PREFACE

WORLDS APART

Even by local standards, the morning of Thursday the 17th, January, 1991 was a foul one. Daylight was slow to drive the Arctic night into the heavy overcast, and a 30 knot blizzard added an indescribable chill factor to the minus 30°C temperature reading at Yellowknife Control Tower.

Somewhere out there over the vast frozen Canadian Barrens, between us and the Arctic circle, was a hot air balloon. Not just any old hot air balloon — but the Pacific Flyer — that had set out 46 hours earlier from balmy subtropical southern Japan — and was now lost in this impenetrable Artcic storm. At 0953 Per Lindstrand and Richard Branson landed the balloon, descending through the murk and putting down on one of a myriad frozen lakes scattered across the wilderness. They had no idea of their whereabouts, as they had no charts for the far North where they so unexpectedly found themselves. But they did know that they had made history with the longest, and fastest manned balloon flight ever, successfully riding in the jetstream at nearly two hundred miles an hour, across the Pacific and landing in another continent after a dramatic 6700 mile flight. They clambered out of the top hatch of the capsule, lying on its side in the snow, not just into a different continent but into a different and very empty world.

The balloon had made a perfect launch just two days ago in serene oriental conditions. The pilots had stepped into their throbbing capsule surrounded by their trusted groundcrew and a huge crowd of Japanese spectators. The launchsite was bathed in arc lights and the Fuji film helicopter hovered over head.

Now they stepped out into a raging Arctic blizzard, and total and utter desolation. The trees that sur- rounded their lake were just gaunt skeletons in the swirling snow, burnt bare by a forest fire. Even "Polar Per's" Swedish blood froze — he had never experienced or imagined cold like this. Per and Richard clambered back into the capsule as quickly as they had left it, donned the Vacuum Reflex snowsuits stowed for just such an emergency and took stock of the situation.

Two hundred and thirty miles to the south the exhausted ground crew were taking stock of the same situation. They had chased the balloon from the South of Japan, via Tokyo, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle and Alaska to the end of the inhabited world — Yellowknife.

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