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Albuquerque 99 member and partner win 2001 Gas Balloon race! |
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 Peter and Barbara after winning the race. Congratulations Barbara and Peter!
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Barbara and Peter's account of the race:
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Following is an edited transcription of their report at the Media Briefing on Saturday, October 13, 2001.
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Peter Cuneo: "We had great folks chasing us across country, Donna Partington and Dr. Karen Griest. They drove three days and three nights and ended up ½ mile from us when we landed. It was a great flight. I remember the first night, we went low, north up the valley, and then popped up to 8,000 feet and started going east just south of Santa Fe. We got into the foothills of those big mountains that go up to 12,000 feet up there then headed straight towards Las Vegas. We were contour flying over some 10,000 foot ranges. Barb was doing the flying at that point. I was just sitting there watching in amazement. The updrafts took us up the valleys and down the ridges on the other side with very little ballast. The point of gas ballooning is to use as little ballast as possible. Next time I want a night vision scope to see tops of ridges more clearly. "We had a beautiful sunrise, got to lower elevations and just cruised on for the next day. I am remembering us up at about 10,000 feet on Sunday, near sunset, going about 23 miles an hour, and I could see another balloon below us, down on the deck at about 300 feet, going straight north about 60 miles an hour. Right about that time I thought we'd made a terrible mistake by not being down on the deck. I have to give all the credit to our weather guy who kept us south and out of the weather. This was a case of the turtle beating the rabbit. We went slow, east and managed to stay out of weather. "The next day we were running aloft near the Oklahoma/Kansas border, and our weatherman said to stay out of Kansas no matter what. We managed to do that until just before Joplin, Missouri. That was one of the keys-for us to go around the weather. Our communications were very good; we had the use of a Globalstar satellite phone, which gave us 100% coverage. In the past we tried to use cell phones, and I'll tell you, there are a lot of places in the mid-western part of this country with no cell phone coverage. It was a lifesaver. "Monday afternoon, we're heading into St. Louis and there's been some discussion already about whether or not we had permission to fly over Class B airspace. Mark Sullivan was nice enough to fly over Kansas City before us, and since Kansas City center also controls the air space over St. Louis, it only took us about five minutes to get confirmation from those folks that we really did have permission to fly over St. Louis. We spent about five hours, still going fairly slowly, flying up around and over St. Louis airspace. "I remember going over the Mississippi River; this is the second time we've managed to make it across the Mississippi. After that point we felt we had it made. The weather guy said to stay high and keep away from Lake Erie. My last, strong image is, after we decided to fly the third night, we talked to the weather guy and sent the chase off to a hotel in Columbus. We knew we were pretty much just going to be cruising east and we were settling down for the night. All of a sudden I heard beeping in the basket. At first I thought it was the descent alarm saying we were going down more than 400 feet a minute, but I knew that wasn't the case. Then I realized it was my pager, which I had hung on the outside of the basket. It was the hotel room that Donna and Karen were staying at, so we got out the Globalstar phone and called them. They were having a strategy session and had called the weather guy. They thought there were still four balloons in the air. That would have been Richard Abruzzo, 'cause he's always in the air, always ahead of us. We're usually not even within a 1,000 miles of him. Then, Mark Sullivan, and then we had a pretty good idea that it would have been Willie Eimers, because he's from Germany and he's won the Gordon Bennett, which is the world championship of gas ballooning and he's flown here three or four times. We thought we might even have to fly a fourth night to keep up with these guys. We had 10 or 12 bags of ballast left at that point, so if we didn't use very much ballast during that night, it actually would have been a possibility. We talked to our weather guy and he said we might be able to stay high to fly across West Virginia, then cut across Pennsylvania and land in upstate New York. We're thinking, 'This sounds like some really rugged territory,' and trying to decide how far we really wanted to push it just to win the America's Challenge. You know it's really not the end of the world, and we don't want to kill ourselves. "Anyway, getting back to the main part of the story, I called the hotel and heard we were the last balloon in the air and the others had all landed somewhere up in the vicinity of Wisconsin. They told us, "All you need to do is fly through the night." The way this works, normally we have a real time tracking system, and the past two years it has worked really well. "This year there were some glitches with it, so the control center kind of reverted to the old system of the competitors not receiving any information until it was at least four hours old. The point of that is that you don't want to give the teams in the air any tactical advantage over the teams that have already landed. The four hour time limit had passed from all the teams that had landed right before sunset on Monday evening and it was about 9:00 PM. I tell you, I had a really hard time getting through the previous night, and on Monday my adrenaline was just pumping so hard that the night seemed like the night went by in 15 minutes. Once we knew we were the last balloon in the air and all we had to do was fly it and land it, I just kept thinking of that button that's been on all the jackets here this year, "Don't screw up the landing, dummy" or something like that. If we could just get the balloon down, I figured we would probably be okay. We were and we had a great flight! "The snow that Barbara was referring to happened in southwest Missouri, and it was just the tail end of a little bit of virga. We had a dark cloud to our northwest when we woke up Monday morning and it just kept getting closer and closer. We called our weather guy and he said there was no lightning in it, just some clouds, and that it was going northeast. We called flight radar at the FAA and they said it was going southeast. We were about 1,500 feet below it. It kept getting closer to us and closer and it had these little tails of virga coming down out of it. It was pretty dark and we weren't getting much solar heating. Finally it passes us and little, fine, tiny bits of powdered sugar snow started coming down. It lasted 5-10 minutes, then was past us and we were in bright sunlight. It was kind of a turning point psychologically for us. After that, everything just seemed to go. Somedays things just seem to work out right. I guess we got really lucky, we got good weather guys and a great chase team, and that's the story." |
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