Elite Traveler January-February 2016

INFLUENCE TRAVEL COLUMN

Geoffrey Kent on space travel

At 62 years old and having explored every continent in the world, Geoffrey Kent, founder of Abercrombie &Kent, set himself the ultimate challenge: to travel to the final frontier. Here’s what happened next

The canopy closes. Then – boom! We shoot off, going vertically from zero to 40,000ft in one minute. At the very top of this climb, he does three loops and we climb to 65,000ft to level out. We then accelerate to the full speed of mach 2.2. After this I take over the controls and fly straight. I’m not interested in doing anything fancy. David takes over the controls again. “You want to see earth?” Boom. Instantly we’re looking down at the purple curvature of the earth. “You want to see the sky?” Another boom and I’m gazing up at an endless blue sky. Then he flies us down low at just 800ft over the sea. We fly around a few minutes more, and within 45 minutes of take off, I pull the lever to release the plane’s parachutes for landing. When we get out my legs are wobbly as jam. I need to get the adrenaline out of my system so I run five miles, thinking; this has to be one of the most dangerous things I’ve done. I took on 5.5 Gs. I run 20 miles a week, and that was intense even for me. I’m not sure if most A&K clients would be up to it. I call the head scientist and engineer on my A&K Space team. “If we go into space, what are the chances that we will not have an accident? Can we be 100 percent sure that won’t happen?” “Let me reword that for you, Geoffrey,” he says. “There’s a 100 percent chance we will have an accident.” I lie awake all night and think about it. Next day I tell him we can’t pursue it with those odds. This was in 2004. One year later David Stock met his own tragic fate. While the plane was at full speed, its hydraulics collapsed. His only hope was to eject but the system didn’t work. He was killed when the plane plunged to the ground. Today it’s a relief that we had to determine this was one product we would never be able to make good on. A&K Space was one of my most audacious enterprises, but a good leader knows when to pull the plug. For me, that was before we could make any mistakes. Geoffrey Kent is founder, CEO and chairman of Abercrombie & Kent, and has served as president of the Prince of Wales Foundation in the USA

We shoot off, going vertically from zero to 40,000ft in one minute. At the very top of this climb, he does three loops and we climb to 65,000ft to level out. We then accelerate to the full speed of mach 2.2

It is four o’clock in the morning and I’m inside Thunder City, currently Cape Town’s site for ex-military jet flights. I’m standing next to the English Electric Lightning, a 1950s-built plane and Britain’s first aircraft able to travel at a rate of mach 2 (roughly 1,520mph). I am here because, having explored every continent, I have decided to test the ultimate limits – space travel. This is partly a personal challenge and partly a professional one as I am considering adding space travel to the range of tours offered by my company, Abercrombie & Kent. Reading the release form for the flight, I realize I was right not to have told one person that I was doing this. One line reads: “Before boarding, passenger must produce a deposit of £2,000 in the event that it is necessary for us to fly your body back to your country of citizenship.” I feel a wave of nausea, not at all helped by the fact that I haven’t eaten a single thing in two days to avoid getting sick while in flight. I mentally review the training I’ve received over the last week: how to work the oxygen

mask, how to activate the mechanism that releases the parachute in the rear of the plane that slows us down when we land, and, of course, how to work the ejection seat. A man comes out and hands me a racing tracksuit, similar to what a Formula One driver wears: all-black with Thunder City written on it in gold, and a helmet for the real official feel. My watch reads six o’clock when the pilot, David Stock, wrangles himself into the cockpit and turns to me with a relaxed grin: “Are you ready, Geoff?” With the jet’s canopy up, we taxi across the apron to the start of the runway. The jet sounds like the most incredible race car you’ve heard in your life. When I tell this story later, I’ll say that it felt like a Ferrari on steroids. When we reach the take off point, David brakes. “This is your last chance to bail out!” “No bailing out,” I tell him. “Then you remember this one instruction: if there’s a problem, and I want you to eject, I’m gonna call one. I’m gonna call two. And then, there’s no three, because I’ll be gone and you’re the captain of the ship.”

Extracted from Safari: a memoir of a worldwide travel pioneer , by Geoffrey Kent, published by Harper Collins, $35