Ballongfarerne

Pilots Attempting Record-Breaking Balloon Trip Across Pacific Ocean Projected to Land on Saturday

Tsuyoshi Ogushi/Two Eagles Balloon Team(NEW YORK) -- The two pilots attempting to break world ballooning records in a trip across the Pacific Ocean are now projected to cross over Vancouver Island on Thursday night and land in the United States on Saturday.

American Troy Bradley and Russian Leonid Tiukhtyaev took off from Japan on Sunday morning and hoped to break a pair of long-held records -- the distance record for gas balloons (5,208 miles) and the duration record (137 hours and five minutes). As of Wednesday afternoon, the ballon was about a thousand miles west of San Jose, Calif.

The pilots will swing northward to avoid a weather system, bringing it through British Columbia and down through Alberta before an expected landing in either North or South Dakota or Minnesota.