A balloon carrying a Denver radiologist and her partner from New Mexico was plunging toward the Adriatic Sea at 50 mph when it dropped off air-traffic-control radar, a sign that they crashed and almost certainly were killed, balloon-race organizers said Friday.
Flight director Don Cameron said that high rate of descent, if confirmed, leads him to be “very pessimistic” about the fate of veteran balloonists Carol Rymer Davis and Rich ard Abruzzo.
The “only shred of hope” is that the readings from air traffic control in Zagreb, Croatia, were from the outer limits of its radar zone and might be incorrect, Cameron said. He added that he expects to confirm the data with Italian air-traffic controllers in Brindisi, on the other side of the Adriatic, today.
Davis, 65, of Denver and Abruzzo, 47, of Albuquerque were participating in the 54th Gordon Bennett Gas Balloon Race when contact was lost Wednesday morning in rough weather over the Adriatic.
Race organizers said the balloon “appears to have suffered a sudden and unexpected failure.”
Cameron said he received information Friday from Zagreb indicating the balloon was at 5,300 feet and descended slowly at first but then at a rate of 50 mph until 600 feet. “At this rate of descent to the surface, survival would be unlikely,” the race organizers said in a statement.
The Italian coast guard, the U.S. Navy and Croatian coastal aircraft crews have been scouring the area around Croatia’s distant, uninhabited islet of Palagruza.
Abruzzo’s wife, Nancy, was in Bari at coast-guard headquarters on Friday monitoring the search effort. She said her husband had made a final radio transmission saying that he was preparing to ditch in the sea.
In the Gordon Bennett race, teams compete to fly the farthest with a maximum of about 35,300 cubic feet supplying lift. Abruzzo and Davis won the 2004 edition of the race and the 2003 edition of the America’s Challenge, a competition Abruzzo has won five times in all.
Using her professional name, Dr. Carol Ann Rymer is on the staff of Lakewood-based Diversified Radiology of Colorado.
