John Wallington is the first man to cross Australia in a hot air balloon together with Dick Smith in 1993. Now he is helping out in the flight control and practically being a right hand man for Fedor. Arranging clearance in the air space, John knows every detail of the trip and he guided us into it, saying crossing the Pacific Ocean on Fedor's first attempt is already a huge achievement as he successfully overcame severe weather conditions, but the speed record in not the aim.
- Fedor just crossed South American continent, is that right?
- He crossed Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and a small part of Brazil.
- Was is something you expected him doing to go across 4 countries?
- No, we did expect him going further to the South. We always anticipated Chile and Argentina, but we didn’t anticipate quite that far north.
- What has changed?
- Just a change in a wind direction. There was a rough forecast showing trajectory further to the south, but these things change. Weather is not something that going to any particular person’s desire.
- How is he going now regarding the schedule that was planned?
- He is going well. Going over the land yesterday put him in very his high spirit. He saw lots of places that he was familiar with, Aconcagua – the highest mountain in the Southern hemisphere which he has climbed, a bay in Chile, where he started his epic rowing trip to Australia a few years ago and a place where he’d sailed to in Uruguay. For him it was just a fantastic trip and he was lucky enough to cross the continent in daylight hours.
- Considering the timing – making it quicker than 13 days and 8 hours – what are the perspectives for that?
- There is still a reasonably good chance that this will occur. We’re pretty much right on schedule at the present time, so we just have to see what happens. But I should stress that this is not the primary objective of the flight. The primary objective of the flight is the achievement, which under any circumstances will be extraordinary. If he does achieve the circumnavigation he will be the person ever to do so on his first attempt. So a record.
- I’m aware that his crossing the Pacific Ocean was quite an achievement for the crew. Why was it that important?
- Of course it is a very big hurdle. The Pacific Ocean is the largest ocean in the world, so to get across there is a huge achievement in itself, certainly it is one of the longest solo-balloon flights in history a great sense of satisfaction and also there was some bad weather in the latter part of the crossing, which had us all very concerned for a while. There were storms in the area and we need to predict where they were as accurately as we could and Fedor himself changed levels a few times to try and get winds that were going around.
- Was there any pint where the crew felt it was quite dangerous?
- It was certainly worrying, we were very concerned when he was in the middle of all that activities but were keeping our close eye on things, and if it had become excessively dangerous, then there wouldn’t been no option but to land in the ocean and the capsule of course is designed to float and fortunately we weren’t put in that position. It was also much moisture area, so we had quite a lot ice forming on the balloon and it was very cold. There were ice crystals breaking of the balloon and falling down. It was a pretty tough environment to be.
- You’re helping a lot if not doing all communication with the aviation services. What was the reaction of traffic controllers – it’s not a usual thing to have a balloon crossing their borders.
- Of course, in South America English is not the first language of these controllers. First of all, we had to negotiate this little issue. But the reaction has been one of universal admiration, extraordinary cooperation and as the balloon left each control zone we have had messages of good will over the radio and emails back to our base in Australia saying how they wish Fedor well.
- And so do we.
