"Things Were Very, Very Bad"

By the flight of a silvery balloon, man not only was transported but moved again last week. Double Eagle V, which lifted off and blew away from Japan on Tuesday, came down nearly four days later in a rainstorm near the little mountain town of Covelo, Calif. The four adventurers in the gondola--Ben Abruzzo, 51, Larry Newman, 34, Ron Clark, 41 (all of Albuquerque), and Rocky Aoki, 43, Japanese-born owner of the Benihana restaurant chain--drank champagne toasts to the first balloon to make it across the Pacific Ocean and then settled down to wait overnight for rescue.

Three years ago, Captain Abruzzo had piloted Double Eagle II across the Atlantic, a pioneering trip that was half as far and twice as calm. This time, he said, "things were very, very bad." The 26-story helium balloon leaked throughout the 5,070-mile journey. Ice built up on its thin skin, and thunderstorms wildly buffeted the craft. Losing altitude prematurely, the crew worried about not making landfall. In the crash landing, Aoki was briefly knocked unconscious. But they were down, no one was seriously hurt, and Abruzzo was asked once again why men do such things. "For the adventure, the achievement, the challenge," he said. "You do it for the horizons that are before you and to keep moving forward." After the world's longest balloon flight, what horizon is ?now before him? Abruzzo and crew want to balloon all the way around the world.

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