Breitling Orbiter 3: the 1999 hot-air balloon adventure that completed the first non-stop trip around the world
On the morning of 1 March 1999, at 5:05 a.m., a hot-air balloon rose slowly above the Swiss village of Châteaux d'Oex and launched one of the boldest projects in aviation history. According to HistoryExtra, the balloon, named Breitling Orbiter 3, carried Swiss aeronaut Bertrand Piccard and Briton Brian Jones through 19 days, 21 hours and 47 minutes of adventure before landing in Egypt and completing the first non-stop balloon flight around the world.
Piccard's path to this project was a long and family-tied story. His father, Jacques Piccard, was the man who descended to the deepest point of the world's oceans in the bathyscaphe Trieste in 1960; his grandfather Auguste Piccard was the physicist who set the altitude record with a stratospheric balloon in 1932. Bertrand Piccard added to that lineage the goal of a non-stop world circumnavigation, combining the accumulated knowledge and passion that reached the balloon world.
The path to reaching that goal had been difficult. Piccard and Wim Verstraeten made their first attempts with Breitling Orbiter 1 in 1997; mechanical problems led to a landing over the Mediterranean. Their second attempt with Breitling Orbiter 2 in early 1998 ended in 9 days when air turbulence and fuel consumption problems caused the loss of Chinese airspace permission. For the third and last attempt Piccard changed the team composition and took on Brian Jones as co-pilot. Jones was a professional who had previously held a Royal Air Force pilot's military flight experience.
Breitling Orbiter 3 itself was an important engineering project. Designed by Canada's Cameron Balloons and a Swiss engineering team, the balloon used 'rozière' technology combining helium and hot air. Its total height was 55 metres, it weighed 2,770 kilograms and could carry 18 tonnes of fuel. According to technical details carried by HistoryExtra, the balloon could climb to 12,000 metres and fly at speeds of up to 240 kilometres an hour. That was assessed as an innovation in balloon technology.
The flight's route was planned with the help of atmospheric jet streams. After departing Switzerland, Piccard and Jones flew south; they passed over Algeria, Mali, Chad and Sudan and reached the Indian Ocean. They then crossed Thailand, China, the Pacific Ocean and the Americas and returned to Africa. The total distance was calculated at approximately 45,755 kilometres, covering roughly 1.15 times the circumference of the Earth.
Among the flight's most difficult moments was the passage through Chinese airspace. According to details carried by HistoryExtra, just a few months before the flight the project was almost cancelled when China refused permission. Following a last-minute diplomatic intervention, permission was granted; but the balloon was obliged to stay in a narrow corridor within Chinese airspace. The pilots constantly adjusted the balloon's altitude in the hope that weather conditions would help keep them in that corridor.
The flight's nutrition and daily needs were also an interesting engineering problem. Inside the balloon's small cabin Piccard and Jones slept in alternating shifts over 19 days and supported each other's flight monitoring. Foods were vacuum-packed; the total load included 320 kilograms of food and 850 litres of drinking water. The cabin temperature was generally around 5°C and the pilots wore thermal clothing. In an interview HistoryExtra carries, Jones commented: 'the real struggle is taking on the flight responsibility for an hour while you are trying to sleep for an hour.'
On 21 March the balloon landed near the Egyptian town of Mut, triggering a worldwide celebration. When the landing was confirmed, Piccard's first words were 'my God, we did it.' Later at a press conference Piccard said: 'this flight is not a standalone achievement for us; it is a chapter added to the history of ballooning,' framing the project's true meaning. The flight entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the 'non-stop hot-air balloon world tour record' and that record has not been renewed in 25 years.
The contemporary aviation impact of the Breitling Orbiter 3 flight was multi-faceted. It provided new information for stratospheric aerospace design, particularly on the future use of balloon technology. Most modern Stratospheric Balloon programmes took the atmospheric data set assembled by Breitling Orbiter 3 as a reference. At the same time, the flight revived children's and young people's interest in aviation; according to data carried by HistoryExtra in 2024, more than 12,000 amateur balloon pilot licences worldwide cite the Piccard-Jones flight as their source of inspiration.
Bertrand Piccard went on to sign other bold projects after ballooning. In 2016 he flew a 42,000-kilometre world tour with the solar-powered aircraft Solar Impulse; this was the first long-distance demonstration of zero-carbon-emission flight. He currently speaks as one of the leading actors in the global climate movement and lobbies for the development of renewable energy technologies. Brian Jones passed away in 2019; but commemorations organised by the Royal Air Force and the British Ballooning Federation continue to carry his aviation legacy.