I don’t fly balloons. Idid fly balloons, but I gave it up. Not because it isn’t a lot of fun, because it is. Idon’t fly balloons because, like flying flingwings, it is too much work for a lazy guylike me. With an airplane, you take off, point it where you want to go, trim it out andlet it take you there. With a helicopter, you’ve got both hands and both feet going allthe 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 andbeauty, 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 thatthe largest balloon convention in the world is held annually. This event is to ballooningwhat Airventure at Oshkosh is to airplanes. The 1998 Fiesta was the 27th edition of thisannual event and it has grown every year since the inception. It started out at theFairgrounds with less than a score of balloons (thirteen total) until today there is a355-acre park area set aside for the launches and over 850 colorful balloons in all kindsof shapes. This much space is needed for the mobs of people who attend the event, forparking, 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 milliontoday.
International Flavor
The balloonistsliterally come from all over the world. Some sixteen international teams are represented.They come from Argentina, Belgium, Canada, England, France, Germany, Japan, Macao, NewZealand, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States, and Venezuela. Andthere 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, NewMexico, Nevada New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee,Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington Wisconsin, and Wyoming. The nineday event requiresyear-round work on the part of the Fiesta Board and staff which coordinate the world’slargest ballooning event.
With a vehicle — Isuppose we should call the balloons vehicles — that can only be controlled on thevertical plane, the determination of horizontal direction is left to the mercy of thewind. Since the wind shifts with altitude, the skilled balloonist does have a modicum ofcontrol over the direction his vehicle takes over the ground. I have observed some trulyremarkable examples of this kind of directional control, including the flying of a squarepattern. With a south wind at the surface, the balloon would take off and fly north, climba few hundred feet where the wind was from the east, fly west, anticipating the distancecovered, climb some more to an altitude where the wind is from the north, go south, againanticipating the right point to start climbing again, and go to an altitude offering awest wind, and fly east until it was right over the starting point on the ground, thuscompleting a near perfect square, or rectangle.
Effect On The City
As might be expected, the Kodak Balloon Festival exerts an enormous influence on theCity of Albuquerque. Throngs of people descend on Albuquerque for the annual BalloonFiesta. The hotels fill up, the restaurants see a substantial increase in business, andthe retail stores make hay selling to the crowds of visitors, although one localrestaurant operator complained that his business was down because everybody was havinglunch out at the launch site. At the launch site there are booths offering everything fromfood (including breakfast burritos), pins, buttons, mugs, and t-shirts to equipment andsupplies for balloons. I’m sure that it has nothing to do with the fact that Kodaksponsors the fiesta, but this is no doubt the most photographed event in the world. Thecolorful balloons and the fascinating shapes in which many of them are designed and builtmake them all extremely photogenic, so as might be imagined, film sales are phenomenal.
On the subject ofshapes, 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 aMountie on horseback.
One deleterious effect of the fiesta is the number and magnitude of the traffic jamscaused by gawkers stopping to watch low-flying balloons drift by. The local media urgespeople to pull over off the roads and streets if they want to watch, but that doesn’t seemto stop them from slowing down to watch and causing huge traffic jams, just as motoristsseem to do whenever there is a traffic accident. Even so, the economic impact of thisannual event on the city is simply enormous.
Contests
Every day during the weeklongfiesta there are contests for the participating balloonists. There are spot landingcontests, beanbag bombing contests, distance-flown contests, and so forth. (The gasfiredballoon distance contest was won this year by a team consisting of Mr. And Mrs. TroyBradley who covered some 1,700 miles, ending up in Ontario, Canada.)
The most interesting contest (with the biggest reward) is the "key grab" inwhich a key is suspended from a pole, and if a balloonist succeeds in grabbing it as he orshe 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 ifyou’re willing to get up early to go to the launch site for the mass launch and pay amodest admission, then you should do what I did last October.
