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For the fourth consecutive year, an international team of balloonists will attempt to make history from northern Maine, where they will launch Wednesday night on an expedition that — if successful — would be the first trans-Atlantic crossing in an open-basket hydrogen balloon.
The Atlantic Explorer, formerly known as the Torabhaig Atlantic Explorer, is expected to set off from Presque Isle around 10 p.m. bound for Europe.
The balloon will be piloted by Bert Padelt, Peter Cuneo and Alicia Hempleman-Adams, each of whom are world record holder or champion balloonists from across the Northern Hemisphere.
The trip across the Atlantic is projected to take four to six days, covering some 3,100 miles to mainland Europe from Presque Isle, the same place from which the first balloon to cross the Atlantic launched in 1978.
“I’m really ready to get in the air,” Padelt, who is from Bally, Pennsylvania, said in an interview with the Bangor Daily News at the launch site Wednesday afternoon. “The hardest part is waiting.”
All of the team’s previous attempts have ended before reaching the open ocean.
First planned for 2023, the initial flight was delayed a year because of unfavorable weather. The following summer, the team got in the air, but again faced poor conditions that grounded them in New Brunswick. In 2025, an apparent gas leak forced the Atlantic Explorer to land on Prince Edward Island just 12 hours after take off.
Wednesday’s launch was originally scheduled for Friday morning, but moved up because of weather, meaning all three pilots will have been in Presque Isle for barely 24 hours prior.
“Our meteorologists are looking at the weather constantly, and they’re looking for a particular window of opportunity,” Padelt said. “You just can’t pick a day and go out and take off and expect to fly a balloon to Europe.”
If the launch is successful, Cuneo put the odds at “50% or better” that the Atlantic Explorer makes it to Europe.
“The first 24 hours will be real important,” Cuneo, who is from New Mexico, said.
The team hopes to average 30 knots (roughly 34.5 mph) over the duration of the flight at an altitude between 14,000 and 15,000 feet.
This expedition will be the second attempt at the crossing for Cuneo and Alicia Hempleman-Adams, who joined Padelt in 2025, replacing Swiss billionaire explorer Frederik Paulsen and adventurer David Hempleman-Adams, Alicia Hempleman-Adams’ father.
“The circumstances this time have meant that everything has happened a lot faster,” Hempleman-Adams said. “We all know what we’re doing, we’ve all gone through the procedures, but we thought we had an extra day to just kind of go back over it.”
Padelt, 66, built the Atlantic Explorer. He is a world-renowned balloon builder whose constructions have set world records in all three categories of ballooning (hot air, gas and hybrid — a combination of hot air and gas). He built the smallest, manned gas balloon to cross the Atlantic, flown by David Hempleman-Adams in 2007 and has wanted to pilot a trans-Atlantic flight since he was 13 or 14 years old, he said.
“The chance to go out and achieve this goal at the age I am now, would, for me, be quite an achievement,” Padelt said.
Cuneo, 75, has flown gas and hot air balloons for more than 30 years. Alongside his wife, Barbara Fricke, Cuneo is a four-time winner of the America’s Challenge Gas Balloon Race, the most prominent race of its kind in the Americas. He and Padelt have worked together on a number of projects, including a Japanese documentary attempting to document a theory that suggests an ancient Peruvian civilization created and flew primitive hot air balloons.
Alicia Hempleman-Adams, 36, holds world records in altitude, distance, and duration for several classes of hot air balloon and hot air airships. A fashion consultant in the United Kingdom by trade, Hempleman-Adams also holds the world record as the youngest person to travel to the North Pole, flying there at 8 years old to meet her father when he completed the Explorer’s Grand Slam in 1998.
The three pilots are aided by a four-person flight control team mostly based in the U.K., two American meteorologists and more than a dozen other support team members. It’s that team, the pilots said, that has allowed them to move their launch window up so rapidly this week.
“Because we’re done it before and we know what we’re doing, it’s pretty easy this time to get everything ready with such short notice,” Padelt said. “We wouldn’t have done that before.”