The scene above features a rare image captured by the first live webcam of the Pyramids at Giza, displaying a ‘Blue Moon’ at sunset. This project, called PyramidCam, operated from 2003 to 2010, utilizing two cameras that recorded high-resolution images every 30 seconds, day and night. Initiated by Jim Sorenson in Cairo and Vance Kosig in LA, it received generous support from Rami Siag of Siag Hotels and Travel. In the coming days, I will share numerous pyramid images on the site, along with the story of how PyramidCam was established and maintained 24/7 over its seven-year run.

I am reviving extensive content from 35 years in Egypt, which includes establishing foreign petroleum and gas companies, creating the Egypt Foreign Currency Clearing System under the Central Bank, launching the first modern reprographics facility in the Middle East, adventuring with the Goering Yacht Carin II in the Red Sea, deep desert exploration, operating Ham Radio as SU9AM, recovering the Breitling Orbiter III, introducing GPS and vehicle tracking for the Egyptian Defense Department and Cairo Police, developing PyramidCam, setting up U.S. petroleum and gas concessions in Syria and Lebanon, and managing an oil concession awarded to Egypt’s most famous spy by President Sadat, among other activities.

Recovery of the the Breitling Orbiter III around the world Balloon

Introduction to the around the world voyage and recovery of the first ever manned balloon. the Breitling Orbiter III.

I’m at the Breitling Orbiter 3 after spending most of the day helping to prepare the gondola for shipment to Cairo and then Switzerland. I was invited to guide the recovery crew to the landing site in Upper Egypt using GPS coordinates provided by the Breitling representative. We had less than a day’s notice before departing from Cairo in four Toyota Landcruisers for the 500 km journey to Dhakla Oasis.

The image on the left depicts the landing site of the Breitling balloon, situated on a high plateau approximately 520 km from Cairo. It descended close to the center of Egypt, encircled by two impassable escarpments that restrict access for 4-wheel drive vehicles. The plateau’s surface was relatively flat, though it measured only a few miles in width. Fortunately, the gondola avoided a catastrophic collision with the cliffs during its descent, despite making brief and violent contact. Fortunately, it did not drift over the eastern escarpment, which was located less than a mile from the final landing position. Had that happened, it would have like been destroyed on the rocks or carried into the Great Sand Sea.

I made the map above from GPS points on our accent route and labeled each according to what I had put in my waypoint labels at the time. The story of the final climb up the 2nd escarpment is a tale in itself. We found no trails, tire tracks, or any other sign that the top of this plateau had been visited before. As I recall, we had to completely unload each SUV and our drivers did a rapid steep hill climb up a narrow sandy dry stream bed. We realized that we could probably not get back down this way safely, so when we left the plateau after two days for Cairo, we headed north and followed a long (miles) gently sloping wadi that eventually met the desert road just south of the desert road near Farafra Oasis.

 Here we have just arrived in the morning, approximately 48 hours after the balloon had touched down and the crew had been lifted off by helicopter and flown to Cairo. Our convoy consisted of four Siag Hotel Toyota land cruisers.

 Jim Sorenson with some Cameron R650 balloon envelope fabric Much of it is still up there on the plateau probably buried in sand. There was no possibility to recover the envelope and bring it back and as far as we know, it’s still up there.

 Here I am looking out. The primary radio for all communications was an ICOM IC-706, a radio I had used before as an amateur operator. It was the perfect radio for this application. They also had a variety of sat comms and state-of-the-art ground sensing radar aboard.

 Lunch at the recovery site with Sandra Simpson (K3DKA) and Ramy Siag (President of Siag Travel and Hotels). Rami was (and is) probably the most experienced overland desert explorer and outfitter in Egypt at the time. Without the new Toyota Landcruisers and the extensive off-road desert experience of his drivers, the mission would have been impossible.

But wherever he goes, there is always great Middle Eastern food and typical Egyptian hospitality. But by the time we reached this point every tire in the group of four vehicles was filled with sand and there were no spare tires left due to the sharp limestone surface encountered on the way up. That afternoon spares were flown in by the same military chopper that picked up the gondola for its trip back to Cairo.

 Sandra Simpson and Mel James (Breitling Representative). Notice “Rally of Egypt 1999” on the SUV behind. Siag Hotels was that year’s sponsor for this major international off-road rally.

 The spot where the balloon drag rope first hit the sand is shown by the circle in the image above. I later drove an iron stake deep into the hard sand here marking the location with my GPS. Notice the track from the circle out to where the gondola finally touched down. As you can see, after it touched down it was dragged slightly left of center by the wind. What is a mystery to me is why the drag rope seems to have touched earth first ahead of the gondola and against the direction of landing – from the SW.

From the GPS coordinates I took at the time, the sequence of landing looks like this:

Distance from 1 to 2 – 225 feet (Rope touches the ground)

Distance from 2 to 3 – 294 feet (Gondola touches down and is dragged to 3)

Distance from 3 to 4 – 150 feet (Gondola dragged to 4 by an increase in the speed and direction of the wind.

Marker 1 is where the end of the drag rope first made contact with the desert.

Marker 2 is where marks in the sand indicate the gondola first hit the ground before it was dragged by the canopy to Marker 2 3, which is where it lay upright for at least a few hours after they arrived at 8 am local time until the wind picked up and further dragged it to Marker number 4 where we first encountered it resting on its side with the canopy spread out in the SE direction. You still see, I believe, the track in the sand on Google Earth after some 20 years. The horizontal displacement is around 60 feet on the ground which would be the combination of the GPS error (about 30 feet) and Google Earth’s average horizontal worldwide mapping spread of error (anywhere from 14 to over 140 feet).

The desert here appears entirely flat, but the balloon had come down on a relatively small high plateau surrounded by one steep escarpment over another. Even the Egyptian Army Reconnaissance Department was unable to find a way up here and had to turn back after the first escarpment.

The Breitling pilots had been lifted off at about 3 pm after the landing by an Egyptian military helicopter and were flown to a desert base nearby. We were the only group to reach the landing site ‘off-road’ thanks to the very experienced SIAG drivers and some incredibly good luck. Another group of Egyptian military experts flew in a few hours after we arrived to deal with the remaining gas bottles.

Had they not landed at this particular location as they did, the consequences would have been disastrous. The entire area outside of this small flat plateau, only a few miles across, consists of deep wadis, blind canyons, and impassable dunes.

 Sandra Simpson emerges from the top hatch of the gondola. She reckons to be the first woman to ever not circumnavigate the earth in a balloon.

Location Map

The balloon landed in almost the exact center of Egypt and 50 miles from the nearest oasis or town. Had it landed just a couple of miles further east in the Great Sand Sea, efforts to reach it over land would have been almost impossible.

 This gives you some idea of the surface over which we drove which destroyed one tire after another. We started from Dahkla Oasis on the desert floor and followed the old Long Range Desert Group trail up the first escarpment. The kilometer stone markers were still in place from WWII. To reach the top of the 2nd escarpment where the balloon landed, we made our way up slowly by trial and error. Probably, no motorized vehicle had ever been there before and there were no tracks of any kind indicating so.

 Yet another flat.

Ah, but we were able to resort to a wise old Bedouin desert trick of filling our tires with sand to get rolling again. Our Egyptian drivers sat down and filled tire after tire with sand through the tire valves. They take a small sheet of paper construct a funnel and then simply sit in the sand for hours until the tire is full. They earned a lot of extra baksheesh for it of course and saved the day.

Here is Sandra helping Egyptian Air Force techs to bleed off the gas canisters to render them safe for transport back to Cairo by helicopter. She’s wearing her PADI Diving Instructor shirt for the task, being very familiar with pressurized air tanks from her underwater activities as the first ever woman PADI diving instructor to be certified in Egypt. There were also several large pressurized air tanks to be emptied as well.

 After we arrived by SUV, a local Cameron Balloon specialist and a group of Egyptian military technicians showed up by helicopter to dismantle the gondola’s ‘roof rack’ and to bleed off the pressurized air and gas tanks before evacuating the gondola itself. We transported as much as we could carry on our roof racks back to Cairo before turning it over to the Swiss Embassy for return to Switzerland. Mel James, the Breitling recovery representative, had met us at a hotel in Dahkla and joined us for the overnight trip from there to the landing site the next morning. He also returned with us on our 500 km trip back to Cairo.

 On the evening of our first day on the road, we set up the first night’s camp below the second escarpment. It was March and still freezing, but we were prepared for it. As is the custom here in Egypt, Rami’s cook came along and we had a sumptuous outdoor meal rivaling any that one might order in a first-class hotel.

  Sandra at sunset on the first day just before we set up camp.

 In Dakhla, we inquired at a local hotel if they knew of anybody who could lead us to the beginning of the track used by the Long Range Desert Group during WWII to reach the top of the first escarpment to the north. This little guy was on the steps of the hotel. No, he didn’t take us there, but there was one old guy there who did. He saved the day also.

 Because the bottom of the gondola had hit the ground hard against the upward-sloping cliffs before the plateau, there was heavy damage to anything hanging off the bottom. Fortunately, the yellow Styrofoam ground supports were still attached to the gondola and had prevented it from being damaged. Because the workload of the pilots was so heavy upon taking off in Switzerland, they did not have time to release these supports as planned. Here was another twist of fate that added to their luck.

 This banner can be seen today hanging in the Air and Space Flight Center with the gondola.

Here is the gondola tipped up again before we start the dismantling process. The Intrepid Breitling recovery team Mel James, Sandra Simpson, and Jim Sorenson take yet another photo op.

Sandra shows where we assume the gondola first landed before it was dragged further along in that direction and then to the right. You can see the drag rope at the right which leads the eye to its final resting position.

 Sandra taking a break. The yellow-colored Breitling Orbiter 3 ground support and banner sign were not supposed to travel around the earth with the balloon.

 Jim and Mel begin the teardown.

When the balloon first landed, it was upright on the ground. A few hours afterward, the wind dragged it about 50 feet and the pull from the canopy pulled it over on its side. For, some reason that I can’t remember, we put it back in an upright position before the Egypt Air Force showed up on the scene. It was then put back on its side for dismantling and finally put back upright when the helicopter arrived to tow it away.

 I’m afraid we left a mess!

Finally, late in the afternoon, a second helicopter arrives to lift the gondola to a local Egyptian airbase before it is carried by truck to Cairo. The chopper also delivered enough new tires to get us back down the escarpments and back to Cairo.

 Jim with the trusty Garmin GPS that got us there and got us home. They laughed when I brought along two GPS receivers and 5 sets of batteries. I lost one of the GPS receivers and used all five sets of batteries. The trip back to Cairo involved a lot more off-road travel than we had expected.

 Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC

See the Orbiter at the Smithsonian

Sandra and I donated our 39 original photographs to the Smithsonian where they are on file. One can obtain copies if interested by writing to the museum.

The missing oxygen bottles should still be up on the plateau at the landing site and it may be some time before a desert explorer finds them and perhaps recovers them. We encountered one on our way out of the maze of escarpments and wadis but had no room left to carry it back with us.

As a side note, we later heard a rumor that their computer had been removed from the gondola at some point after the pilots had been taken out by helicopter and before we arrived about 48 hours later. The assumption was that Egyptian intelligence made a second trip to the site after the pilots had been recovered and confiscated it because it was in the interests of national security. As we all know, governments are all very touchy about their air space and there was no time for Breitling to apply for and obtain the many many permits that would have been required to land such a vehicle and its pilots in Egyptian territory. After later reading the Jones-Piccard book about the adventure, I learned that they did leave with their laptop.

We also heard that Brian Jones later quipped (after arriving back home) that it was tougher getting out of Egypt than it was circumnavigating the globe. Only the Swiss could have managed to diplomatically circumvent the mountain of red tape involved that must have piled up at the end of the adventure.

Landing of the Breitling Orbiter III around the world balloon in Egypt – 1998

(A work in progress)

HARD LANDING

BERTRAND

We had trained for the landing on the supposition that I would be flying the balloon as we came back to earth and that Brian would carry out all the tasks that needed to be done outside. This made sense, as | had landed a big Rozier balloon twice before, and he had specialized in the external systems, practicing on the release mechanisms that needed to be operated in sequence from on top of the gondola. But when he woke me for the last time he had already started the descent and was in full control of the balloon’s flight, speed and direction. He wasn’t having an easy time, but he’d got the feel of it, so there seemed no point in taking over from him. We therefore switched jobs, and when the time came I was the one who went outside. It wasn’t the most sensible arrangement because we kept having to give each other advice about what to do next, but at the time it seemed the sensible option.

BRIAN

We started our descent from 32,000 feet as we crossed the border from Libya into Egypt, our plan being to come gently down at about 300 feet a minute, progressively losing speed. By then we were doing 130 knots, and we had worked out what our trajectory should be from the winds that the met men had predicted for various levels. But it turned out that Luc and Pierre’s forecast was quite wrong, and we continued to travel much too fast. Nor could we bring the balloon down at the rate we wanted. At first I found I could lose height simply by keeping the burners switched off; but the heat of the sun rapidly intensified, and at around 20,000 feet the sheets of ice that had formed on the inside of the hot-air cone started to melt and smash down on the gondola. The noise inside the capsule was tremendous — thumps and bangs and slithering crashes — and the envelope was shedding so much weight that the balloon no longer wanted to descend. The only way we could continue down was by venting helium. I opened one gas valve and kept it open for what seemed ages, but still we were not descending. From his position under the hatch Bertrand called, ‘Open the other!’ I did so, and suddenly we found ourselves dropping out of the sky at 800 feet a minute — far too fast. Then another load of ice fell off, and we started up again.

BERTRAND

On our way down, while Brian was at the controls, I saw an opportunity for a fabulous photograph. The red, rising sun was glowing through the frozen porthole, and the effect was so striking that I simply had to take a picture. ‘Brian,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry. I know it’s not really the moment, but could you just move out of the way . . Because of the bombardment by falling ice, I had to wait some time before I could open the top hatch — and when I did, sheets of ice and gouts of water cascaded in. Until that moment, for twenty days the gondola had remained dry and in good order; now suddenly it was awash, an absolute mess, with water and ice everywhere. When I climbed out on top of the gondola I was suddenly in the sun. The air was warm, and ahead of us lay dark, rocky hills eroded into deep gullies. I shovelled masses of ice overboard with my hands and prepared the fifty-metre-long guide rope, setting it in position for deployment. The rope was made of hemp and weighed nearly 100 kilos; the idea was that in the moments before touchdown it would drag along the ground and keep the gondola side-on to our line of advance. Then I took out the safety pins from the release mechanism at P each corner of the load-frame so that we could fire off pneumatic charges to separate the envelope from the gondola if we had to. I also filmed everything — the envelope, the ice, Brian in the cockpit. I felt it was important to record everything. But when I tried to pull up the dangling solar panels, I found that after three weeks’ inaction I had become incredibly weak, and the array felt so heavy that I had to call on Brian for assistance. With him standing under the hatch, holding the end of the rope, and me calling out, ‘One, two, three —pull!’ we heaved in unison. Another job was to release all the lines connecting the gondola to the envelope and cut the thermocouple wires with bolt-croppers — altogether a lot of work.

BRIAN

There was no way we were going to land in the river valley: we missed it because we simply couldn’t get the balloon down fast enough. At 3,000 feet, instead of the fifteen knots predicted, we still had twenty-eight, and not until we were down to 1,000 feet did we at last slow down. The Breitling party which had flown out to meet us was already in the area and had been trying to call us on the emergency frequency, 121.5 , from their Canadair jet. After a fruitless search for the balloon, the pilot was on a final approach to Dakhla airfield when suddenly, ten seconds from touchdown, he heard my voice in his headphones calling, Any station — this is Breitling Orbiter balloon. Do you read us?’ Instantly he shoved the throttles forward, overshot the runway and climbed away. Stefano Albinati rushed up to the cockpit, and once the aircraft had gained height found he could talk to us easily, gave him our GPS coordinates and he headed in our direction. Dakhla was less than a hundred kilometers away, so we knew the aircraft would be with us in a few minutes. Bertrand took his camera on to the roof to film it coming — and a tremendous moment it was when we saw it. As the white jet began to circle us, low over the desert, rocking its wings as a sign of victory, Alan Noble came on the radio. I told him we’d missed the river valley but that we would try to land close to a road marked on our maps some eighty kilometers ahead. `

`OK, then,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we go and spot it for you?’ `Fine,’ I agreed, and the plane disappeared ahead of us w. 1..: u • ‘thin minutes it was back and Alan was saying, ‘Believe me, there is no road out there. You might as well land as soon as you can.’ Bertrand, back inside, started to stow all the loose equipment. We needed to keep the laptop out for communication with the control centre, so we left it on the desk. I was still struggling to steady our descent, standing in the corridor for quick access to the burner control panel and peering out through the portholes, which gave very poor downward visibility — particularly as at that moment the gondola happened to be flying backwards. Ridiculous as it must sound, we failed to use the famous radio altimeter about which Alan had pestered us the day before. Just as I was thinking, ‘We must still be about 150 feet up,’ I glanced down through the curved glass of the front hatch and saw stones. They looked extremely close. I was wondering whether convex glass could have a magnifying effect when Bertrand, who was watching through the rear hatch and therefore looking forward, shouted, ‘Brian — look out! We’re not even ten metres up! Hold tight! We’re going to hit!’ Immediately I switched on full burners. We both stood clutching the top rail of the bunk with our knees bent to absorb impact. Seconds later there was an almighty BANG! as we hit the ground. We were down for no more than a second. With the weight momentarily taken off it, the balloon snatched us back into the air. Up we went again, bouncing straight to 300 feet, where another blast from the burners stabilized us and stopped us coming down. Looking out we realized it was the most horrendous place in which to try to put down a balloon. We were approaching a plateau of sand, but beneath us, running up to the edge of the flat ground, was a steeply sloping mass of eroded rocks — and it was these we had struck. Fortunately the polystyrene blocks which I had failed to cut away after the launch took the brunt of the impact and saved the capsule from significant damage. More important, they prevented our remaining four fuel tanks from striking the rocks: had one split, the consequence might have been a catastrophic fireball. Fate had played its hand once again. Over the radio came Alan’s cynical voice, awarding us five out of ten for our attempt at touchdown. Bertrand went back on the roof and saw, a mile or two ahead, a flat plateau that looked perfect for landing. ‘Give it five minutes,’ he advised. ‘Then we’ll be over a suitable area.’

We were travelling at five or ten knots, with the Canadair plane still circling. Members of the party were filming us among them the official observer from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, Jakob Burkard, whose job was to record the precise moment of our touchdown.

When we reached the level stretch of ground, Alan called, ‘It looks good. Take it.’ Bertrand, inside again, apparently told me to put my helmet on, but I was so busy I never heard him. He pulled on his own helmet and, seeing a single red light on the instrument panel showing that only one of the gas valves was open, he suggested I open the other as well, and leave them both open, to vent a substantial amount of the helium. This is the way to land a Rozier, as it effectively transforms the balloon from a gas balloon into a hot-air balloon.

Now at last I was flying it, rather than having it fly me, and I brought us in with a few careful final burns. At the last moment we again both clutched the rail, but there was hardly any impact, and after one more tiny bounce we finally came to earth, with the capsule travelling lengthways. The gondola slid along on its belly for a few yards, then stopped. For a moment we looked at each other, speechless with the realization that we were safe. The flight was over, and we were surrounded by utter silence.

Then Bertrand cried, ‘Check the time! Check the time!’ I did so. It was a few seconds after 06:00 Zulu on Sunday, 21 March. Quickly I retrieved the laptop, which had shot off the desk and flown across the cabin, giving me a hefty clout on the side of the thigh, and at 06:01, seeing that we still had a signal on the Capsat, I hurriedly faxed to Control: ‘The Eagle has landed. All OK. Bloody good. B.

With hindsight, I feel slightly embarrassed to have used what seemed a rather unoriginal phrase, but it was completely spontaneous: the sight of the desert must have triggered a subconscious memory of the moon landing. I wanted Control to know we were safely down, but or more poetic.

I didn’t have time to type anything longer In fact Control knew we were down, for three successive sets of figures from our GPS had been the same. Quickly Sue came back: ‘Is the plane with you? Or anyone on the ground with you? Please advise status.’

BERTRAND

My ears were hurting because in the rush of preparing to land I had dragged my helmet on in a hurry and nearly ripped my ears off. As soon as the gondola settled, we both pulled the red rope of the rip panel through the top hatch to release the main body of helium, but the envelope stayed up, held aloft by the gas in the little tent balloon at the top. Imagine the scene. The sun was fully up. We were absolutely in the middle of nowhere: the fluorescent red gondola on the ground, the silver envelope overhead, and a white three-engined jet plane circling us only forty or fifty feet off the ground. We learned later that in the plane’s cockpit the automatic ground-proximity warning was screaming, ‘PULL UP! PULL UP!’, but the pilot was on such a high that he ignored it. Grabbing still and video cameras, I opened the rear hatch and scrambled outside to film the scene before the balloon collapsed. As I put my left foot down on the sand it left a print, and I had the same thought as Brian when he faxed that echo of Neil Armstrong’s famous message from the moon. Like the lunar surface, the desert was unmarked, and when I saw my own footprint, I thought, ‘Well, for Armstrong and Aldrin, it was wonderful to set foot on land so far from the earth – but for me, now, it’s a thrill to stand on the earth again.’ As I went out I was almost overcome by emotion. Determined to film the balloon while it was still inflated, I ran away from the gondola and immediately found I was out of breath from the unaccustomed exercise. The envelope was leaning at an angle of maybe forty-five degrees, with wind already blowing into its mouth and making the Mylar billow. While I filmed I kept talking to no one in particular – to heaven, perhaps – saying, ‘This is fabulous! Thank you! Thank you!’ Then the Breitling plane came by on a really low pass, and I filmed that too, holding the camera in my right hand and waving with my left. Over the radio Stefano told Brian that he had to go back to Dakhla to refuel, but that they would send people to rescue us. Now that I had at least some pictures in the can, I asked Brian to pass out the first-aid