SMALL WORLD BALLOONISTS

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28794, 15 January 1959, Page 9

SMALL WORLD BALLOONISTS

“Willing To Try Again”

NEW YORK, January 13,

Britain’s free balloonists want to try again to cross the Atlantic entirely by air. “It could be done —we proved that,” the expedition leader (Mr Arnold Eiloart) told a press conference today. Mr Eiloart and three other crew members drifted part way across the Atlantic recently in the balloon Small World, then were forced down, and finished a journey into Barbados in the balloon's sea-going gondola. Of the effort to cross all the way in the air, Mr Eiloart said: “We would have done it if it had not been for that blasted storm.” Mr Eiloart said on his arrival in Barbados that they were forced to cut loose from their balloon in the storm for fear that the bag would be blown too high by wind currents, expand because of low pressure, and then lose its gas. Mr Eiloart, who appeared gt the press conference with two of his fellow balloonists (Mr and Mrs Colin Mudie) said that “next time” he made such a crossing, he would make sure they had more water aboard.

Asked what he meant by “next time," Mr Eiloart said: “Well, we wouldn’t mind doing it again.”

But he added that there were no definite plans for another trip in the near future.