CAIRO, Egypt -- Traveling high above the Earth, the first men to circle the globe nonstop in a balloon say they reached a higher achievement, an appreciation for the planet and for peace.
"We were in another world in our gondola. It was like a little piece of paradise," said Bertrand Piccard, 41, at a news conference yesterday with his British flying partner, Brian Jones, 51. "I could not understand that people would be fighting in deserts where there was a lot of space. It was really heartbreaking to know during the time that we had so much pleasure, people were suffering on the ground.
"The goal of our achievement is not to go around the world in a balloon," said Piccard, a Swiss psychiatrist. "It is also to feel closer to our planet and to the human beings on the earth. . . . Maybe the greatest achievement we can do in this round-the-world flight is we can speak a little more about peace."
The balloonists -- bearded, sunburned and fit -- landed in Egypt's Western Desert yesterday morning, ending a journey of 29,054.6 miles that began March 1 in a Swiss mountain town and carried them across continents and oceans.
After touching down and securing their shimmering, silver-domed craft, Breitling Orbiter 3, Piccard and Jones waited 6 hours for a helicopter ride, soaking up the sun and the solitude and reflecting on their nearly 20-day odyssey.
"I was happy to sit, my back against the gondola, and to look at the desert," said Piccard, a Swiss psychiatrist whose father and grandfather achieved firsts in the sky and at sea. "It was absolutely incredible how you can feel when you are in front of emptiness because you are really in front of yourself."
"We could see absolutely nothing on any horizon. And it just seemed right somehow. We had time to collect our thoughts, to get ourselves together and we even washed our hair in the desert," Jones said during a news conference in Cairo last night.
Piccard and Jones, wearing their dark-blue aeronautical jumpsuits emblazoned with the yellow logo of their sponsor, were escorted into a Cairo hotel by beating drums and chanting musicians. They arrived in Cairo aboard a private plane that carried them and members of their land crew from a desert oasis in southwestern Egypt.
Piccard was poetic in his recollections; Jones was practical.
'The best moment'
"I would say the best moment for me was exactly the moment between the takeoff and the landing," Piccard said, exemplifying his dry humor. "We could hardly believe it was so fabulous to live in such a small gondola. We were in the middle of the sky."
As they approached the finish line, high over Mauritania, fear seized Piccard. "I was really afraid that something would go wrong and we would fail by a quarter of an hour," he said candidly.
The start of the journey was the worst moment for Jones, a former pilot turned balloon instructor. The balloon ascended "much too fast," crimping one of the heat pipes and damaging a support bracket, he said.
"I really did fear not only for our safety. From the very first, we were intent on seeing if anything had gone wrong with the balloon," he said.
During the journey, the balloon and the balloonists suffered. At one point, they had to scrape ice off the gondola. While crossing the Gulf of Mexico, the balloon drifted. Both men had trouble breathing and relied on oxygen to regain their equilibrium. Piccard resorted to self-hypnosis at one point to calm himself.
The finish line
The shining moment for Jones came on Saturday.
"It had to be the finish line, doesn't it?" said Jones, who brought a range of compact discs on the trip, from the soundtrack of "Les Miserables" to Eric Clapton. "It's just a surreal feeling. I still hadn't quite come to terms with it."
Then there were the messages from British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Queen of England. And, of course, the scenery.
Jones noted that despite their cramped quarters and the intensity of their journey, neither man had a cross word for the other.
Although the pair wrote their names into aviation history when they reached West Africa, they pushed on because Jones hoped to land the balloon at the Great Pyramids in Giza. Wind kept them from achieving that goal. But as Piccard put it: "When you go around the world the goal is not the place where you land. It's the fact that you go around the world."
'Eagle has landed'
After three attempts, the balloonists set the Orbiter down on a plateau about 85 miles north of Mut, a town in the desert oasis of Dakhla. The message e-mailed from the Orbiter to the balloon flight control center in Geneva, Switzerland was, "The Eagle has landed."
There is talk now that the balloonists will compete in a round-the-world contest. Jones said he would gladly advise on such a project, but not fly in it.
"I don't believe for me anything can come close to what we've experienced in these 21 days," he said.
The men haven't decided what to do with the $500,000 of the $1 million in prize money that is to go to charity. They would like to set up a foundation with the money so it can increase in value and help others, but it's unclear if that is permissible.
Retrieving the gondola
Noble, the flight controller, would like to donate the Orbiter balloon to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.But first they must retrieve it from the desert plateau.
"This historical item, the gondola, is firmly stuck in the desert. I know we can't bring it out with a truck. If [the Egyptian military] would like to land another helicopter to lift it out, I would be most grateful," he said.
Piccard was reunited with his wife and daughters in Cairo. Jones' wife remained in Geneva. Rejoining her, he said, "is a particular pleasure that I have to look forward to."
Pub Date: 3/22/99