hour and a half earlier over the town of Pinsk. Now he jumped back on the radio. “A Russian helicopter is circling us,” he told her. “An armed helicopter.”
Then the radio cut out. It was the last transmission Hockeler would hear from Wallace and Brielmann.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/04/03/balloon-race-belarus-disaster/
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