Double Eagle Two, the Helium Balloon That Crossed the Atlantic on This Day in Nineteen Seventy-Eight After a Century of Men Died Trying

On August 17, 1978, three balloonists from Albuquerque, New Mexico, landed a helium balloon called Double Eagle II in a barley field outside Paris, becoming the first people in history to cross the Atlantic Ocean by balloon. The feat ended roughly a century of attempts that had cost an estimated 13 lives. The crew - Ben Abruzzo, Maxie Anderson, and Larry Newman - had flown more than 3,000 miles from Maine to France in just under six days.

Why the Atlantic Was Ballooning’s Last Great Prize

For most of the history of human flight, the balloon came first. People had been going aloft for roughly 120 years before the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, and almost from the beginning, one challenge loomed over all of them: the roughly 3,000-mile stretch of cold ocean between the New World and the Old.

Airplanes conquered the Atlantic decades earlier. Alcock and Brown flew it nonstop in 1919, and Lindbergh crossed solo in 1927. By the 1970s, travelers crossed in wide-body jets without a second thought.

But no one had ever crossed it in a balloon - and the failures were grim. The first serious, funded attempt dates to 1873, backed by the newspaper the New York Daily Graphic; it never even reached open water. Between the 1950s and the summer of 1978, at least seven attempts ended in the ocean. By one common count, there had been 17 attempts and 13 deaths. The Atlantic was undefeated.

Who Were the Men Behind Double Eagle II?

The three challengers all came from Albuquerque, New Mexico, high-desert country prized by balloonists for its calm mornings and good flying.

Ben Abruzzo was a driven, successful real estate developer.
Maxie Anderson was in the mining business and known for a quiet, unshakeable steadiness.
Larry Newman, the youngest, was a hang glider pilot and entrepreneur who brought energy to the team.

Abruzzo and Anderson were serious gas-balloon pilots, not weekend hobbyists. And this was not their first attempt.

The First Failure: Double Eagle and the Ice off Iceland

In September 1977, Abruzzo and Anderson launched a balloon simply called Double Eagle from Massachusetts. It turned into a nightmare. They ran into weather, and ice built up on the helium envelope, weighing the balloon down until it could no longer hold altitude.

After roughly 66 hours battered over the North Atlantic, they came down in the water off Iceland. Abruzzo was in the frigid sea so long that he suffered frostbite and nearly lost the use of a foot.

Instead of quitting, the two men studied what went wrong. Their conclusion: they needed more balloon, more ballast, and a third set of hands. They recruited Larry Newman and named the new craft Double Eagle II.

How a Gas Balloon Actually Flies

A gas balloon is a different animal from the hot-air balloons that drift over vineyards. A hot-air balloon burns propane to heat the air and can only stay up as long as its fuel lasts - a few hours at most.

Double Eagle II was a helium balloon with an enormous envelope holding more than 112,000 cubic feet of gas, its black-and-silver skin coated to survive both sun and cold. You don’t burn fuel in a gas balloon; you fly it with ballast - bags of sand and jugs of water hung around the gondola.

The physics make every flight an exercise in slow, irreversible arithmetic:

To climb, you drop ballast and let it fall away.
To descend, you valve off precious helium out the top.
Every handful of sand and every puff of gas is gone forever.

The gondola itself was a catamaran-style boat hull named Spider, built to float if the balloon went down at sea. It was smaller than a pickup truck bed, and three grown men lived in it for days in freezing cold, breathing bottled oxygen at altitude.

The Flight: Six Days and One Terrifying Night

Double Eagle II lifted off from Presque Isle, Maine, on the evening of August 11, 1978, riding the winds northeast past Newfoundland and out over the deep water where earlier balloons had been lost. The crew took turns sleeping, ate cold food, and relayed their position through ham radio operators, ships, and passing aircraft. Newspapers tracked the balloon’s location like a ballgame score.

The crisis came on roughly the fourth night. As always at night, the sun’s warmth vanished, the helium contracted, and the balloon grew heavy and began to sink toward the black ocean. They dropped toward 20,000 feet and lower, with ice a threat and the sea a certainty if they couldn’t stop.

So they threw everything overboard - first sand and water ballast, then food, equipment, even a cooler. Somewhere low over the waves, the descent finally stopped. At dawn, the rising sun warmed the gas, the helium expanded, and Double Eagle II climbed back to safe altitude. They had spent nearly all their reserves, but they were still flying.

Why They Flew Past Ireland to Reach France

With land finally in sight, the crew could have set down in Ireland or England and claimed the crossing outright. Instead, they pushed on. They wanted to land near Paris at Le Bourget - the same field where Lindbergh had touched down 51 years earlier - to close the historic circle.

Low on ballast and daylight, they didn’t quite reach Le Bourget. But as evening fell on August 17, 1978, they brought Double Eagle II down into a barley field outside the town of Miserey, about 60 miles from Paris, as the French countryside came running across the field toward them.

The final clock read 137 hours and change - just under six days aloft and more than 3,000 miles from Maine to France. They were the first human beings to cross the Atlantic by balloon.

What Makes This Flight So Remarkable

A balloon has no engine, no throttle, no way to power out of trouble. You are at the mercy of the air, the sun, and the cold, and every decision is slow and irreversible. That the Atlantic fell at last to a real estate man, a miner, and a hang glider pilot is remarkable on its own.

What lifts the story higher is that these men had already failed once. Abruzzo carried frostbite scars from his first attempt and knew in his body exactly what the ocean could do - yet he climbed back into a small boat under a bag of gas and pointed it at the same water. The willingness to study a failure, fix what broke, and try again is the heart of aviation itself.

The Coda: The Pacific and the Cost of Pioneering

The crew wasn’t finished. In 1981, Abruzzo made the first balloon crossing of the Pacific - an even longer haul - in a balloon called Double Eagle V. Both Abruzzo and Anderson were later killed in separate accidents, a hard truth about aviation pioneers. Today, the Double Eagle II gondola is on display at the National Air and Space Museum.

Key Takeaways

Double Eagle II was the first balloon to cross the Atlantic, landing near Miserey, France, on August 17, 1978.
The crew - Ben Abruzzo, Maxie Anderson, and Larry Newman - flew more than 3,000 miles from Presque Isle, Maine, in about 137 hours (just under six days).
The crossing ended roughly a century of attempts, with about 17 tries and 13 deaths before it succeeded.
Abruzzo and Anderson had failed a year earlier aboard Double Eagle (September 1977), ditching off Iceland after ice and frostbite - then rebuilt and returned.
A gas balloon flies on ballast and valved helium, making every altitude change a permanent, irreversible trade-off.