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American Morning

Chicago Millionaire Steve Fossett Tries to Fly Balloon Around World

Aired August 09, 2001 - 10:50   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: And we are back and we're going to resume our discussion this morning with Ken Stass, who is the -- following the mission of Chicago millionaire Steve Fossett as he tries to balloon his way around the world.

Ken, sorry about the interruption, and as they say, this is CNN, and it's kind of what we do here -- breaking news. we got to go.

Thanks for bearing with us, we appreciate it. You are saying that everything is so far so good. No bumps in the road right now, and give us an idea of what we can expect to see in the next coming days in this mission.

KEVIN STASS, FOSSETT'S FLIGHT DIRECTOR: The next coming days, you're going to be, fortunately, will be pretty well dull. He's going over a lot of water. He will pass to the south of Tahiti and to the south of Easter Island, and then over the coast of Chile and onto Argentina, the Atlantic, South Africa, and then back to Australia.

HARRIS: Right before we cutaway to go with the breaking news, I was asking about how do you turn balloon like this? You're saying he's got to make a turn coming up very soon, and we know this doesn't have any steering wheels or whatever, so how do you do that?

STASS: What we do is, as I say, Bob Rice, our weather guru, is looking at the map all of the time. He's got computer forecasts, and he can see where the wind is going to take him. And what you can do, is you can play around with altitude, so that you can take advantage of the different wings, the different altitudes. to give you the direction that you want to go.

HARRIS: So listen, last time around, there were quite a few close calls. You haven't had any so far? And if you haven't, do you have any idea exactly where you might have some close calls on this mission?

STASS: Well, I have a touch on this. But we looked at the satellite pictures, and really, there are no clouds with any nasty thing in them.

HARRIS: OK.

STASS: Everything seems to be pretty good. So we're very confident.

HARRIS: All right, well knock on some wood.

Listen, can we get the camera to show us, you are in the mission control center right there, can you give us an idea of what kind of equipment you guys are getting to follow this balloon.

STASS: Yes, using the e-mail to contact Steve.

HARRIS: That's real high-tech.

STASS: Yes, well, that's the most -- it was the easiest way, because we have a record of what's being said, and if someone puts the phone down and all, what did he say? We've got it all written down. It's easy for him. He can read it when me wants to. We can send it when we want to. It doesn't wake him up, all of that sort of stuff. So it's pretty good. We haven't got satellite phone communication with him. But we only use that really on a very rare basis.

HARRIS: Let me tell you folks that next time, have some of those "high mom" signs for us the next night, OK.

STASS: Yes.

HARRIS: Hey, listen, good luck, Ken, we hope to talk to you again about this some more throughout the mission, and we want to make sure that we're there with you when this thing does get to be a real big, exciting moment.

So thanks very much, Ken Stass.

STASS: OK, Leon, thank you very much.

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