Andy has flown by open balloon to over
40,000 feet more times than anyone in history. In 1991 he was the first balloonist to fly over Mount Everest.

Throughout the 1990s he designed and built all the capsules for all the international attempts to be the first to fly around the world (except for Richard Branson). These included the Swiss Breitling team and Steve Fossett.

In 1998 he flew the Breitling Obiter 2 balloon with Whim Verstraten and Bertrand Piccard from Switzerland to Burma, setting a new world endurance record of 9 days.
In 1999 he broke the world endurance
record for any non-stop sub-orbital flying
machine when he flew Cable and Wireless
more than 12,000 miles from Spain to the
Pacific in 18 days. For this he was awarded
the Gold Medal ofthe Royal Aero Club
(previously only awarded 40 times to such
pioneers as Louis Bleriot, the Wright
Brothers, Alcock and Brown, Armstrong,
Aldrin and Collins).

In 2002 he trained as a cosmonaut in
Moscow. In 2003 he attempted to launch
QinetiQ 1 (the biggest balloon in history)
from a research ship off St Ives, UK.

In 2004 he designed and built, in Britain,
a capsule to carry five astronauts to the
international space station. However, this was not publicised at the time due to contractual terms with the American clients.

In 2005 he designed and built a pressurised
capsule and balloon to carry Air Commodore Vijaypat Singhania to the current world hot air balloon altitude record of 70,000 feet above Mumbai.

While primarily an aeronaut, Andy has
considerable skydiving experience, and brings his knowledge ofHigh Altitude Life Support Systems to Everest Skydive.