The Great Balloon Race ended late Wednesday shortly after it began when Chicago Heights architect Kevin Uliassi’s craft, named after his wife, J. Renee, experienced loss of lift and made a controlled landing in northern Indiana.
Uliassi’s flight to become the first person to circle the earth nonstop in a balloon lasted slightly more than three hours after his liftoff from a quarry near Rockford at 8:45 p.m.
Mark Rosatti, a spokesman at Uliassi’s team headquarters at the Illinois Institute of Technology, said that the latest report from the balloonist was that he made a safe landing shortly before midnight about 30 miles southwest of South Bend near the Starke County airport.
Rosatti said there were conflicting reports as to what forced Uliassi to abort the flight: whether it was a tear in the envelope or a burst helium container.
It was Uliassi’s experience as a hot-air balloonist that enabled him to land safely, Rosatti said. “When he began jettisoning fuel, the balloon became unstable and he had to fly it in, that’s where his experience paid off,” he noted.
Meanwhile, spirits continued to run high for the balloon team of millionaire securities trader Steve Fossett, who began his 20,000-mile journey at 5:04 p.m. Wednesday when he took off in his balloon, Solo Spirit, from snow-covered Busch Stadium in St. Louis.
Fossett’s balloon climbed to 20,000 feet and was passing south of Nashville on Wednesday night.
The pilots did not intend for their launches to coincide so closely as to turn the event into a race.
Both men had planned to take advantage of clear skies and the position of the winter jet stream, which could carry a balloon swiftly across the Atlantic.
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Fossett and Uliassi were evenly matched in terms of equipment. Both are flying in small, unpressurized gondolas of roughly equal dimensions, and both have 150-foot-tall helium balloons.
The edge in experience, however, went to Fossett. The Chicago native has attempted the round-the-world voyage three times, including a record-breaking six-day trip last January.
That attempt was foiled when Libya denied Fossett’s request for air clearance, forcing him to use up fuel on an alternate route.
The balloons that took off Wednesday differ radically from the sophisticated designs of balloonists such as British millionaire Richard Branson, who had an unsuccessful around-the-world attempt earlier in December.
But the director of Fossett’s mission control, Alan Blount, said he would like to see their rugged ethic win out.
“I really hope we can do it with a lower-tech approach, because that’s more in tune with the purism of ballooning,” Blount said.