Well, in this case, we couldn’t even get the balloon to the street on either side of the neighborhood. That particular backyard was big enough for the basket to land without the balloon in danger of hitting the house. It was more of an opportunity to land safely before we didn’t have fuel to land. So that’s why it was that backyard in that location. The other options were less safe.
What’s the process of getting a balloon down safely from that height?
Well, it’s pretty simple. Hot air causes the balloon to rise. Let the balloon cool, or let some of the hot air out—we go down. The steerage comes from the wind. So we can control up and down very expertly, as you can see. But left and right, that’s entirely by the wind.
In this case, there was no wind for an extended period of time, and that’s why the pilot landed where he did.
Can I ask a dumb question, then? If you can’t control directionally where you’re going, how do you chart a course for balloon flights in the first place?
OK, sure. So balloons travel with the wind. We look at the forecast to know what the expected winds are. We use these very sophisticated pieces of instrumentation, called helium balloons, the morning of the flight, to see what the actual wind conditions are. Those helium balloons rise at a rate of 300 feet per minute, so by watching the balloon rising, with our stopwatch and a compass, we get an idea of what the actual winds are doing at launch time.
After that, we pick our launch site where we think we’ll be landing at the end of an hour. We reverse engineer the entire flight. In this case, the wind conditions changed dramatically, and that’s how the pilot ended up above that neighborhood and not able to get to his intended landing spot.
And then our ground crew will follow the balloon with their chase vehicles to be there to help catch the balloon, manage the balloon, pack it up, and bring it back to home base.
When you first got the report from the ground crew that said, ‘Hey, this balloon is stuck,’ what was your reaction in that moment?
I trust the pilot’s skills. So my reaction was the pilot did what was proper and correct, because the only other option is he could have kept flying low on fuel to the point where he didn’t have enough to control his landing. For him to land in that backyard without damaging any property or putting any of our passengers at risk was the right decision.
How often does this sort of thing happen, in your experience?
It’s rare. It’s very rare.
Did anybody ask for a refund? I feel obligated to ask.
Just the opposite. They want to go back and fly with that same pilot again. They thought he was very safe and explained what was happening and why it was happening. Everybody wanted to do it again.
