At 9:05 a.m. on March 1, 1999, amid the ringing of church bells and the cheers of thousands in the Swiss ski village of Château d’Oex, the crew chief severed the last rope holding the Breitling Orbiter 3 with a Swiss Army knife. The gondola—an elongated red carbon-composite egg, 16 feet long and 7 feet in diameter—carried Bertrand Piccard, a Swiss psychiatrist and grandson of stratospheric balloon pioneer Auguste Piccard, and British balloonist Brian Jones. Their balloon, 180 feet tall and filled with the equivalent of seven Olympic swimming pools of helium and hot air, had to do what no one had ever done: circle the world on the wind alone. For nineteen days, twenty-one hours, and fifty-five minutes the two men rode jet streams and traded altitude for direction, discarding titanium propane tanks over the Sahara, drifting in silence above the Pacific, and faxing meteorologists in Geneva to plot their next wind. They crossed their own starting longitude at 9°27' west in Mauritania on March 20, completing the circumnavigation. With nearly all fuel gone, they bounced to a landing in the Egyptian Sahara near Mut on March 21, having covered 29,055 miles. It was the last great aviation “first,” the final unconquered milestone in atmospheric flight. The Anheuser-Busch $1 million prize was theirs; so was a place beside the greatest aerial voyagers of history.