Andrée Balloon Crash (2014)

A log of their journey was recovered, which makes clear how, having put themselves in this predicament, they tackled its many hardships and setbacks with a level-headed determination and fortitude resembling that of Shackleton and his party a year or so later.

Edit: Shackleton's expedition departed 17 years later.

He lost two of the three during launch, and even if he had kept them, there's no evidence they had any steering effect, and no reason to believe they could have had any. That is, their contribution to the failure of the expedition was increased overconfidence.

The drag ropes were causal, but in a complicated way. They did not - and could not - function as intended, which was as a means of flying in a direction significantly different from that in which the wind was taking them, allowing them to navigate towards a specific destination.

Without this assumption, it seems unlikely that they would have attempted to do what the flight actually was: a drift in a free balloon over the arctic. After several days, the balloon came down onto the ice (it did not "plummet") as a result of losing gas gradually, with ice accumulation probably being a factor.

I have seen a report of the press conference they gave before starting, and it seems painfully clear that they would have all abandoned the attempt if any one of them would have said, out loud, that it was a bad idea.

Thanks, I just ordered a copy of the book that it’s based on (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_of_the_Eagle_(novel))

How would they have survived? If you put Nansen in Andrées shoes on the ice next to the failed balloon, his fate would have been just the same. The only way to have survived would have been to avoid the situation all together. Which would have been wise, but does not take someone like Nansen to do.