By Jim Barnosky, EAA 845949
This piece originally ran in the March 2024 issue of EAA Sport Aviation magazine.
“Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth. … High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there, I’ve chased the shouting wind along.” — High Flight, John Gillespie Magee Jr.
Once, long ago as a little boy, John Gillespie Magee Jr.’s words were my last conscious thoughts before drifting off to sleep.
In those days, television stations stopped broadcasting at night, signing off with a short video. My favorite before bedtime showed a U.S. Air Force jet flying among the clouds, while the narrator intoned High Flight.
A lifetime later, those words are my first conscious thoughts stirring in pre-dawn darkness. I awake to fly “in the sunlit silence” and “chase the shouting wind along” in the most literal sense. My wife, Sue, preceded me downstairs. After turning on the coffee, she is at the computer studying the weather.
Aircraft category and class ratings on our pilot certificates allow today’s flight. FAA-speak reads “Lighter-Than-Air, Free Balloon.” In plainer language that means a hot air balloon flight.
But “Lighter-Than-Air” is an amusing misnomer. Hot air has weight. Inflated, our 90,000-cubic-foot balloon’s mass in flight is more than 6,000 pounds. Disregarding my professional flying, it is the biggest and heaviest aircraft in our personal fleet, which includes a Cessna R172K and a Van’s RV-7 under construction.
Our crew arrives just as preflight planning concludes. Balloon flying requires a team effort. The camaraderie involved is special and different from airplane flying, which can be a solitary endeavor.
The “airport” is the hayfield outside our front door. We release a small helium party balloon as the sun rises. This visually confirms what is actually happening in the micro-layers of air right above the surface, important information the nearby airport METAR in our computer weather brief cannot provide. Balloons react to micro-level winds that airplanes never feel. They can differ only 50-100 feet from your current altitude.
Balloonists “chase the shouting wind” in these micro-layers by climbing or descending to steer. “Shouting” is an overstatement. The wind’s sensory cues are subtle. Since a balloon moves with the wind, the air is perfectly still in the basket during flight. If you feel even the slightest wind, it means that the basket is moving in a different direction or speed than the top of the balloon. So, climbing or descending will result in corresponding changes.
With our experienced crew, the balloon is expeditiously inflated. A few burner blasts and we are ready to fly. But the pilot’s old friend Bernoulli counsels caution. Wind moving over the curved top of a stationary balloon on the ground creates invisible lift just like with an airplane wing. Unless the balloon is hot enough to overcome this, it will unintentionally descend after takeoff. This “false lift” disappears once airborne because the balloon moves with the wind.
Sue makes the takeoff today. A balloon takeoff is so smooth that people are usually surprised to be airborne. Sue stays low, contour flying well below treetop level over open fields of sagebrush while barely moving, almost “hov’ring there.”
Our sparsely populated rural area means that this ground-hugging flight fully complies with applicable FARs. Grazing deer, which usually scatter at the rumble of the burner, just look up with curiosity as we pass slowly by them in the almost still air.
Outside the basket, a large hawk takes up close right echelon formation. The raptor, now a wingman so close that I can see individual feathers, fearlessly eyes us as an interloper but accepts us as a fellow airborne creature.
Suddenly, a rabbit jumps from the sagebrush just a few feet below and runs ahead on our exact ground track. Our avian wingman gives chase, grabbing the unlucky rabbit in its talons less than 10 feet from us.
Balloon flight is so silent I hear the rush of beating wings and the sounds of the frantic struggle that ensues on the ground. But the rabbit breaks free and runs to hide in more sagebrush ahead.
The hawk rejoins our formation until we fly over that next sagebrush clump. Again, the scared rabbit bolts into the open, provoking the same response. For the second time, it escapes from the hawk’s clutch and runs ahead to hide. The cycle repeats a couple more times as we fly slowly over the natural drama unfolding before us.
We eventually land and deflate, conveniently by a road where our crew awaits. Pensive about what we witnessed, we are reminded that to fly, a balloon pilot must accept what nature provides. While modern flight is often spoken of as “the conquest of the air,” a balloon doesn’t conquer anything. A balloon flies as part of nature.
My aviation life followed a typical path: Navy pilot, aircraft owner, personal flying, instructing, airline captain, homebuilder, and now time to savor it all.
Looking back, it was always a quest for something bigger, faster, and shinier. Airplanes are magnificent machines, but technology tends to separate the pilot from things that make flight magical. Was I really chasing any “shouting wind” or doing anything in “sunlit silence” with an airplane?
So, the most basic flight that predates airplanes attracts me. In 1783, more than a century before Wilbur and Orville Wright at Kitty Hawk, the Montgolfier brothers, papermakers for the French King Louis XVI, built and flew the first manned hot air balloon in Paris.
I relish each of my thousands of hours aloft, where I did “a hundred things you have not dreamed of.” But none of them spent flying in what High Flight calls “where never lark, or even eagle flew” brought me as close to the essence and magic of flight as our hot air balloon does.
Oh — the rabbit? In a manner of speaking, it also “slipped the surly bonds.” It successfully escaped from the frustrated hawk.
Joseph (Jim) Barnosky, EAA 845949, is an ATP and CFII who still finds magic every time he is airborne. He lives in southwestern Colorado, flying the family Cessna 172 and their hot air balloons. When not airborne, he is building a Van’s RV-7, which is nearing completion.