Keith Fennel: How do you navigate when all electronic systems go down? Does a bubble sextant still work at high altitude?
We didn’t use a sextant because we rarely had a clear view of the sky and the balloon was constantly rotating, but it does work at high altitude. Because we are travelling with the wind, there’s little we can do to affect our direction in a significant way. Our main concern, navigation-wise, was to know where we were from a survival point of view. We had handheld, battery operated backup GPS with us, plus compass and independent systems for putting out distress messages. A complete electrical failure on our main and backup systems, caused by a fire for example, would have meant the end of the flight, and probable disaster. But there were very few scenarios where we might have lost both main and backup power.
