The Balloonists: the terrifying story of the first round-the-world balloon flight
On 1 March 1999, Breitling Orbiter 3 – piloted by Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones – took off from Châteaux d’Oex in Switzerland. After more than 19 days aloft, circumnavigating the world, the hot-air balloon landed in Egypt. Piccard, one of the subjects of a new documentary, The Balloonists, tells Jonathan Wright why he braved a journey so dangerous many had begun to doubt it could be made at all
- Jonathan Wright
Published: May 28, 2026 at 2:09 PM
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Growing up, Bertrand Piccard loved to hear stories of adventure and exploration. Nothing too unusual there, except Piccard got to hear these tales first-hand. In 1960, his father, submariner Jacques (1922–2008), was one of the first men to reach the deepest known point in the world’s seas, the Mariana Trench in the Pacific.
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If that weren’t inspiring enough in itself, young Bertrand also met those his father knew, including Charles Lindbergh, the first aviator to cross the Atlantic solo, mountaineer Edmund Hillary and astronauts involved in the early US space programme. “They just gave me a fantastic view of what was exploration,” recalls Piccard, “They were passionate, they showed me how difficult it was, but also how much you need to persevere to succeed.”
At 11 years old, Piccard saw the Apollo 11 mission that carried Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin to the moon blast off from Cape Canaveral. The die was cast. “I said to myself, I want this type of life,” says Piccard.
But what to do? As a teenager, Piccard had a strong sense that “everything had been done”. Moreover, he was scared of heights. Then, in 1974, he saw “one of the first hang gliders” in the air above Switzerland. “I said, ‘That’s for me, that’s something new. I will heal my fear of heights. I will get out of my comfort zone. Here is something to explore.” He became a microlight pioneer, sometimes launching himself into the sky from a hot-air balloon.
Astronaut Neil Armstrong works on the lunar surface during the Apollo 11 mission. This historic moon landing inspired Bertrand Piccard to become an explorer (Image by Getty Images)
The jump to a new challenge
On one of these journeys aloft, he met Belgian balloonist Wim Verstraeten, who was preparing to enter the Chrysler Transatlantic Challenge, a 1992 balloon race. “I was not a balloonist, but [professionally] I was a psychiatrist and hypnotherapist,” says Piccard, “and he said, ‘I’m going to fly with you, if you agree, because you will be the secret weapon to win the race. You can help me to manage the sleep patterns, the stress, the life on board.’”
Saying no “would have been the opposite of exploration” so of course Piccard accepted the offer. Besides, it wasn’t just his father from his immediate family who had inspired him. In 1931, Bertrand’s grandfather, Auguste (1884–1962), co-piloted the first hydrogen balloon to ascend into the stratosphere.
Taking off from Maine, the duo won the five-balloon race, but a far bigger challenge lay ahead. Piccard wanted to fly around the world by hot-air balloon, a feat that even today has been achieved only three times. He wasn’t alone in this ambition. Indeed, he was late to the party, as the likes of Richard Branson and Steve Fossett had been pouring money into projects. Nonetheless, Piccard secured sponsorship from Swiss watchmaker Breitling and set to work.
Piccard in the flight deck of the hot-air balloon. He had previously won the Chrysler Transatlantic Challenge, but had bigger aspirations in the ballooning world (Image by Dogwoof / Brian Jones)
Try, fail, reappraise, try again…
It would take three attempts before Piccard, flying with English balloonist Brian Jones, succeeded, beating far better funded adventurers to become the first men to fly non-stop around the world by hot-air balloon. How did they succeed where others failed? Piccard’s estimation is that he learnt from the adaptability of other explorers. “We always tried in a different way, we changed the strategy, we changed the technology,” he says. In contrast, adds Piccard, his competitors “tried over and over again with the same bad technology and the same wrong strategies”.
Piccard and Jones wave to the cameras as they prepare for take-off. Their successful mission made them the first men to fly non-stop around the globe in a hot-air balloon (Image by Patrick Aviolat / Keystone / AP Photo)
As a remarkable new documentary, The Balloonists, makes clear, it was often a perilous undertaking. At one point, for instance, carbon dioxide began to build up in the duo’s capsule. “We were like fishes out of water,” remembers Piccard, speaking of a time when the men were slowly losing the ability to function – at least until they donned oxygen masks and changed a carbon dioxide filter.
There was also the ever-present danger of bad weather, but perhaps the worst moment came over Mexico. Having taken seven days to cross the Pacific, a journey that should have taken three days, Orbiter 3 was headed for the South Atlantic rather than Africa as planned. The balloon had “lost the good winds” and, with a quarter of the flight remaining, fuel reserves were at an eighth of what the duo had started out with. The maths didn’t work, but Piccard and Jones refused to land.
“One thing that was absolutely clear for Brian and I was the fact that we would never give up,” Piccard remembers. “We were trained to ditch. We were trained to survive on a little life raft in a dry suit with a couple of biscuits and a couple of litres of water until a ship would rescue us. We went for it and we got, at the last moment, the right direction of wind, the right speed of wind. We crossed the Atlantic like a rocket, 234kph.”
Weather wizard
Without a support team on the ground, the duo would never have known the jet stream would eventually be so favourable. In particular, Belgian meteorologist Luc Trullemans, working alongside French meteorologist Pierre Caret, was a crucial figure – in Piccard’s estimation, a maverick and “a magician of the weather”.
When the crossing of the Pacific dragged and the duo contended with the danger of thunderstorms, a situation not helped by temporarily losing communications with those on the ground, it was Trullemans who eventually reassured Piccard that more favourable conditions lay ahead. Piccard had to hear from Trullemans, who had also worked on the Chrysler Transatlantic Challenge, because he needed “to know exactly in the intonation of his voice what he was thinking, because I knew him well, that was really important”.
Jones, pictured as the hot-air balloon flew over the Sahara. Breitling Orbiter 3 faced many weather challenges throughout its journey across various landscapes (Image by Dogwoof / Bertrand Piccard)
On 21 March 1999, after a journey of more than 40,000km, Breitling Orbiter 3 touched down in the Egyptian desert. Piccard and Jones had succeeded. Along the way, as well as frightening moments, there were awe-inspiring sights too, such as witnessing the dawn high above the world.
“Every morning, before sunrise, you have all the sky black in front of you, and then suddenly you have a little silver line on the horizon,” says Piccard. “That’s how you see the horizon, and you have this silver line getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and you have the entire sky silver and the earth black. And then you have the sun, like a flash of red light, putting all the colours everywhere. You have the impression of being a witness of the creation of the world. Every morning, that was absolutely gorgeous.”
A dramatic sunrise is pictured through the hot-air balloon’s window. Piccard says viewing such a spectacle was like “being a witness of the creation of the world” (Image by Dogwoof / Bertrand Piccard / Brian Jones)
In his late 60s, Piccard’s thirst for exploration remains as great as ever. His latest undertaking is Climate Impulse, a project with the aim of flying non-stop around the world in a green hydrogen-powered airplane and which reflects his longstanding environmentalism. Despite his own thirst for adventure, exploration, he says, is less about derring-do than an attitude to life.
“Today, more than ever, exploration is not about conquering new territories,” he says. “Exploration is about discovering better ways to live, better quality of life, better governance, better protection of the environment, better ways to protect people from poverty, better ways to educate them and to preserve health on Earth.”
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The Balloonists, directed by John Dower, is in UK cinemas now
Authors
Jonathan Wright
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