Passepartout I – an adventure in three episodes

It’s Thursday, the 4th of October 2007, a day like many others and still a day to remember. Today is the most exciting day for all the members of the Passepartout-team – well, maybe apart from the 5th of October, but let’s start the story at it’s beginning…

While the world is just starting everyday life, a few members of the Austrian Space Forum already confuse their cab driver with talks about meteorology and different gases. However, he is able to find the Lustbuehel observatory, a task that’s not so easy according to stories from others! Now, we are still discussing happily the risks and problems of GPS, without knowing that this grin will fade quite soon…

The weather conditions change between slightly cloudy and cloudy, the atmosphere inside is accordingly either enthusiastic or annoyed. Last questions have to be answered – who’s got the number of the airport, which we have to inform about the final flying route? Where is the OPS commander (who is still doing his „ordinary“ job in his real-life job)? When will we get the Helium, how do we get it on to the roof? Why is always something missing, and where the heck ist his serial USB-adapter, that we just can’t do without?

Meanwhile in the astrodome other team members do the last work: glueing, measuring, screwing and radio. The building rubble on the roof has to be removed. Laptops are recharged in an additional office room (thanks for giving it to us!) and software is copied from one machine to the other.

All the time telephones are ringing, space is running out, cabel connections grow longer and full of knots. From the outside the building is completely hidden because of ongoing painting work – whoever wants to enter, has to take care to avoid drops of colour. The whole observatory is one huge building site, our gondola a small but equally complex one.

So many single parts, so much material and work – and then you’re supposed to just let that piece of art go in one moment, let the wind take it with him? It’s not surprising, that we took everything apart again and again for many times, just to check for one last time… The take off time of 2pm is moved into the late grey afternoon. Everyone is on the edge… maybe everyone apart from Christopher Vasko, who answers the question what he’s doing here with a simple „I’m only an observer.“. Well, that’s true – for now!

Finally, at 4pm, it is time: Balloon, parachute, radar reflector, the gondola, about 20 members of the space forum and about as many bystanders and roughly 100 crayfish eggs are ready for take off. Only the GPS seems to have some problems and gives mysterious data. Project leader Michael Taraba, who sticks a paper with his mobile number on the gondola, and system engineer Norber Frischauf finally give the command all were waiting for: „GO!“ OPS – leader Willibald Stumptner gives a short talk and cheers with russion Vodka on „50 years of space travel“ – before he lets go of Passepartout. It takes less then a minute, until the balloon, moving with 300m per Minute, is lost in the dense clouds above us…

The relief about a successful take off of the balloon is very soon replaced by a slight panic: The received GPS data we get, are wrong, and not useful to find the balloon again. Now, help has to be sought somewhere else – luckily, the Austrian army is there for us. The backup system with a radar locating works even better than hoped for! We get the coordinates for the two recovery teams (Harald Fauland, Markus Spiss, Ernst Gotsch and Daniela Scheer in car 1, Photographer Andreas Köhler and cameraman Wolfgang Speiser with his Team in car 2), who instantly get on their way.

But this is already too late: Passepartout is moving with high speed, and is about 40km ahead – in a height of 10km. The pursuit gets harder. Although the flight route of the balloon is processing according to our calculations in a straight line towards east-south-east, but the roads are not. We follow its course from Fürstenfeld until Jennersdorf, leave the cameraman and photographer behind at the Slovenian border in the hope of reaching Passepartout – a fruitless experiment…

The further our balloon is away, the slower it moves, but we still manage to get close enough to observe it’s „comeback“. Meanwhile, the operations office got the information that the balloon burst at a height of 28km and is falling towards the earth. And not in Slovenia, but in Hungary… We change the maps and the country and continue our hunt for Passepartout.

While the highways change into small village roads, the pursuit changes into an odyssey. We drive through places we can’t even pronounce the name, knowing that Passepartout has already landed somewhere – according to the last informatio from 6pm around Nova, still a long way from our current position. Night falls, and a dense fog rises to make matters even worse. Tyrolean humour and some snacks from the same country that Markus Spiss and his colleague Ernst Gotsch brought with them, help us to keep our spirits.

Arriving at the possible landing site (around 7:40 p.m.) hope is raising again - our tracking transmitter is receiving a signal. It's just one beep per kilometer but we don't give up yet. The plan is to use every street in the area in hope to track down vital signs of our pod. We even use roads which are not mapped. If our Tyroleans were not equipped with an all-terrain vehicle we would be in need of a second recovery team - this time for us (don't forget to take a tractor with you).

For a short moment we think about climbing a fence to ascend an antenna pole to slightly raise our chances of receiving a signal. But we still have to get in an area not farther than some hundreds meters around the pod to pinpoint it - the notorious "looking for a needle in a haystack", but this time it's no needle but a pod somewhere in the woods. That's what we think when we go on the last drivable road a few minutes to 9 p.m. somewhere in the darkest forest and suddenly have to stop in front of a barrier protecting a private road.

Being quite disappointed we report to operations center we can't locate Passepartout and are not able to continue today because of lacking exact positions reports of our Track&Trace expedition and because of the now complete darkness of the night. Our new order says to return and continue the search next day. But, as we say - uncommon problems require uncommon procedures. And so Markus Spiss takes his saw: "I came all the way from Zurich (rem.: Switzerland) to chop down a tree and that's what I'm going to do now."

Looking at each other with either brave amusement or simple irritation in our eyes he's already leaving the car an starts to saw a little tree right opposite the closed road. Someone invites me to freeze the moment with my camera but I am still standing disbelieving and with a wide opened mouth when the tree finally decides to give in and goes down on the street. Now what was that?!

At least our tension gets loosed. It even works with us who we politely decline the offer to use the saw, too. Of course we don't know yet that a small sacrifice seems to appease the spirits of the forest ...

At 1 a.m. we finally find rest in our beds after a travel made by no means easier by fog, deer crossing the road and a briefing in Graz. At 4:30 a.m. we are rudely pulled from our slumber - we will leave at 5 a.m. for recovery expedition part 2, the target is Szombathely (rem.: Hungary). Using Willibald Stumptner's small Citroen (fondly called "fighting gnat") Harald Fauland and Daniela Scheer are on the way to the land of hot paprika. Their secret weapons: Austrian Space Forum member Christopher Vasko who speaks Hungarian and contact details of an hungarian pilot who owns a licence to fly microlights. We found the man past evening after a pile of telephone calls within the austrian flying milieu.

Arriving at a small airport our reconnaissance pilot prepares for an one hour trip into the area of Nova where we believe to find Passepartout - or its remaining. Normally there is not much left of the balloon when it bursts but if we are lucky we may see the red parachute from above. Christopher is being armed with binoculars, a tracking transmitter and a camera - and with about everything we may spare of our clothes he looks like the Michelin mascot to prevent him from freezing sitting in the microlight. The pilot Attila Filipovics gets his last instructions and off they go.

Surrounded by two evil barking dogs Harald and I prepare to hide in the car and wait for their return in two hours. But we don't have to wait that long. 15 minutes after the start the microlight must land. The morning fog has dissolved a little bit since sunset but not in the direction we want to look. So we change to Plan B - trying again in some hours. But things appear different in the mirror, you can say. Just when we decided to start for a second flight at midday the phone rings.

It's our "red phone". The caller speaks german with hungarian accent, shares our pilot's first name and tells us he's got our balloon! We nearly drop down like Pasepartout 15 hours ago. Attila (the caller, that is) is a forest warden and seems to be very interested in our balloon so Christopher talks with him about the projects of Austrian Space Forum for a while before we get on the way to the forest warden office in Lenti to finally receive our balloon. The finder himself (not the same as the caller) is a forest warden, too. He is ready to show us the landing site.

Josef Nemeth surprises us for a second time by leading us near a hunting lodge nearby Nova where a road closed by a barrier rouses certain memories. Same applies to a small chopped tree lying alongside the road leading to the main building ...

On a meadow behind the building is our landing site where the forest warden gathered lumber during the morning and, thanks to his well trained sharp eyes, discovered our pod. What a piece of luck because when we arrive there it's raining cats and dogs.

Mister Nemeth refuses a reward for finding the pod but he's happy to get a voucher for a flight with a microlight. We are at least as happy as him to get Passepartout back which we nearly believed to be lost forever. Nobody may claim that the god and the spirits of the forest are sleeping ...
Report by: Daniela Scheer, Photos: Andreas Köhler