Not too many people would view a wicker basket as a prison cell, but by the end of her three-day, 1,528 kilometer gas balloon flight Cheri White was glad to be free of her confinement in the 4.5-foot by 5-foot waist high capsule that held her aloft from Geneva, Switzerland, over miles and miles of open water in the Mediterranean Sea to the southern coast of Portugal.

 Starving for sustenance beyond chocolate and cookies and before fully regaining her land legs, the Lakeway resident devoured a fast-food salad and soothed her fatigue in a warm shower the night of Sept. 8 where she landed near Tavira, Portugal.
“Laying down in a bed and being able to sleep for the whole night was just heaven sent,” she described.
Completely exhausted, she easily fell asleep in her hotel room near where her team landed softly among olive trees.
Her slumber didn’t aid her escape. She dreamed that night of flying out over the vastness of the roaring waves of the Mediterranean and awoke to find herself rushing half-conscious to the balcony of her room that opened to a sea view. She feared that her balloon was carrying her back into flight and only a building in her peripheral vision brought her back to reality.
Several days later after she and co-pilot Mark Sullivan placed third in the 53rd annual Coupe Aéronautique Gordon Bennett gas balloon distance race and she had returned to her familiar Lakeway environs, White still struggled with reality amid a haze of jetlag.
“It was like a dream. It was like it didn’t happen because I’m going to my kids’ open house school and my son has the flu. It’s like two different worlds,” she said Monday.
The Gordon Bennett race is a gas balloon distance race that the International Aeronautical Federation hosts each year. The winning team is the one that flies the farthest from the launch site.
American James Gordon Bennett, a press mogul and adventurer, created the race in 1906 to advance developments in aeronautics, according to the competition’s web site.
The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale has staged the event that has witnessed winners from America, Belgium, England and France. Every winning team enjoys the honor of having the event held in their home country two years later. Albuquerque, NM, hosted the 2008 Gordon Bennett, England will stage the 2010 competition and France will host the 2011 event.
“It is often compared to the America’s Cup Yacht Race for the endurance necessary to compete and win,” organizers said on the web site.
White and Sullivan competed as USA 2 against 15 international two-person teams piloting hydrogen-filled balloons, which included a French team featuring three-time Gordon Bennett champion Vincent Leys who could be considered that nation’s version of Lance Armstrong. Leys won the competition with his brother from 2001-2003 and both retired, but he came out of retirement for this race to claim his fourth title.
Despite the fierce competition, White and Sullivan had the French and a Swiss team on the ropes. The USA 2 team was out front for most of the race and led in the third day of the race, but after traveling over the Mediterranean from Montpellier, France, to Vera on the eastern coast of Spain by way of Mallorca, the crew decided against another foray that could send them south to land in the sea or in Africa, both of which would have disqualified them and been unsafe prospects. White said the knowledge that her team had landed, spurred the French and Swiss teams, which had been trailing the U.S. team for most of the way, spurred them on to Portugal’s western coasts where they landed.
The Americans took consolation in pushing Leys to the limit before exercising sound judgment in touching down safely on land.
White is no stranger to ballooning. When her father, Sam Edwards, also a Lakeway balloon pilot, took her and her sister to a balloon race in Houston when they were teen-agers, she immediately took to the sport.
“She’s just a competitive person. She always has been,” Edwards said of White’s drive.
Father and daughter learned hot air ballooning over the years, but she eventually made the switch to gas ballooning for the craft’s historical appeal and longer flight times. Hot air balloons are typically able to fly for a few hours’ time. Based on weather and temperature variables among others, gas balloons can fly for days.
There’s also the allure of the silence thousands of feet above the Earth.
“There’s no sound. You just float through the air,” she said peacefully.
The chief pilot and general manager of the Touchstone Energy Hot Air Balloon Team also is the reigning America’s Challenge Gas Balloon Champion and former Women’s National Hot Air Balloon Champion. She has logged more than 1,450 flight hours.
Still, she pushed herself to limits both physically and mentally.
“It was the most challenging flight I’ve ever been on,” White said of the three-day, two-night adventure.
Leading up to the race, she and Sullivan also studied European weather models and followed weather patterns and consulted with a German pilot who they’ve been friends with for years.
A week before the Gordon Bennett race, they flew their German-made gas balloon in Muenster, Germany, for the city’s 100-year anniversary as a tune up for the multi-day competition to come.
Their early arrival allowed them to overcome jetlag and time to test out their flight, electronics and communications equipment that included satellite phones, GPS devices and emergency position-indicating radio beacons that served as personal locators to maritime emergency responders.
They packed this gear as well as more filling fare of bread and turkey along with survival suits and a life raft.
White and Sullivan spent the day of Sept. 5 preparing sandbags, getting their balloon on the field at Vessy Sports Centre in Geneva and filling it with hydrogen pumped in by truck.
Shortly before liftoff, they mingled with spectators and made final preparations with other crewmembers.
The moment, she and Sullivan lifted off from Vessy Sports Centre under a full moon Sept. 5 with the other 15 teams, it was go, go, go.
“From the very beginning, you start working. There’s a few minutes at night when the balloon settles into an altitude that you can look around. It’s very peaceful and beautiful, but then start rotating sleep and try to get as much rest as you can,” she said.
The basket’s size left little room for creature comforts, and rest was a precious commodity on this endurance race.
Sullivan, the more experienced of the two pilots, served as crew chief and handled the difficult ascents and descents and ballasting associated with warmer daytime temperatures. He traded off with White for the more predictable night flying.
“As a team we operate really well together. We’ve got experience,” White said of the partnership that goes back to 2002 when Sullivan’s co-pilot retired and he invited White to learn under him.
The duo tackled the race in stride with the aid of their meteorologist and two-person ground crew.
They also juggled communication with air traffic controllers at Europe’s multitude of airports. As their gas balloon traveled through an airport’s airspace, its controllers would redirect planes around the inflated craft. Only once did a language barrier arise, and White unpacked her best broken Spanish to get the correct message through to Portuguese officials.
After the USA 2 team made its way through the tip of the Alps, the Rhone Valley Mistral Winds blasted them south through the valley in France, an experience White described as being in a wind tunnel. Winds gusting up to 65 mph propelled them south through the valley and spit them out at the Mediterranean near Montpellier, France.
All the teams that reached this juncture — one U.S. team failed to break through a high pressure system in Switzerland that forced them to turn back and an English team landed due to a leaking balloon — faced some of their most critical decisions.
“You have to be very brave to go out over the sea and hope your weather models are right,” White said.
Their meteorologist, who was constantly running projections, advised White and Sullivan to venture out over the Mediterranean Sea with the southwest tip of Portugal as their goal.
As they traveled over water, the intense sun sent temperatures spiraling to unbearable heats that reminded the pilots of yolks on a frying pan. All they had for shade were the hats on their heads and a sheet that they could pinned up on the side, but inevitably the basket would rotate and they would repeatedly have to reconstruct the sheet shade.
“It was blazing hot out. The Mediterranean sun was cooking us. It was like being in Austin in the middle of July,” White said.
At night, the temperatures plummeted, but White wore three pair of long underwear, a hat and gloves to stem the cold winds’ embrace.
As day turned to night that turned to day, a sense of doubt began to creep in that they might have gone too far to return to the European mainland and would face undesirable landings.
Family and friends back in the United States relayed information via text messages about their competitor’s positions, altitudes, and speeds that was posted on the Gordon Bennett web site.
“They couldn’t sleep because they were waiting and hoping we made it back to land,” White said of her supporters. If a crew lands in the water, it “might have to go back to work for awhile to replace all the expensive equipment onboard, but in the end your life is more important.”
Thanks to good fortune and pinpoint weather analysis that detected a small wind layer, the balloon crew shifted course toward the eastern coast of Spain.
“We almost missed that weather model, but luckily it turned for us. I think that there’s a little bit of luck involved and a little bit of skill,” White explained.
Other teams veered off to the south and, unable to return to the European mainland, had to land in Africa where they were disqualified. Some European countries, such as Belarus where the country’s air force shot down and killed balloon pilots a few years ago, Croatia, Turkey and Russia, also were off limits.
“You have to plan your flight around these cities and countries,” White said.
Two German teams landed on the island of Menorca due east of the larger island of Mallorca. As the USA 2 team passed over the island, White said she could make out the Germans’ balloons as small specks and also got a bird’s eye view of a fireworks show as her balloon passed over Mallorca.
The many sights of castles, chateaus, wineries, solar farms in Spain, cruise ships, and mountains will remain as lasting memories, but one sound sticks in White’s head – the constant, almost deafening roar of the Mediterranean Sea’s waves lapping.
She didn’t have much time for sightseeing or brushing up on her French, though, as gas ballooning demands mental and physical fortitude from pilots who are adjusting their flight paths frequently and battling thermals during the day that can rocket balloons upward thousands of feet in a matter of minutes and then drop them like a rock as they furiously unload sand ballast to counter the fall.
One American team hit storms that took them up to 16,000 feet and forced them to pitch almost everything overboard, possibly even their satellite phone.
“They had a pretty rough landing,” White said, adding that during a 2002 balloon flight in Georgia, her crew had to throw out sand, oxygen, batteries and more to avoid a crash.
Weight is the name of the game in this tug-of-war, so every ounce counts. White trained by doing yoga, which aided in staying calm through the most taxing of times, hiking and working out in cardio routines.
“All of that helps when I’m sitting in that basket for hours on end,” she said. “It’s an extreme sport. You’re up there in the elements. You’re living in that basket for three days. You have to eat and try to sleep. You’re pushing exhaustion half the time.”
Encouraged by the sight of Vera, Spain on the country’s eastern shoreline, the USA 2 pilots pressed on trying to reach Sagres, Portugal.
They soon learned that they were in the lead among balloons still aloft, and the city of Seville, Spain and the Guardiano River that forms Portugal and Spain’s southern border urged them on as welcome landmarks.
As the Americans battled several thermals, the French and Swiss teams started catching up.
“We had to push it to get to the tip of Portugal. That was only hope of sealing the win,” White said.
They searched for a westward wind that would boost their speed; however, the team hit a bevy of thermals and another wind change that started to take them out to sea again.
“If we had more coastline and better weather, we could have flown another night,” White said. “After 35 hours of [flying over] the Mediterranean, we didn’t want to go out to sea.”
They coasted to an upright landing near Tavira amid a grove of olive trees, some of which deposited olives in the balloon that White and Sullivan didn’t find until days later when packing up the balloon to be shipped home.
They also enjoyed a warm reception from local spectators who saw the gas balloon coming out of sky.
“They were right there at field where we landed. It was nice to have the extra hands to help pack everything up,” White said.
White and Sullivan stayed the night in Portugal and then headed back to Geneva for the awards ceremony knowing they would represent their country on the awards stand where they received a FAI medal and plaque.
“It’s great honor to be competing against the top teams in the world,” she said.
They also were recognized for achieving the seventh-longest flight in Gordon Bennett’s race history.
White takes all the achievement in stride.
“To my kids, I’m just a mom. That’s just what I do,” said the mother of 14-year-old twins at Lake Travis High School. “I was flying when they were in the womb.”
White and her husband, who is a glider pilot and flies in the Civil Air Patrol, are passing on their passion to future generations.
Her son is following in his mother’s and grandfather’s footsteps as he takes lessons and White has taken hot air balloons to show at her children’s schools.
The family moved from Houston to Lakeway to find a better quality of life. It’s comforting for White to know that while she’s flying thousands of feet in the air, her family is on solid ground.