I got the amazing opportunity over the weekend to take a hot air balloon flight at the SunKiss Balloon Festival at Warren County Airport!
What an experience. If you’ve never been up in a hot air balloon, you need to do it some day!
Liz and I were a little hesitant to get up at 4:00 in the morning to take our flight, but it was well worth it…
We arrived at the airport at about 5am, and after checking in and grabbing some hot coffee headed over to meet our pilot. We were paired up with the Montgolfiéres Saint-Jean-Sur-Richelieu balloon team and watched patiently as they attached the balloon to the basket and blew it up with a big fan.
We took off after the pilot gave the balloon several blasts of fire from the burners. These things are amazing to me, they look so fragile and delicate while they float through the air; but up close they are actually quite tough! The team was pushing and pulling on the thing while it was on the ground, and obviously they can withstand the heat from a ten foot flame firing out of the burner that can’t be more than six or eight feet away from the actual balloon.
We lifted off and started drifting towards West Mountain before we reached an altitude of a few thousand feet. At this point, as the co-pilot explained to me, we entered another layer of wind that pulled us in the opposite direction, towards Hudson Falls.
When flying through the air in a hot air balloon, you are completely at the mercy of the wind. There is no steering, you are only in control of your altitude. Our pilot obviously had this down, and he just pulled the trigger on the burners every once in a while as we floated up and down.
We were up in the air for about an hour before we started dropping in altitude, getting ready for our landing. At this point we were somewhere around the line that separates Queensbury and Hudson Falls.
The pilot continued to “fly” the balloon back towards the airport by keeping it in the “layer of wind” that was pushing us back there. We slowly drifted over the trees, making our way back to the airport.
I was absolutely amazed at the skill of our pilot. Most balloons have a chase team that drives around while the balloon is in flight; and through the use of walkie-talkies meets up with the crew when they land on some random, open parcel of land. Our pilot floated our balloon right over the fence at the airport, and literally landed it five feet away from where we took off. The chase team didn’t have to move the truck a foot!
We landed with a thud, enjoyed some champagne with our hosts (hot air ballooning tradition) and thanked the team for a great experience.
The Montgolfiéres team is the lead sponsor of a HUGE international balloon festival in Quebec in August. Their festival goes on for nine days, and features live concerts every night! The team gave us a stack of free tickets for the festival, I’d love to get up to Canada to check that out next month!
