GO SCOUTS!
Posted on 03/09/2005 6:44:32 AM PST by RonF
Whether he is in a balloon, a boat, a glider or a jet, show adventurer Steve Fossett a record and he will want to break it. Now he’s trying to become the first man to fly a jet non-stop around the globe. And it all started with a scouting badge.
You won't get much poetry out of Steve Fossett, and certainly no introspection. The Chicago billionaire who has brought us the first solo circumnavigation of the globe by balloon, the fastest by yacht – if that’s the right term for a monster high-tech catamaran – and the fastest, highest trip by unpowered flight in a glider, is perpetually lost for words.
Emotions are just not his thing. But he does love deeds. His records – more than 20 so far, although not all stand for long – result from years spent doing things like climbing five of the world’s seven tallest peaks, running-swimming-bicycling through innumerable triathlons, and holding the record for the slowest swim across our own dear English Channel. That last says something about Fossett, Sir Richard Branson’s adventure-pal and rival. He entered the Channel four times in five years and when he finally made it in 1985, it took him 22 hours and 15 minutes. But he did it. Everest remains the only peak he has attempted to have beaten him, but he shrugs it off. His lungs couldn’t take it, and he doesn’t care enough to die for a mountain top. That says something, too.
Just turned 60, Fossett has seen and done things few of us would even consider. He loves to pit the latest technological ingenuity and his own endurance against the forces of nature, but plays down what might happen if a bolt breaks or a cable snaps, or simply if tempestuous weather overwhelms his balloons, boats or gliders. The answer, in all cases, is that he dies. Take his next plan, this time sponsored by Branson, to be the first person to fly non-stop round the world, solo. His Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer, a super-light jet, should be ready this month.
Fossett lists three “critical dangers” he faces: taking off with full fuel tanks bulging in the lightweight skin, “turbulence while heavy”, and fuel freezing late in the 70-hour voyage. In other words, he might be blown to smithereens taking off, have the jet fall apart in a storm, or plummet from the sky if the fuel freezes, which makes three pretty good chances to end his days in a single enterprise.
But before he gets to that, Fossett is taking a crack at being the first to glide all the way up to the stratosphere, floating silently on the winds, 62,000ft up, just below the celestial ceiling of the Earth.
It is a potentially glorious, potentially lethal venture. This is what he has to say about it: “Well. It’s true what other people who are good at words say about gliding: ‘It’s serene!’ ‘It’s so uplifting to be up there, flying without a motor!’ ‘The scenery is great.’ But somehow, I just don’t think of things that way.”
Fossett is smiling – serenely – as he says this. We are in a cheap restaurant in a middle-of-nowhere town in Nevada that just happens to have one, unassailable attraction. It has an airfield with the best combination of thermal risers, winds and dry, desert mountains for flying gliders, and every summer attracts a bevy of glider-jocks bent on breaking records. Fossett couldn’t be happier.
Out on the airstrip, only the top quality of his flight suits and his German-made ASH 25M glider set him apart as a billionaire in a brotherhood of pilots. He sits at a bench with a jug of water, poring over flight plans and weather charts, just like the rest of them. “He’s the fattest cat in a bunch of fat cats because these aircraft cost a ton of cash,” says Jim Blake, the “glider camp” professional who is hooking up the wispy machines for take-off. “But he doesn’t go into things that much, and we like that. Ask him about that balloon trip and all he’ll say is: ‘Good flight, that one!’”
And when I ask Fossett why he does these things, he can only grin. He digs in his metaphorical heels and sets his jaw, which makes him look remarkably like Sir Anthony Hopkins. He chews quietly on his salad.
Well? The motivation, is, after all, exactly what we all want to know about a man who can apparently breeze to a billion-dollar fortune on the tempestuous commodity and “futures” markets of tough-guy Chicago, and then chooses to amuse himself dodging the storms of ocean and atmosphere.
And then he comes up with an answer: the Boy Scouts.
“I learnt my values in the Boy Scouts, and I am proud of that,” he says. Fossett’s eyes are twinkling. At first I think he is joking – the Boy Scouts? – but his eyes are twinkling only with pleasure. “I went right through the Scouts when I was growing up in southern California,” he goes on. “It was in the Scouts that I climbed my first mountain, and where I learnt my leadership skills between the ages of 11 and 18.
“Maybe I am going after awards. You know how in the Scouts you get awards as you go on, as you learn and prove yourself to be worthy of them? Well, I think that each record I break is like earning myself a new and higher Scout award.
“And I can’t think of anything I would rather do.”
It is an explanation that might have gone down well at the Royal Geographical Society in the 19th century. There is an inevitable touch of Phileas Fogg about Fossett – all this scrambling around the world the hard way – and perhaps an echo of Scott of the Antarctic, or Captain Cook. There could be no greater Boy Scout heroes than them. But Fossett just chuckles at that idea.
He is the explorer for the post-industrial 21st century, when almost all is already known and the technology becomes its own frontier: three parts Bill Gates to one part Scott. “I really get a charge out of the technology,” he says.
In 1998 Penthouse headlined him “The Most Extreme Man on Earth”. Most men would take that as a compliment, but not Fossett. “It’s nonsense,” he says. “Riding roller-coasters? Bungee jumping? I am not the least bit interested in thrill-seeking. I am not drawn to risk – I do an enormous amount of planning to reduce the risks. That is what I am interested in. I want to have control over the experience.
“I don’t participate in a sport for pleasure,” he adds. “I do it to achieve something. I take considerable pride in being licensed to pilot a jet solo. And I take pride in being able to deal with the solitude when I have to – 14 days alone up there on the solo balloon record – but there’s no pleasure in flying a balloon. Oh no there is not.”
Fossett did very nearly die in 1998, when he was racing Branson for the first around-the-world balloon flight. He was two-thirds of the way around the globe when he was caught in a storm 500 miles off Australia and ended up in the Pacific. He was rescued by the Australian Coast Guard. Later that year he joined Branson in another attempt.
“I lost my equipment and I nearly lost my life. It is just unfortunate that the things I want to achieve involve danger,” he says. It seems to have been the loss of his balloon that bothered him, because it allowed Branson and a third team of Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones to get ahead. In the end it was the Piccard and Jones team that went round the world first but it was Fossett who, nearly three years later, became the first man to go round the world by himself in a balloon.
And here he exhibits a trace of the competitive spirit, the ambition, the ego that for most of the time he keeps carefully hidden. It’s the solo flights that stay in the world’s imagination: “It’s Lindbergh, not Alcock and Brown, who remains the household name,” he says.
His single-mindedness means that there is no room for much else in his life. He has been married for 36 years but he says he doesn’t regret not having any children. Children would be a distraction. What does his wife Peggy think? “I think she would like it if I just stayed home,” he replies.
He grew up in southern California with a father who enjoyed a stable, lifetime-career at Procter & Gamble, an older brother and a younger sister. It was the old American Dream incarnate. “It was a great start,” he says. “We always knew then that you get things done if you do it right.”
Fossett long ago learnt that it is not necessarily the biggest cheese in the high school cafeteria who wins the ultimate prizes. “I love to compete and I love sports, but I am not and never have been a natural athlete,” he explains.
It was in business that he really discovered himself. The Chicago commodities markets are as competitive, fast and perilous as any – the New York stock markets are tame in comparison. Fossett thrived, and made fortunes, first in commodities and then in “options” on the futures market. “I learnt to make decisions very clearly and quickly,” he explains. “On balance, I was more right than wrong.”
Eventually he decided he was rich enough to play with the big guys in the rarefied world of performance yachting. “Sailing was very like business,” he says. “I could make the decisions, be the skipper, but to make good decisions you need the best advice, and then you need the best crew to carry them out.”
It occurs to me that this determinedly down-beat, blend-with-the-crowd man has something of the quality that the New Journalist Tom Wolfe famously dubbed “the Right Stuff” in his book on astronauts. It is not just courage, and certainly not just quick reflexes. It is something close to the mystical, a quality that can keep the pulse steady while the brain somehow makes the right decision at the right moment, without knowing quite how.
“I suppose so,” says Fossett, managing an expression combining both modest surprise at the comparison, and obvious gratification. “That’s my strongest point. I am the decision-maker.”
So is the day eventually going to come, I ask gingerly, when he will be too old to fly to space? He gives me a look combining pity and contempt. “When that happens, I’ll build some robots and break records with them.” And he points out that his buddy on the glider altitude record attempt in New Zealand is Einar Enevoldson, a retired, real-life Right Stuff NASA test pilot who is already 70.
And to wonder whether, for instance, you would get the same satisfaction from sending a robot to Everest as standing at the peak on your own two feet is simply to miss the point of being Steve Fossett, 21st-century explorer.
GO SCOUTS!
I think I'll read part of this to my Scouts at our Pack Meeting this week.
Scout Ping
later
Steve Fossett credits his Scouting experiences and training for what he has accomplished, both in business and in his adventuring. He is an elected member of the World Scout Committee, which is the board of the World Organization of Scouting Movements (WOSM). The WOSM (of which the BSA is a member) includes more than 28-million members - girls and boys - worldwide. For your reference, the GSUSA is not a member of the WOSM, but is a member of the World Association of Girl Scouts and Girl Guides (WAGGGS).
From the WOSM's web site: "'Steve has demonstrated that self confidence can take one far, to continue to explore the limits of science, technology and human character,' said Dr. Marie-Louise Correa, Chairman of the World Scout Committee. 'This is more than just a new record by Steve Fossett and a former Scout, it opens new horizons in aeronautics and how we view the world.'"
Here's a picture of the plane:
Note the World Scouting emblem on the fuselage.
I guess you have to be a bezillionaire to have a decent adventure these days.... LOL
He would have some unique merit badges if they gave them out for his accomplishments.
Please check out post #7 on this thread.
I wonder how Scouting would've affected this guy if he were a kid today? I'm talking about the damned ACLU and those pesky Atheists. God Bless the Scouts!
I enjoy reading about Mr. Fossett's achievements, but Wiley Post is still my flying hero!
Neat picture. I'll show this to my husband later.
I got my Eagle Scout Award on 11/20/63, as a member of Troop 7 in Arlington Heights, Illinois. I was 12, and since the minimum age was 13, I had to get special permission to have it awarded so early. I still carry the card in my wallet. I miss those days.
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