![]() ![]() ![]() Not long afterward, he crashed into the Pacific. It took Britain’s best diplomats to keep him aloft and alive. During another, in 1998, the Chinese Air Force threatened to shoot his balloon out of the sky as it crossed the Himalayas. During one of his attempts to circle the globe, Branson crashed into the Algerian desert. He has been pulled from the sea five times by helicopters (and once from a frozen lake). Branson may well hold another record: the number of highly publicized near-death experiences. But in 1991 Branson soared over the Pacific Ocean from Japan to the Canadian Arctic, again establishing records while travelling at speeds of more than two hundred miles per hour. Bad weather and technical glitches forced him to abort several attempts at becoming the first to fly a balloon around the world without stopping. The next year, the Virgin Atlantic Flyer, history’s largest hot-air balloon, became the first to travel the same path. In 1986, Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group of companies, crossed the Atlantic in the fastest time ever recorded, on his boat the Virgin Atlantic Challenger II. Rather than travelling around the world in eighty days, however, he appears to be trying to find eighty ways to do it. Richard Branson likes to pretend that business is his hobby he sees himself as a modern version of a nineteenth-century British adventurer-Phileas T. From the Sex Pistols to cellulosic butanol : “I never thought my life would go in this direction,” Richard Branson remarked. ![]()
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