Losing My Virginity by Sir Richard Branson

Author:Sir Richard Branson [Branson, Sir Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, General, Business & Economics, Business, Entrepreneurship
ISBN: 9781446483343
Google: NWxnDythozIC
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

Flown seventeen hours and four minutes. Feels like a lifetime. Coming near the dateline. When we cross the dateline we beat our world hot-air-ballooning record. However, right now we are about as far away from help as anyone could ever be, sitting in a tilting capsule with half our fuel gone, terrified that if we move the rest will fall off. Not sure whether war has broken out because we have lost all communication with the outside world. Unlikely to reach the coast. But spirits up and the speed we’re going is amazing.

As our hours out of contact with San José continued, I wrote, ‘Things look pretty desperate. I’m not certain at this moment that we’ll get home.’

Then, just as abruptly as we had lost contact, we made it. I heard voices on the radio. By this time radio contact had been down for six hours and ten minutes. Mike had thought he’d lost us as two of the ships he had steaming towards us had reported sighting wreckage.

‘Mike, is that you?’

‘Richard! Where are you?’

‘Sitting in a tin can over the Pacific.’

We nearly wept with relief.

‘We thought that you must have ditched. God, we practically mobilised the airforce and the navy.’

‘We’re OK,’ I lied. ‘We’ve had a fire up on the capsule from propane but it’s gone out.’

I gave them our position.

‘Any other problems, apart from not having enough fuel to go home?’ Mike wanted to know.

‘No. We’re still tilting. We’re certainly not going to fire off any more fuel tanks.’

‘War’s broken out in the Gulf,’ a girl’s voice said. It was Penni, who was in the control room with them. ‘The Americans are bombing Baghdad.’

I thought of the soldiers I had met at Baghdad airport. The outbreak of the Gulf War meant that, if we did have to ditch, quite rightly we would be the last priority for anyone.

‘Thank God we’ve got hold of you,’ Bob Rice said. ‘I’ve worked out your route. You need to come down immediately. Your current jet stream will soon start bending back towards Japan. You’ll be marooned over the Pacific. If you come down from 30,000 feet to 18,000 feet you might get the jet that’s heading north. It’s sweeping up towards the Arctic but at least it’s land.’

‘Christ!’ Mike swore. ‘Another half an hour and you’d have been swinging back away from us.’

We cut off the burners and began to descend. After five hours Bob told us to rise again. We went back up to 30,000 feet and sure enough found ourselves heading northwest. We now flew steadily hour after hour. We stayed in the jet stream and kept the fuel we burnt to a minimum. We were still over the Pacific, flying at 200 miles an hour in a lopsided capsule, and we were exhausted, but now we had radio contact I felt that anything was possible. And the miracle continued. Our speeds were extraordinary: 210 miles an hour, 220, 200. We were just beating the average 180 miles an hour we needed.

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