One hundred and ten miles of Atlantic

About 110 miles from the French coast, Don Cameron and Christopher Davey were running out of balloon. They had left Newfoundland in Zanussi on 26 July 1978, hoping to complete the first balloon crossing of the Atlantic. A helium leak and then a storm had left them with an ocean beneath them and too little lift to reach land.

They ditched in the Bay of Biscay, where a trawler picked them up. Three weeks later, Double Eagle II reached France and took the record. The difference between the two flights was not the size of the ambition. It was the remaining stretch of water, the condition of the envelope, and whether the next landing place was a field or the sea.

A graveyard with a waiting list

By 1978 the Atlantic had already collected balloons. Hydrogen and helium had both been tried. Some craft vanished. Some ditched and were found. Double Eagle I, the American attempt of the previous year, had come down off Iceland. BBC coverage of Zanussi called the British flight the thirteenth recent attempt. Whether every compiler would use the same integer is less important than the public fact the number was pointing at: this was not a first dream. It was a queue of expensive near-misses.

Cameron was not a tourist in the sport. He designed and built balloons in Britain. Davey was an army officer with the particular calm that radio reports like to borrow. The envelope was a Rozière — helium for lift, a heat system to trim altitude — about ninety feet tall in the descriptions filed while it was still in the air. The gondola was built as a survival capsule if the envelope lost the argument with the weather. That design choice is a tell. They knew the almost was the ordinary outcome.

The leak, in public

The useful thing about Zanussi, for a site that refuses to invent, is that part of the failure happened on the radio. On 27 July the BBC reported the pair about a thousand miles west of the United Kingdom, “limping along” after a helium leak, still hoping for Cornwall or Brittany, not asking to be treated as a wreck. The RAF control centre at Bracknell was on standby. Nimrods had been flying with the balloon, which is a sentence from a state that takes a civilian stunt seriously once it is over the ocean.

They kept height around seven thousand feet and a speed that the same reports put near thirty knots. For a day the leak was a problem you could still narrate as a delay. Then the weather did what weather does to a thin bag of gas. A storm opened a gash later described as about eight feet long. Ballast went over the side. The remaining lift was enough to drag them closer to Europe and not enough to make Europe into a landing field.

A trawler where a field should have been

On 30 July the envelope finished collapsing into the sea. The gondola did the job it had been built for. A passing trawler took the two men off and turned the last miles of the “crossing” into an ordinary maritime rescue. They were wet, alive, and immediately talking about a second attempt with a repaired bag. That talk is in the public record too. It is also short. Double Eagle II completed the crossing in August, and the British second try was set down. There is no honest version in which Cameron and Davey were robbed of a finish by a conspiracy. They were beaten by a tear, a storm, and a crew that launched with a sound envelope three weeks later.

The Royal Aero Club gave both men a gold medal the same year. Medals are how institutions mark an almost that should not be confused with incompetence. The Atlantic did not become easy in 1978. It became done. After a thing is done, the previous hundred and ten miles look, from a distance, like a rounding error. They were not. They were the entire remaining problem.

What “almost” is doing here

Retellings often say they were “so close.” Distance is the only honest intensifier. A hundred and ten miles of cold water is close in the way a runway is close when you are still in cloud. The rest of the lore around early Atlantic ballooning — curses, gentlemen’s agreements, a single doomed romantic — is mostly later color. The public file is plainer: a leak reported while the flight was still a news story, a tear in a storm, a designed capsule, a trawler, and then someone else’s barley field.

Almost Lore is not in the business of ranking courage. The near-miss that belongs on this site is mechanical and documentary. Zanussi proved that a British Rozière could take two men most of the way across a basin that had been eating balloons for years, and that “most of the way” is a phrase you can measure. The successful crossing did not erase that measurement. It just made it easy to forget.