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Howard Fried |
| Photographs by Howard Fried
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| About the Author ... |
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Howard Fried started flying with the Army Air Corps in WWII, where he
served both as a multi-engine instructor pilot and in combat piloting B-17s.
After a stint teaching sociology and on-the-air and management jobs in the
radio business after the war, he turned to teaching flying again full-time.
Over 40,000 general aviation hours later, he is still instructing
and running his own flight school. Along the way he administered over 4,000 flight tests
as a Designated Examiner
until victimized by rogue FAA officials.
He has authored two popular flying books aimed at student pilots and
instructors, Flight Test Tips and Tales and Beyond The Checkride, and a
series of audio tapes,
Checkride Tips from Flying's Eye Of The Examiner.
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I don't fly balloons. I
did fly balloons, but I gave it up. Not because it isn't a lot of fun, because it is. I
don't fly balloons because, like flying flingwings, it is too much work for a lazy guy
like me. With an airplane, you take off, point it where you want to go, trim it out and
let it take you there. With a helicopter, you've got both hands and both feet going all
the time, and with a balloon, you're totally at the mercy of the wind, and when you land,
you have to squeeze all the air out of the envelope, fold it up, stuff it in the basket,
and then drag that heavy thing out of the field where you landed to the road where
(hopefully) the chase car is waiting.
Balloons are,
however, a joy to watch. The designs and colors are breathtaking in their variety and
beauty, and if you want to see balloons, the place to do it is Albuquerque, New Mexico,
and the time to do it is the first or second week of October. It is then and there that
the largest balloon convention in the world is held annually. This event is to ballooning
what Airventure at Oshkosh is to airplanes. The 1998 Fiesta was the 27th edition of this
annual event and it has grown every year since the inception. It started out at the
Fairgrounds with less than a score of balloons (thirteen total) until today there is a
355-acre park area set aside for the launches and over 850 colorful balloons in all kinds
of shapes. This much space is needed for the mobs of people who attend the event, for
parking, booths, food service, etc., as well as for the actual launching of balloons.
Attendance has grown from fewer than ten thousand the first year to well over a million
today.
International Flavor
The balloonists
literally come from all over the world. Some sixteen international teams are represented.
They come from Argentina, Belgium, Canada, England, France, Germany, Japan, Macao, New
Zealand, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States, and Venezuela. And
there are teams from each of the following 41 states of our own union: Alabama, Arkansas,
Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana,
Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri,
Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New
Mexico, Nevada New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee,
Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington Wisconsin, and Wyoming. The nineday event requires
year-round work on the part of the Fiesta Board and staff which coordinate the world's
largest ballooning event.
With a vehicle — I
suppose we should call the balloons vehicles — that can only be controlled on the
vertical plane, the determination of horizontal direction is left to the mercy of the
wind. Since the wind shifts with altitude, the skilled balloonist does have a modicum of
control over the direction his vehicle takes over the ground. I have observed some truly
remarkable examples of this kind of directional control, including the flying of a square
pattern. With a south wind at the surface, the balloon would take off and fly north, climb
a few hundred feet where the wind was from the east, fly west, anticipating the distance
covered, climb some more to an altitude where the wind is from the north, go south, again
anticipating the right point to start climbing again, and go to an altitude offering a
west wind, and fly east until it was right over the starting point on the ground, thus
completing a near perfect square, or rectangle.
Effect On The City
As might be expected, the Kodak Balloon Festival exerts an enormous influence on the
City of Albuquerque. Throngs of people descend on Albuquerque for the annual Balloon
Fiesta. The hotels fill up, the restaurants see a substantial increase in business, and
the retail stores make hay selling to the crowds of visitors, although one local
restaurant operator complained that his business was down because everybody was having
lunch out at the launch site. At the launch site there are booths offering everything from
food (including breakfast burritos), pins, buttons, mugs, and t-shirts to equipment and
supplies for balloons. I'm sure that it has nothing to do with the fact that Kodak
sponsors the fiesta, but this is no doubt the most photographed event in the world. The
colorful balloons and the fascinating shapes in which many of them are designed and built
make them all extremely photogenic, so as might be imagined, film sales are phenomenal.
On the subject of
shapes, here's a balloon in the shape of a grocery bag just being erected!
And speaking of shapes, they had one balloon in the shape of Christ, and one was even a
Mountie on horseback.
One deleterious effect of the fiesta is the number and magnitude of the traffic jams
caused by gawkers stopping to watch low-flying balloons drift by. The local media urges
people to pull over off the roads and streets if they want to watch, but that doesn't seem
to stop them from slowing down to watch and causing huge traffic jams, just as motorists
seem to do whenever there is a traffic accident. Even so, the economic impact of this
annual event on the city is simply enormous.
Contests
Every day during the weeklong
fiesta there are contests for the participating balloonists. There are spot landing
contests, beanbag bombing contests, distance-flown contests, and so forth. (The gasfired
balloon distance contest was won this year by a team consisting of Mr. And Mrs. Troy
Bradley who covered some 1,700 miles, ending up in Ontario, Canada.)
The most interesting contest (with the biggest reward) is the "key grab" in
which a key is suspended from a pole, and if a balloonist succeeds in grabbing it as he or
she drifts by, he/she gets to keep the brand new automobile it fits!
If you want to see one of the most breathtaking sights anywhere in the world, and if
you're willing to get up early to go to the launch site for the mass launch and pay a
modest admission, then you should do what I did last October.
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