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Up, up and away...
Feb. 9th, 2003 06:30 pmDoug and Katrina are the folks who hold get-togethers from time to time with us and some other folks to play Kiyosaki's CashFlow game, and about a month ago, we got a call from them inviting us to ride on a balloon. It turned out that their sponsorship of a balloon for a local mass-launch type event entitled them to some number of tickets, so were we interested?
We said yes.
Today was the day.
All the participants met in a church parking lot around 7:46 this morning, and it looked much like any other group of hobbyists getting together for an event (a lot of milling around until someone takes the bull by the horns and gets things rolling). We met Doug and Katrina, and they introduced us to Kris (whose last name I forget off the top of my head), who was pilot of the Athena, an 85,000 cubic foot envelope out of Albuquerque.
Once everyone shook hands, we were off to find a promising location from which to take off.
Unlike many other participants, whose baskets, tanks, etc. fit in the back of a pickup or van, Athena's boss has a separate hydraulic-equipped trailer for the equipment. Once we stopped, the top of the trailer went up and a platform holding the basket and everything else tilted up into position. This first shot shows the basket shortly after being removed from the trailer.
The basket was a lot smaller than I thought it would be, especially since it already contains three propane tanks secured to the side walls of the wicker basket. Then again, I don't know where I got the idea that a basket was big enough to stroll around in.
The balloon - called the "envelope" - was stored in what looked to be an oversize seabag inside the basket, and Galina and I helped wrestle it out onto the ground. The bag was opened and a set of shroud lines were attached to each corner of the top of the basket, which by now had been placed on its side on the ground.
The next step was to walk the bag away from the basket, allowing the envelope to stretch itself out like a long, multicolored snake. Once that was done, the crew (two people, friends of Kris's, who help with the grunt work and act as the "chase team" when Athena is flying) spread the envelope out a little bit and then brought out what looked to be a fan. Unlike most fans I've seen, the blades inside the cage looked just like an airplane propeller, long and thin (it didn't occur to me to ask).
I guess part of the deal when you're a guest is to make you feel useful, so Galina and I were shown how to hold the sides of the bottom of the envelope, so that the air being blown by the fan fills the envelope. The photo shows me looking inside the envelope during this step; I must admit I was fascinated to see this huge nylon bag fill with air.
Once the envelope was sufficiently inflated with air (cold, not very conducive to flight), Kris pointed the burner toward the opening Galina and I were making and delicately blew hot propane exhaust into the center of the envelope. After a few moments, the warm air inside the envelope started to rise, taking the envelope with it, and in no time at all, Galina and I were aboard and Athena was ready for liftoff.
I have to confess that everything went pretty much as I expected it to, and although I enjoyed the flight - and everything before and after - enormously (except, maybe, the biting cold), I was a lot calmer than I thought I would be floating high in the air, hanging under a bag of hot air in a basket made of dead wood.
Kris did not take us very high, certainly not as high as some other participants, one of whom seemed to shrink to a pixel-sized dot to the northeast and disappear. I seem to recall that our altimeter's maximum reading during the trip was somewhere around 8600 feet (which is 800 feet higher than our house, or maybe 1000 feet higher than the local terrain). Kris was concerned about the weather deteriorating rapidly, and he was right; some participants never got off the ground (you can see an unfurled, but uninflated envelope in the top photo of the above pair).
It's very quiet in a balloon when the burner is not working, throwing more hot air into the envelope. One of the tricks in piloting a balloon is acquiring a sense of how what you do now is going to affect how the vehicle behaves in the future (engineers call this a feedforward problem). A short burn will give you a gentle rise; a long burn will shoot you up at a breathtaking rate. What is interesting is this: however you engage the burner, you won't start to rise until several seconds have passed.
We were probably one of the first balloons down, and while we went about the business of gathering the envelope (it pretty much collapsed on its own, with some help from the wind that had sprung up), Kris kept an eye out on the other participants, pointing out to us a couple of teams that were going to have difficulties getting out of the predicaments they were in (we saw one balloon "bounce" into some trees and then fly off, rocking very much like a child's toy balloon).
The post-flight festivities were marred by the bitter cold that I noted before, but the cameraderie of the particpants helped mitigate the temperature. Like most aeronautical activities, ballooning, too, has its own initiation rites for newbies, which include trying to catch a popped champagne cork (and, of course, a sip or two of that marvelous drink). Galina and I passed our tests and in the end, were each given an attractive lapel pin, too.
After the flight, we went to a late brunch with Doug and Katrina, downtown at a place called Victoria's Parlor. They are an interesting couple, and the food at the restaurant was excellent.
In all, a very nice day with no worries (the first one, I'd say, in quite a while). We should do this again, soon, even if it doesn't involve a hot-air balloon.
Galina and I will be going over to the kids' place in a few minutes.
Cheers...
We said yes.
Today was the day.
All the participants met in a church parking lot around 7:46 this morning, and it looked much like any other group of hobbyists getting together for an event (a lot of milling around until someone takes the bull by the horns and gets things rolling). We met Doug and Katrina, and they introduced us to Kris (whose last name I forget off the top of my head), who was pilot of the Athena, an 85,000 cubic foot envelope out of Albuquerque.
Once everyone shook hands, we were off to find a promising location from which to take off.
Unlike many other participants, whose baskets, tanks, etc. fit in the back of a pickup or van, Athena's boss has a separate hydraulic-equipped trailer for the equipment. Once we stopped, the top of the trailer went up and a platform holding the basket and everything else tilted up into position. This first shot shows the basket shortly after being removed from the trailer.
The basket was a lot smaller than I thought it would be, especially since it already contains three propane tanks secured to the side walls of the wicker basket. Then again, I don't know where I got the idea that a basket was big enough to stroll around in.
The balloon - called the "envelope" - was stored in what looked to be an oversize seabag inside the basket, and Galina and I helped wrestle it out onto the ground. The bag was opened and a set of shroud lines were attached to each corner of the top of the basket, which by now had been placed on its side on the ground.
The next step was to walk the bag away from the basket, allowing the envelope to stretch itself out like a long, multicolored snake. Once that was done, the crew (two people, friends of Kris's, who help with the grunt work and act as the "chase team" when Athena is flying) spread the envelope out a little bit and then brought out what looked to be a fan. Unlike most fans I've seen, the blades inside the cage looked just like an airplane propeller, long and thin (it didn't occur to me to ask).
I guess part of the deal when you're a guest is to make you feel useful, so Galina and I were shown how to hold the sides of the bottom of the envelope, so that the air being blown by the fan fills the envelope. The photo shows me looking inside the envelope during this step; I must admit I was fascinated to see this huge nylon bag fill with air.
Once the envelope was sufficiently inflated with air (cold, not very conducive to flight), Kris pointed the burner toward the opening Galina and I were making and delicately blew hot propane exhaust into the center of the envelope. After a few moments, the warm air inside the envelope started to rise, taking the envelope with it, and in no time at all, Galina and I were aboard and Athena was ready for liftoff.
I have to confess that everything went pretty much as I expected it to, and although I enjoyed the flight - and everything before and after - enormously (except, maybe, the biting cold), I was a lot calmer than I thought I would be floating high in the air, hanging under a bag of hot air in a basket made of dead wood.
Kris did not take us very high, certainly not as high as some other participants, one of whom seemed to shrink to a pixel-sized dot to the northeast and disappear. I seem to recall that our altimeter's maximum reading during the trip was somewhere around 8600 feet (which is 800 feet higher than our house, or maybe 1000 feet higher than the local terrain). Kris was concerned about the weather deteriorating rapidly, and he was right; some participants never got off the ground (you can see an unfurled, but uninflated envelope in the top photo of the above pair).
It's very quiet in a balloon when the burner is not working, throwing more hot air into the envelope. One of the tricks in piloting a balloon is acquiring a sense of how what you do now is going to affect how the vehicle behaves in the future (engineers call this a feedforward problem). A short burn will give you a gentle rise; a long burn will shoot you up at a breathtaking rate. What is interesting is this: however you engage the burner, you won't start to rise until several seconds have passed.
We were probably one of the first balloons down, and while we went about the business of gathering the envelope (it pretty much collapsed on its own, with some help from the wind that had sprung up), Kris kept an eye out on the other participants, pointing out to us a couple of teams that were going to have difficulties getting out of the predicaments they were in (we saw one balloon "bounce" into some trees and then fly off, rocking very much like a child's toy balloon).
The post-flight festivities were marred by the bitter cold that I noted before, but the cameraderie of the particpants helped mitigate the temperature. Like most aeronautical activities, ballooning, too, has its own initiation rites for newbies, which include trying to catch a popped champagne cork (and, of course, a sip or two of that marvelous drink). Galina and I passed our tests and in the end, were each given an attractive lapel pin, too.
After the flight, we went to a late brunch with Doug and Katrina, downtown at a place called Victoria's Parlor. They are an interesting couple, and the food at the restaurant was excellent.
In all, a very nice day with no worries (the first one, I'd say, in quite a while). We should do this again, soon, even if it doesn't involve a hot-air balloon.
Galina and I will be going over to the kids' place in a few minutes.
Cheers...
