About Ballooning and the Long View Balloon
Let me tell you about my balloon:
It is a Galaxy 77 and is my second balloon. I purchased it new in August of 2002. Its volume is 77,000 cubic feet. It is 76 feet high, 55 feet in diameter, is made from 1,800 square yards of fabric, 3 miles of thread and ˝ mile of reinforced webbing. The fabric is very strong. The tested fabric strength is in excess of 25 times greater than the forces that will be exerted on it in flight. The basket is made from woven wicker with wood frames and hardwood base. In the basket is two twenty gallon, stainless steel, fuel tanks.
You may ask, why wicker? Can’t they come up with something… well, more modern? Balloon baskets (or gondolas) are made of wicker not just to be picturesque, but because nobody has found a better material that is both tough enough and resilient like wicker.
Lighter
Than Air:
You may have heard that hot air balloons were “lighter than air”. Just ask a crew member if that’s true, especially after they just horsed 225 lbs. worth of envelope and 480 lbs worth of basket (with full fuel tanks) out of the tight confines of the trailer. When fully inflated a balloon system, including the hot air inside the envelope will weigh 2 ˝ tons. Yet the system displaces a heavier amount of air than that (and thus will rise) . For an interesting article in the "How Stuff Works" series on balloons click here.
A Short History of Ballooning:
Man’s romance with flight began in 1783 in
France more than a century before the Wright brothers. When the first balloon
came down for a landing many miles from where it took off, the startled peasants
thought that it was some sort of devil descending from the skies. They were
preparing to attack it with pitchforks when the two noblemen inside hopped out
brandishing champagne to prove that they were Frenchmen. Ever since then,
champagne and ballooning have been linked together like politicians and graft.
After major changes in balloon design in the 1960s and with the phenomenal advances in fabrics and coatings in recent years, ballooning has become a worldwide sport offering the adventure and magic of floating quietly above the earth to over 3400 pilots in the US alone. It is now the safest and one of the most popular forms of recreational aviation. For an interesting article on the history of ballooning click here. Another interesting web page was put together by the folks at Magic Carpet Ride Balloon Adventures of Atlanta, GA. It is a page of Balloon Trivia. Click here to go there.
This shows how popular ballooning has become. It is a picture of only a part of the almost 800 balloons at the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. This photo was taken by a crew member flying in the Long View Balloon during the 2005 Albuquerque Fiesta (October 2005) The river is the Rio Grande. Ten minutes after this picture was taken we were doing the splash-n-dash (you'll see it on the photo page).
[See the Photo Page to learn how you can order a CD filled with more than 3000 spectacular balloon photos to run on your computer.]
Albuquerque! - what a festival! There are 3400 balloon pilots in the US and an additional 1800 in the rest of the world. 800 of us were there for the 2005 Fiesta. How many sports can you think of where one out of six participants in the world show up at the same time and place each year?!?