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Dude from Maine in this story lives a few miles from me. He's entertaining, but just a lil' bit of an adrenaline junkie.
Maine balloonist escapes rough landing in Nebraska
(CRETE, NB) AP - High winds and frozen instruments forced down two helium balloonists onto a field near Crete in southeast Nebraska, far short in their attempt for a coast-to-coast record.
The open basket carrying Andy Cayton and his co-pilot, Samuel Canders, bounced 100 feet in the air Wednesday morning, said Cayton. It tumbled down a hill and ejected the pair, but they were unhurt.
Cayton, 51, is from Savannah, Ga.; Canders, 29, is from Washburn, Maine.
They rose from the Earth more than 62 hours earlier from Lake Elsinore, Calif., hoping to land about 2,300 miles east in North Carolina. Their goal was the world distance record for AA-6 gas balloons, held by Belgium.
Canders sponsored their quest, trying to win a bet he made in college that he would fly coast-to-coast in a balloon by the time he was 30. Were he to lose, said a story in the North County Times newspaper of Escondido, Calif., he would have to get a tattoo.
Cayton has been flying balloons professionally since 1995, after 22 years in the U.S. Army.
Canders, who flies transport aircraft now, spent seven years flying Black Hawk helicopters.
The gondola suspended beneath the 65-foot balloon was equipped to handle its flight altitudes, ranging from 10,000 to 18,000 feet. It had oxygen, a satellite phone, global position system and plenty of extra warm clothing.
Their original, southerly route was changed when they had to skirt north around Area 51 in Nevada, the secret base military aircraft are developed and tested, Cayton said.
The jet stream pushed them across southern Colorado and eventually to Kansas, where they hit bad weather and wind that carried them 200 to 300 miles farther off their planned path.
"All of the radios, all of the equipment was frozen. We couldn't keep flying. We couldn't keep in contact with air traffic controllers," Cayton said.
So, late Tuesday night, they decided to land and began to slowly descend.
Wednesday morning found them 2,000 feet over an elementary school in Wilber.
A few minutes later, shortly after 8 a.m., they bumped down with the wind blowing at 45 mph.
Cayton said the landing was his hardest in a dozen years.
"We were still with it," he said, "but we weren't in the basket."
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