Danube Tower

This guide to the Danube Tower in Vienna opens on the evening of June 6, 1968, at a children's charity event in the meadow beside the tower, where four gas balloons lifted off together into a calm sky. Three drifted safely past. It follows the fourth, and the American balloonist aboard it, Francis Shields, a veteran of more than a hundred gas flights who had once advised the film crew of Around the World in Eighty Days.