Up, up and around

　　STEVE FOSSETT safely landed his balloon early yesterday near a dried up lake in the Australian Outback, finally ending his record breaking flight around the world.The American adventurer’s Spirit of Freedom balloon touched down about 870 miles (1,392 km) northwest of Sydney, bumping along the ground for 15 minutes before stopping.Asked what he learned about himself during the trip, Fossett replied: “I learned that I get scared just like everyone else. I worry a lot more than I used to.”Just hours earlier, Fossett had to climb out of his capsule in the freezing Australian night to put out a fire caused by a loose burner hose.Fossett said the fire started immediately after a hose fitting came loose. He was able to put out the fire by shutting off a ball valve joint, which is used to attach the hose to propane fuel tanks and the balloon’s burner.“Any fire in this kind of a situation is extraordinarily dangerous,” Fossett said. “It can spread very rapidly and start burning through hoses. You’d be flying a bomb.”The shock of hearing about the fire — the first emergency of Fossett’s sixth attempt to circumnavigate the globe — came with relief at mission control, since Fossett reported the fire in the same note in which he said it was out.Fossett finally becomes, on his sixth attempt, the first person to fly solo around the world in a balloon. Some people might consider this a ridiculous pursuit. But given man’s capacity to chase after all manner of nutty, wasteful, dangerous, or murderous goals, news of a nearly two-week balloon ride rests easy on the nerves. It was anything but easy for Fossett, who has been trying to circle the globe since 1996 and nearly died in 1998 when a thunderstorm shredded his balloon, dropping him 29,000 feet (9,300 m) into the Coral Sea. Earlier that year the Libyan Government ended Fossett’s quest by preventing him from flying over that country’s airspace, and in 2001 he was forced to land in Brazil after storms over Argentina blew him off course.But there he was Wednesday morning, with kind winds carrying his silver Spirit of Freedom east of 117 degrees longitude at 27,000 feet — exactly where his journey began over western Australia on June 18.Fossett flew the 19,428.6-mile Southern Hemisphere route to take advantage of prevailing easterly winds and avoid the political hassle he ran into with Libya. The international rules for ballooning require a round-the-world flight to cross the earth’s meridians and to cover a distance equal to at least half the length of the equator.While Fossett’s balloon is a high-tech wonder compared with those that took to the air in the 1700s, no autopilot, or computerized meteorological instruments can control the wind, and Fossett still had to go where Mother Nature sent him.That, of course, is the great appeal of his trip and why people who would never climb into the basket still like to tease themselves into thinking they just might.Fossett is a millionaire businessman-turned-adventurer who is especially known for his record-breaking balloon flights: in 1995 he made the first solo crossing of the Pacific Ocean. Fossett tried and failed to become the first to circle the globe nonstop in a multi-person balloon; his attempts included a 1998 flight with British businessman Richard Branson which ended with the craft ditching in the Pacific near Hawaii. (The first circumnavigation was accomplished in March 1999 by Swiss pilot Bertrand Piccard and Englishman Brian Jones.) (SD-Agencies)