{"id":8163911,"date":"2026-07-31T18:20:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T16:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/?p=8163911"},"modified":"2026-08-24T16:56:26","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T14:56:26","slug":"double-eagle-ii-first-balloon-atlantic-crossing-1978","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/double-eagle-ii-first-balloon-atlantic-crossing-1978\/","title":{"rendered":"The Balloon That Finally Crossed the Atlantic"},"content":{"rendered":"<style>.et_pb_title_container h1.entry-title { padding-top: 40px !important; }<\/style><p>For twenty years the Atlantic had been killing balloonists. Since 1958, five men had died trying to drift across it, and every attempt \u2014 more than a dozen of them \u2014 had ended in the sea. Then, in August 1978, three amateurs from Albuquerque climbed into a silver helium balloon called Double Eagle II, lifted off from a field in Maine, and six days later came down gently in a barley field near Paris.<\/p><p>It was the first balloon flight across the Atlantic Ocean \u2014 and one of the last of aviation's truly great \"firsts.\"<\/p>\r\n<div style=\"background:#f5f5f5;padding:20px 24px;margin:24px 0;border-radius:8px\"><p style=\"margin:0 0 10px;font-weight:700;font-size:17px;color:#222\">Quick Facts<\/p><table style=\"width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;font-size:15px\"><tr><td style=\"padding:5px 10px 5px 0;color:#666;vertical-align:top;white-space:nowrap\"><strong>Balloon<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:5px 0\">Double Eagle II (helium gas balloon)<\/td><\/tr><tr><td style=\"padding:5px 10px 5px 0;color:#666;vertical-align:top;white-space:nowrap\"><strong>Crew<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:5px 0\">Ben Abruzzo, Maxie Anderson, Larry Newman<\/td><\/tr><tr><td style=\"padding:5px 10px 5px 0;color:#666;vertical-align:top;white-space:nowrap\"><strong>From<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:5px 0\">Presque Isle, Maine (8:42 p.m., 11 August 1978)<\/td><\/tr><tr><td style=\"padding:5px 10px 5px 0;color:#666;vertical-align:top;white-space:nowrap\"><strong>To<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:5px 0\">Miserey, near Paris, France (17 August 1978)<\/td><\/tr><tr><td style=\"padding:5px 10px 5px 0;color:#666;vertical-align:top;white-space:nowrap\"><strong>Duration<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:5px 0\">137 hours, 6 minutes<\/td><\/tr><tr><td style=\"padding:5px 10px 5px 0;color:#666;vertical-align:top;white-space:nowrap\"><strong>Distance<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:5px 0\">~3,100 miles<\/td><\/tr><tr><td style=\"padding:5px 10px 5px 0;color:#666;vertical-align:top;white-space:nowrap\"><strong>Milestone<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:5px 0\">First balloon to cross the Atlantic<\/td><\/tr><tr><td style=\"padding:5px 10px 5px 0;color:#666;vertical-align:top;white-space:nowrap\"><strong>Recognition<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:5px 0\">Gondola preserved at the Smithsonian; crew became instant celebrities<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/div>\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">A graveyard of attempts<\/h2><p>The transatlantic balloon crossing was aviation's great unfinished business. It had defeated everyone who tried it, sometimes fatally. Two of the Double Eagle II crew knew the danger personally: the year before, Ben Abruzzo and Maxie Anderson had attempted the crossing in the original Double Eagle, only to be forced down into the freezing sea near Iceland after nearly 66 hours aloft. They had survived, learned, and come back.<\/p>\r\n<div style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:56.25%;height:0;overflow:hidden;margin:24px 0\"><iframe class=\"skip-lazy\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" loading=\"eager\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/e0edUJBG67g\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;border:0;border-radius:8px\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">Three men and a balloon<\/h2><p>For the second attempt, Abruzzo and Anderson added a third pilot, 31-year-old Larry Newman. Their balloon stood 112 feet tall, filled with helium, and it launched from Presque Isle, Maine, on the evening of 11 August 1978. The plan was simple to describe and terrifying to execute: ride the winds east, stay high, and don't run out of ballast before Europe.<\/p>\r\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\" style=\"margin:0 0 24px;width:100%\"><img data-opt-id=1244451151  fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"skip-lazy\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" loading=\"eager\" width=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/ml5psubhxdln.i.optimole.com\/cb:0e0_.b970\/w:auto\/h:auto\/q:mauto\/ig:avif\/https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2026\/07\/double-eagle-ii-crew.jpg\" alt=\"The Double Eagle II crew\" style=\"width:100%;height:auto;max-width:100%;display:block;border-radius:6px\"><figcaption style=\"font-size:13px;color:#777;text-align:center;margin-top:6px;font-style:italic\">Maxie Anderson, Ben Abruzzo and Larry Newman \u2014 three balloonists from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">The Big Drop<\/h2><p>The crossing nearly ended in the middle of the ocean. In the cold night air the balloon abruptly lost lift and began to plunge. The crew hurled everything overboard \u2014 ballast, equipment, even their sleeping bags \u2014 as the sea rose toward them. They called it, afterwards, \"the Big Drop.\"<\/p>\r\n<div style=\"background:#f8f9fa;border-left:4px solid #d32f2f;padding:20px 22px;margin:18px 0 24px;border-radius:0 8px 8px 0;font-size:16px;line-height:1.7\"><em>&ldquo;The balloon came right down from 22,000 feet - maybe it could have been as high as 24,000 feet at the time - to 4,000 feet. We thought it was all over.&rdquo;<\/em><div style=\"margin-top:10px;font-size:14px;color:#555\"><strong>Maxie Anderson<\/strong> &mdash; Double Eagle II pilot<\/div><\/div>\r\n\r\n<div style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:56.25%;height:0;overflow:hidden;margin:24px 0\"><iframe class=\"skip-lazy\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" loading=\"eager\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/6KvtWz2ofY0\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;border:0;border-radius:8px\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">Landfall<\/h2><p>The balloon recovered, climbed back into daylight, and pressed on. They crossed the coast of Ireland, then England, and finally France. French authorities offered them Le Bourget \u2014 the very field where Charles Lindbergh had landed to a delirious crowd in 1927 \u2014 but with their ballast almost gone, the crew judged it too risky to drift over the Paris suburbs. Instead they set Double Eagle II down in a barley field at Miserey, on the farm of Roger and Rachel Coquerel, 137 hours and 6 minutes after leaving Maine.<\/p>\r\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\" style=\"margin:0 0 24px;width:100%\"><img data-opt-id=1638301308  fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"skip-lazy\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" loading=\"eager\" width=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/ml5psubhxdln.i.optimole.com\/cb:0e0_.b970\/w:auto\/h:auto\/q:mauto\/ig:avif\/https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2026\/07\/double-eagle-ii-gondola.jpg\" alt=\"The Double Eagle II gondola\" style=\"width:100%;height:auto;max-width:100%;display:block;border-radius:6px\"><figcaption style=\"font-size:13px;color:#777;text-align:center;margin-top:6px;font-style:italic\">The Double Eagle II gondola, which carried three men across the Atlantic and now resides in the Smithsonian. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n\r\n<div style=\"background:#f8f9fa;border-left:4px solid #5C91FF;padding:20px 22px;margin:18px 0 24px;border-radius:0 8px 8px 0;font-size:16px;line-height:1.7\"><em>&ldquo;Imagine if a mugger with a .357 magnum pulls the trigger, and the gun goes click.&rdquo;<\/em><div style=\"margin-top:10px;font-size:14px;color:#555\"><strong>Larry Newman<\/strong> &mdash; Double Eagle II pilot, on completing the crossing (Sports Illustrated, 1978)<\/div><\/div>\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">The last of the great firsts<\/h2><p>The three men became instant celebrities. Larry Newman, it is said, was even given the bed Lindbergh had slept in half a century earlier. Their gondola went to the Smithsonian, where it hangs today. And the crossing marked something larger than one flight: with the Atlantic finally beaten by balloon, one of the last blank spaces on aviation's map of firsts had been filled in.<\/p><p>Airplanes had crossed the ocean thousands of times by 1978. But there was still something the winds alone had never carried a human across \u2014 until three men from the desert trusted their lives to a bag of helium and proved it could be done.<\/p>\r\n<div style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:56.25%;height:0;overflow:hidden;margin:24px 0\"><iframe class=\"skip-lazy\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" loading=\"eager\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/qiBMa92vt-o\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;border:0;border-radius:8px\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\r\n<p style=\"font-size:13px;color:#777;font-style:italic;margin-top:24px\">Sources: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum; History.com; Sports Illustrated (1978); Wikipedia.<\/p>\r\n<div style=\"background:#f0f4ff;border-left:4px solid #5C91FF;padding:16px 20px;margin:32px 0 8px;border-radius:0 8px 8px 0\"><p style=\"margin:0 0 8px;font-weight:600;color:#333\">Related Posts<\/p><p style=\"margin:4px 0\"><a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/kingsford-smith-southern-cross-first-trans-pacific-1928\/\">The Australian Who Was First to Fly the Pacific<\/a><\/p><p style=\"margin:4px 0\"><a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/beryl-markham-first-woman-atlantic-east-west-1936\/\">The Woman Who Flew the Atlantic the Hard Way<\/a><\/p><\/div>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For twenty years the Atlantic had been killing balloonists. Since 1958, five men had died trying to drift across it, and every attempt \u2014 more than a dozen of them \u2014 had ended in the sea. Then, in August 1978, three amateurs from Albuquerque climbed into a silver helium balloon called Double Eagle II, lifted [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":8163466,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"editor_notices":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[665,666],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8163911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aviation-world","category-history-and-legends"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Double Eagle II: First Balloon Across the Atlantic<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In 1978, three men in the helium balloon Double Eagle II made the first balloon crossing of the Atlantic - surviving a terrifying near-plunge into the sea.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/double-eagle-ii-first-balloon-atlantic-crossing-1978\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Double Eagle II: First Balloon Across the Atlantic\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In 1978, three men in the helium balloon Double Eagle II made the first balloon crossing of the Atlantic - 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