by Master Sgt. Pat McKenna
photo by Master Sgt. Dave Nolan

In 1947, Chuck Yeager strapped himself into basically a rocket with wings and screeched over the Mojave Desert at supersonic speeds, becoming the first man to break the sound barrier. In the same pioneering spirit a decade later, another Air Force test pilot, Joe W. Kittinger Jr., catapulted himself into the heavens high above Minnesota’s Twin Cities and then just hovered there, defying gravity by — get ready for this — piloting a big, helium-filled balloon. Pretty amazing, huh?

Now, I know some of you might be thinking, “Whoop-dee-flippin’-doo!” A balloon, what’s the big deal? But this was no fancy-schmancy champagne-and-strawberries flight. On the contrary, Kittinger soared up through the stratosphere in a 25-story-high balloon made of bubble-thin plastic, boldly going where no man had gone before and breaking a world record for altitude on a manned balloon flight.

“There I was ... 96,000 feet stalled out, but not dropping,” Kittinger said. This wasn’t any joy ride either. Kittinger didn’t ascend into the unforgiving upper atmosphere, where air’s rare, for chills or thrills nor did he set out to break world records. He did it for knowledge.

Kittinger sealed himself into the pressurized Manhigh I capsule — no bigger than a Porta-Potty and a lot less comfortable — on June 2, 1957, and rose 18 miles above the Earth to study how space affects man’s body and mind. His elevating experiment on Project Manhigh led to the design of the Mercury capsule, which allowed astronauts like Alan Shepard and John Glenn to grab the glory and get their names into the history books. But that’s just fine with Kittinger. He’s just an ordinary Joe (in fact, his friends call him “Colonel Joe”).

“Hell, I’m just a redneck fighter pilot,” said Kittinger, who prefers tying a simple, red bandanna around his neck instead of sporting the swanky silk scarves that other aviators of his era flaunted.

Loving the wild blue
Kittinger’s love affair with the wild blue began at age 3 after his dad took him for a jaunt in a Ford trimotor plane. As a youngster growing up in College Park, Fla., Joe built model airplanes and often pedaled his bike to the nearby Orlando Airport, where he wheedled pilots for free rides. By 17, he’d soloed in a Piper Cub and switched elements, beginning a short-lived hydroplane boat racing career, which nearly killed him.

Kittinger joined the Air Force in 1949 as an aviation cadet, pinning on his wings the next year at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev. His first assignment sent him to Neubiberg, Germany, where he flew Republic P-47 Thunderbolts and then NATO experimental aircraft. He transferred to the fighter test plane section at Holloman AFB, N.M., in 1953, and served as the unit’s flying safety officer. Soon, he began collaborating with Col. (Dr.) John Paul Stapp, a trailblazer in space medicine whose unconventional ideas spurred many of the aircraft ejection and bailout systems still in use today.

Stapp recruited Kittinger into his research program after the pilot flew the observation plane that monitored Stapp’s 632-mph rocket sled ride (see “A One-track Mind,” April ’98 Airman), which studied how gravitational stress impacts the human body (Two-word answer: “It hurts!”). To accept the position, Kittinger earned a balloon pilot license and paratrooper’s rating, learned to fly helicopters, and underwent a dozen claustrophobia tests, corking himself into a capsule 24 hours at a time.

After Man High, Kittinger skippered Project Excelsior, meaning “Ever Upward” in Latin, which investigated aircraft bailout methods at extremely high altitudes. Nobody knew for sure if man could survive such a plummet, so, of course, Kittinger volunteered for the job. As the guinea pig in the gondola, he leapt three times from a balloon at the very edge of space, plunging to Earth in an experimental space suit and a prototype parachute rig — equipment built by the lowest bidder.

One mistake in this hostile environment — frostbiting temperatures, oxygen-starved air and a near vacuum that would boil and bubble blood like a shaken can of cola — could have killed him. And if Kittinger had tumbled into a flat spin, possibly exceeding 200 rpms, he would have whirled faster than a pinwheel in a tornado, pureeing all of his internal organs.

“You wouldn’t be dizzy, you’d be dead,” Kittinger said. “It’s something you wanted to stay away from.”

A really bad altitude
During his first Excelsior jump on Nov. 15, 1959, Captain Kittinger nearly donated his body to science before actually finishing with it. Jumping from 76,000 feet, his stabilizing chute, used to prevent the deadly flat spin, deployed too soon, and its shrouds became entangled around his neck. Unconscious, Kittinger spiraled downward, uncontrollably cartwheeling at 120 rpms. Fortunately, his main chute automatically opened at 12,000 feet, as advertised, saving his life.

“The most amazing thing about Joe Kittinger is that he is still here,” Stapp would later say.

A month later on Dec. 11, 1959, Kittinger hurled himself from Excelsior II at 74,700 feet, and again, lived to tell scientists what it was like. Keep in mind that calculations for these jumps weren’t made by Cray supercomputers, nor IBM’s Big Blue or by Bill Gates and his posse of eggheads. Nope. Instead, a group of Air Force “poindexters” did all the number crunching, guys with slide rules and no social life, and Kittinger trusted them implicitly.

His faith in their abilities embold-ened Kittinger to take his final plunge on Aug. 16, 1960. He ascended to 102,800 feet in Excelsior III, prayed “Lord, take care of me now” and walked out. The first step was a doozy.

“It was a helluva long way down, but the quickest way to get there,” Kittinger said.

By all rights, the captain should’ve scrubbed the mission. He’d lost partial pressure in the suit’s right glove and blood pooled in his hand, causing extreme pain and paralyzing it. But he didn’t want to let his team down. So he jumped and rocketed downward at 714 mph, literally falling faster than a speeding bullet and becoming the first man to go supersonic without the benefit of an aircraft. He dropped in a free fall for 4 minutes, 36 seconds before his parachute blossomed.

“I had absolutely no sense of the speed,” Kittinger said. “I didn’t hear a sonic boom; I didn’t even hear any whooshing or whistling of the wind. But when I flipped over and looked back at my balloon, it sure was an eerie sight — the sky was black as night but I was bathed in sunshine.”

When Kittinger landed or “more like crashed” in a heap near Alamogordo, N.M., he told his

ground crew, “I am very glad to be back with you all.” Although Kittinger seems to have his head

in the clouds, he’s always managed to land on his feet. And again he walked away from a jump

 intact; this time with three world records — longest freefall, longest parachute descent and

highest open-gondola balloon ride.

Kittinger continued his balloon experiments for another two years, culminating with his fifth and final high-altitude flight on Dec. 13, 1962. During Project Stargazer I, he escorted an astronomer up to 81,500 for 13 hours, where the scientist could look at the heavens without the distorting influence of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Because of his clandestine work in the New Mexico desert, Kittinger’s also linked to one of the century’s most notorious nonevents — the Roswell Incident. In the Air Force’s “Roswell Report: Case Closed,” Kittinger is named as the “red-haired captain” mentioned by eyewitnesses. Kittinger says the so-called “alien” that locals saw whisked away in an ambulance was actually one of his very human teammates injured during a balloon crash. At Kittinger’s home in Orlando, a mat lies at the front door adorned with little green men and flying saucers, greeting “visitors” with the words — “Welcome UFO Crews.”

Says Kittinger, “Well, just in case I’m wrong.”
 

The bubble bursts
When the balloon went up in Vietnam, Kittinger retired from research and raised his hand for combat duty. He served three tours in Southeast Asia and flew 483 combat missions — two piloting B-26 and A-26 aircraft with the Air Commandos, and the last flying F-4s and commanding the 555th “Triple Nickel” Tactical Fighter Squadron. On March 1, 1972, Kittinger shot down a MiG-21 during a dogfight over North Vietnam, and then on May 11, 1972, four days short of completing his tour, the enemy got even with him.

“The world’s greatest fighter pilot on the other side shot my butt down,” Kittinger said.

The North Vietnamese captured Kittinger, and the lieutenant colonel spent the next 11 months behind bars at the Hoa Lo Prison — the infamous Hanoi Hilton. His captors inflicted a regimen of torture and solitary confinement attempting to break Kittinger so they could use their prize as a puppet of propaganda. But Kittinger didn’t budge.

“They were asking me questions they already knew the answers to,” Kittinger said. “But I wasn’t about to go along with anything they were saying.”

To escape his torment and sustain his sanity while in solitary, Kittinger dreamed of ballooning around the world. In his mind, he figured out the logistics to accomplish such a feat, designing the gondola and balloon in his mind, listing the provisions and equipment he’d need, mapping routes and weather patterns, and calculating air currents.

“It’s how I entertained myself as a POW,” Kittinger said.

After retiring from the Air Force in 1978 as a colonel, Kittinger began ballooning across the country from “sea to shining sea.” He captured the Gordon Bennett Gas Balloon championship four times, entitling him to retire the trophy. In November 1983, he flew solo from Las Vegas to New York in three days to set a distance record in a 1,000-cubic-meter helium balloon. Colonel Joe landed in his underwear after jettisoning all his ballast and anything else not bolted down.

On Sept. 18, 1984, Kittinger became the first man to complete a solo transatlantic balloon flight, coasting 3,543 miles from Maine to Italy in 86 hours. He might’ve kept on going if thunderstorms hadn’t forced him down into a stand of tall trees, which dumped Kittinger out of the basket, dropping him 10 feet and breaking his ankle.

“It was no picnic; it was a tough flight,” Kittinger said. “I slept 10 minutes at a time, and survived on peanuts and candy bars. The only thing I had to keep me company was my Willie Nelson tapes.”

Today, Kittinger continues flying high, calling the sky “his office.” At age 70, he boasts a woolly mane of red hair that looks permanently wind-swept and a brushy mustache to match. To this day, he still has trouble coming down to Earth, logging more than 16,000 hours in 78 types of aircraft. He even piloted the Budweiser blimp from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to San Juan, Puerto Rico. “It was like flying a whale,” Kittinger said. “It goes only 35 mph, and it’s very sluggish. You’d have one helluva time doing a loop-the-loop in one of ‘em.”

Nowadays, Kittinger and his wife, Sherry, share their love of flying with “civilians” — barnstorming across the country in a 1929 New Standard biplane and selling rides at air shows, county fairs and festivals.

“We don’t do it for the money,” Kittinger said. “My reward is seeing the faces of kids light up on their first airplane ride. I just love it.”

Despite the recent success of the Breitling Orbiter, which circumnavigated the globe in March 1999, Kittinger remains undaunted, keeping his sights set on an around-the-world balloon flight.

“Nobody’s done it solo yet,” Kittinger said. “Plus I could do it faster. I’m not giving up. ... I say there are still some great adventures left.”