" ...in my beautiful, my beautiful, balloon..." One might think I was an actor, given all the offbeat jobs I held in the years before I dragged myself through nursing school in my late 20's.
Dog groomer isn't that weird, but soils tech is kind of odd, (breaking cement cylinders in a strain gauge, three samples from every single truckload of cement poured to ensure quality). And head mold maker for a small but prolific fine art atalier isn't exactly run of the mill. Some of the bronze bas relief sculptures I cast in wax and chased hung in the White House at one point and still hang at Ellis Island, (we were heavily involved in the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island restoration projects back in the 80's).
But the job that I had the most fun with was chase crew for a hot air ballooning company near Palm Springs, Ca. Come fly with me...
There's nothing quite like drifting serenely through the air over vineyards or fields, high over the rooftops or brushing through treetops, or even having your pilot show off and 'float' on the surface of a pond.
It’s utterly quiet between blasts from the propane burners that heat the air and keep you aloft. There is no feeling of movement flying in a balloon, you're technically floating rather than flying, passively moving with the wind, part of the airstream, so you don't feel any motion or breeze at all. It feels like standing on the ground with a movie projecting around and beneath you. A surprising number of people with fears of flying or of heights have no trouble going up in a balloon.
Hot air ballooning has been around for more than 200 years, many traditions have grown up with the sport. For instance the champagne early enthusiasts carried to bribe frightened farmers into not shooting the balloonists who landed in their fields. A very worthy traditon and happily maintained by modern balloonists.
We ran Thunder and Colt balloons, they're made specifically for professional use as passenger balloons. We had a 140, a 160 and the enormous 180. Those are volume designations. The 140 envelope contains a hundred and forty thousand cubic feet of air, in other words it could have held 140,000 basketballs.
The 140 was used for singles or couples, 4-6 would go in the 160 and the 180 took 8 or 9 passengers, (it was rated for a dozen, but that's really cozy). The 180 was unwieldy and had to have a certain amount of payload to fly correctly, so if we already had it out and stood up by the time we figured out that too many passengers had flaked & stood us up, some lucky crew member got to go along as ballast. :-)
As chase crew our first responsibility was to unpack the envelope of the balloon, stretch it out and make sure the lines weren't tangled, fasten the parachute top inside and blow it up with big gas powered fans until the envelope was packed with enough air at ambient temperature to allow the pilot to start the burners and stand the balloon up without burning the collar of the envelope.
Balloons fly because of the temperature differential between the air enclosed in the envelope and the ambient air. The colder it is, the better a balloon flies, if it gets too hot outside, the burners can't maintain enough temperature differential to keep the balloon buoyant, lighter than the surrounding air. So most companies offer two flights daily, an early morning and a late afternoon, (early mornings are my favorite, the balloons light up in the darkness like brightly painted lightbulbs).
Even starting from the same field, morning and afternoon flights will usually end up going in opposite directions because the winds shift as the sun moves throughout the day.
After helping the passengers into the baskets, (gondolas are mostly woven wicker with stout plywood floors, steel cable reinforcement and rawhide trim to protect the basket from abrasion), and holding the lines until the pilot has completed his checks and is ready to fly, we cast off, wave good bye and gather the gear before following in the chase trucks.
If you've ever watched storm chasers trying to follow tornados, that's pretty much what chase crews looked like, too. A stream of trucks or SUV's with trailers careening down back roads, looking up, carrying radios and trying to find ways through or around fields so we could be close enough to be there when the flight ends to grab the lines, steady the basket and guide the envelope down when the pilot pulls the parachute out of the top and lets the hot air out, (so it's a actual landing, not an accidental 'touch and go').
Landings are normally a quiet bump and crew scrambling to weight the gondola in place while the envelope wilts and lays down, but if the wind has picked up there may be a 'high wind landing', where the balloon may still have considerable horizontal speed coming in as the envelope is pushed along. Then the passengers all face the direction of travel and the basket bumps, tips over and is dragged along the ground until we get hands on it and the envelope deflates enough that the wind loses purchase and it stops.
A lot more exciting, but much less hazardous than it sounds, I don't recall us ever having an injury.
After the passengers are safely out, we served the champagne, righted the basket if need be, milked the air out of the envelope and packed it up either in the basket or in a heavy protective bag with straps sewn in to haul it around with, loaded it all back into the chase truck or trailer and headed back to the home field.
The pilot has vertical control of the balloon, period. He can change altitude with the burners heating the air or allowing it to cool. There is no steering mechanism, the way you go places is to find an air current that happens to be heading where you want to go. That's it. Some balloons have side vents, but all those do is spin the balloon on its vertical axis, like the Space Needle or the restaurant in Vegas that rotates. There are no jets or fans or engines that can affect the course, the pilot changes altitude until they find what they're looking for.
And some are very good at finding what they’re looking for. For anyone who knows pilots, whether LTA, (lighter-than-air), fixed wing or rotary wing, they're an interesting group. If you put them together, they'll talk flying. After they've fueled, (actual fuel or coffee), they'll go flying. They think about flying, they look for excuses to fly.
A sport ballooning license takes 10 hours of instruction. A commercial license takes 30, but realistically no one will hire a pilot with fewer than a hundred hours, so it's an expensive profession to get into.
And competitive. Did I mention that pilots tend to be competitive? They are. Or at least many are. One of the excuses to fly is competition, so at balloon festivals there are competitions. Lots of them. Three common ones are the Box Race, Hare and Hound, and Grab the Keys and Win a New Car.
The Box Race sounds deceptively simple. Take off, fly four legs of roughly equal length, roughly perpendicular to each other, and land as close to where you took off as possible. Sounds ridiculously easy until you remember the no steering mechanism part. The pilot has to cast up and down to find the right air currents, which may or may not be there, and may or may not last.
Hare and Hound has the same problem. The Hare takes off half an hour before the Hounds, by which time many of the winds may have shifted, so the Hound pilots can't just make notes of the altitudes that the Hare used and follow by rote.
Hare and Hound is a pilot's game, audiences don't get to enjoy them as much because there's no telling where the Hare will decide to land. The Box Race and Grab the Keys are fun for spectators because you know where the race ends and can be there to watch and cheer.
Grab the Keys is the most exciting because it has the biggest prize, a new car. A local dealership will donate a new car and the keys to the car are fastened to the top of a twenty foot, guyed pole. The object is simple, grab the keys off the top of the pole and you win the car. I've seen it won once, seen several near, (20-30 feet), misses and one heartbreakingly close, about five feet away. But it's generally a pretty safe bet for the dealership and good PR. When you consider the concept of maneuvering a contraption that can carry 8 people and 160,000 basketballs within twenty feet of any given point without active steering, it's pretty impressive.
Good morning, Krew! :::Huuugggsss:::