The first crewed transatlantic balloon flight succeeded
On this day · 17 August 1978
After more than a century of fatal attempts, a helium balloon from Maine finally drifted across the Atlantic into a French field.
On August 17, 1978, the helium balloon Double Eagle II sank gently into a barley field near Miserey, France, about 60 miles northwest of Paris. Aboard were three Albuquerque pilots, Ben Abruzzo, Maxie Anderson, and Larry Newman, who had lifted off from Presque Isle, Maine, six days earlier.
The crossing covered roughly 3,100 miles in 137 hours and 6 minutes and ended a long, grim streak: since 1859, at least 17 attempts to balloon the Atlantic had failed, several of them lethally. Drifting at the mercy of the winds, the crew rode out cold, altitude swings, and a near-disastrous descent over the ocean before the weather finally cooperated.
They were the first to do what balloonists had chased for nearly 120 years.
The gondola, nicknamed The Spirit of Albuquerque, now sits in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, a small aluminum box that carried three men over an ocean on nothing but gas and patience.
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