Clear to Climb

By Paul Brockman

Recollections of the author's often amusing and sometimes hair-raising hot-air ballooning experiences. Glimpses into a twenty-six year passion with ballooning that pursues the author from the tranquillity of the English countryside to the Puget Sound region of Western Washington and the high desert of Nevada

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Brockman
• Release date: Jan 2, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465873613

Paul Brockman

Paul Brockman relocated from England to America in 1984. A retired aerospace engineer, he has written several novel-length stories, mostly in the science fiction and humorous fantasy genres, with an excursion into an autobiographical book about hot-air ballooning. These are currently available as ebooks. Brockman has relocated to Somerset, England

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Clear to Climb

Personal recollections of a quarter-century of hot-air ballooning

Paul H Brockman

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2006 Paul H Brockman

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Chapter one

Reno—High Desert

Saturday the eighth of September, 2001. Preflight briefing began as usual—in the dark. By the time it was over there was daylight enough to see flags and banners flapping in the wind. The length and breadth of the Rancho San Raphael Park, everything capable of flapping, was flapping. This was more than just an omen, it was a direct message to anyone who wasn’t actually in a coma. It should have been a trigger for the self-preservation instinct that had served me well on other occasions. This time my mind must have been elsewhere. Flight service reported a surface wind of eight knots, borderline for the ‘go for launch’ decision. The organizers considered their options and then decided to go ahead with the event.

I’ll be all right, I thought, as I made my way out of the briefing tent, Jesus is with me. Actually, he was waiting for me when I trekked back to my launch site. I’d been assigned a position at the north-west corner of the field. The Jesus balloon in the next launch slot was so large it was spilling over into my area. So much so that I was obviously not going to be able to lay out the Sun Dragon to inflate. The Jesus balloon was indeed with me. The pilot, who guided the balloon through the sky—a sort of high priest, you might say—met me as I returned and asked me, very politely, to move over into another space so he could have his own allotted area, and mine as well. Anything for the Lord of Hosts, I thought, and dutifully moved my rig in a northerly direction. The Jesus balloon, when it inflated, was impressively huge. The figure of Jesus dominated the center of the envelope, surrounded by a giant skirt of clouds, dwarfing the small figures that reclined, or knelt on the clouds, like children experiencing a trampoline for the first time.

My balloon was not one of the first to receive launch permission. The densely packed center-field is always let loose first, after the flag-bearer and the hare balloons have launched, of course, for this was to be a Hare and Hounds event. The hare balloon launches and moves away downwind to seek a suitable landing site. The pilot then lands the balloon and a target is set on the ground at that location for the rest of the field of balloons, the hounds, to aim at.

Preparations for the launch of the Sun Dragon had begun while I was away at the preflight briefing. My crew had unloaded the equipment from the truck and begun to make ready for inflation. Having picked everything up and moved it to our new site, we continued with our preparations. The first balloons out of the field slid off downwind with a speed that belied the eight knot observation. With some reservations I joined in the pre-launch activities, watching the early launches with half an eye.

By the time I was ready to fly, the balloons that had preceded me were hanging in the air about half a mile downwind. I studied their motion for a while and came to the conclusion that the wind had dropped. The situation certainly seemed to have improved. I made a mental commitment to fly. When a launch director came my way I held out my badge to be punched and proffered the mandatory passenger waiver. At the thumbs up from the launch director I checked the sky around me, got a thumbs-up from my crew chief, opened the blast valve, and lifted off.

The first part of the flight, though slightly swifter than my usual experience, was nonetheless not a cause for concern. My passenger expressed his delight with what was for him a first-time experience. As the flight progressed however, it soon became apparent that the lull in the wind had been a temporary matter.

The Earth began to spin ever faster below the balloon. Whole communities slid below the gondola in the blink of an eye and were gone. Local geography became history at an alarming rate. Our westerly progress over suburbia even exceeded the rate at which suburbia was progressing over the desert. It was obvious by then that a landing in many of the usual places was not an option. The little-trafficked side streets were out of the question. City parks, schools, sports fields, and similar tracts where the sky attached itself to the ground without hindrance from walls, poles, and other unpleasant extrusions, were not on the list of possibilities that day on account of their tendency to be surrounded by tall, sharp, or otherwise ill-natured objects. Furthermore, bounding from rooftop to rooftop and dragging through front yards, with equal disregard for rose bushes and Volvos would probably have been frowned upon and regarded as impolite by the local community.

No, the only recourse in those circumstances was the desert that, to look on the bright side, there was still quite a lot of. From the air the desert looks soft, fuzzy, and inviting to a balloonist long starved of open spaces. On closer inspection however, those occasional rocks turn out to be the size of small houses. Sagebrush is spiky and tends to lash out at intruding balloonists. Rattlesnakes are know to lurk behind every rock. Black Widow webs drape the landscape in all directions. Having taken all these considerations into account, the desert was still the preferred place to land that morning.

Another problem with desert, at least in the High Sierras, is that much of it exhibits a tendency for severe departure from the horizontal, preferring, apparently, to occupy space more properly reserved for sky.

Ever since the Earth had begun to spin faster below us my passenger had gone very quiet, no doubt examining his life’s experiences as they passed in review. I attempted to reassure him that all was well by refraining from shouting We’re doomed! We’re going to die! Any more positive reinforcement, I felt, would be premature.

The Sun Dragon rushed on toward an appointment with the future, that for a while seemed to take the form of a low, once round-topped hill. The summit of this particular prominence had been sliced off like a hard-boiled egg. It was currently crowned by a ring of heavy, earth-moving machinery, that was presumably responsible for the removal of its round top.

My plan, such as it was, involved touching down and using as much desert as could be found lying in a straight line, to drag through the sagebrush to slow the progress of the balloon, and to eventually deliver my passenger, my balloon, and myself back to the launch site with all our various parts intact. Known in ballooning circles as a tip and drag landing, it is really quite exciting, especially from the viewpoint of someone standing in the gondola. In an ideal situation the balloon would be close to stable equilibrium, which means it is neither climbing nor descending, and would approach the ground at a very shallow angle so as to avoid bouncing back into the sky in an undignified fashion. This set of conditions is relatively easy to arrange while the ground obeys the normal rules for ground. When ground gets ideas above its station and tries to pretend to be sky, then the rules change quite a lot.

The Sun Dragon was moving at full charge parallel with where the ground ought to have been. The hill that stood in its path would provide a place to drag but arranging for a shallow intercept would prove to be quite a challenge.

Now, I don’t mind taking my chances with a boulder-strewn landscape, but I draw the line at tangling with mountain moving heavy machinery. It’s all angles and corners and sharp bits. I elected to miss this particular hill and move on to the next surprise the landscape had in store. This turned out to be a similar piece of piled-up desert but, this time, without the crown of thorns courtesy of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

Our speed had not diminished by any perceptible amount, nor did I really expect that it would. I aimed at a point as low on the hill as I could arrange and attempted to inject a slight upward tendency to the balloon so as to intercept the ground at a shallow angle while not actually initiating a climb that would make the balloon bound into the sky at first contact. In other words I attempted the impossible. What actually happened was this: having briefed my passenger on the action to be taken in the event of a hard landing, and told him to return his seat to the fully upright position with his tray table stowed and his luggage under the seat in front, I yelled to him to brace himself for impact and to hold on tight. Yelling was probably unnecessary because in the confines of the gondola we were only about twenty inches apart, but I felt I needed to instill a sense of urgency to the occasion. The first contact was hard. The gondola bounced off the hill but didn’t seem to slow down very much. Swinging like a pendulum below the envelope, we retreated from the hill, only to approach it even faster on the return swing. The second contact was even more abrupt. Large quantities of desert were scooped into the gondola and though I didn’t realize it till later, several items normally resident in the balloon departed, never to be seen again. This sequence of thudding into the hill followed by the equally nerve wracking back-swing could have gone on for some time. The balloon was apparently enjoying itself trying to reduce its riders to jelly or remove them altogether. What happened next however, was that we ran out of hill.

Taking a mighty swipe at the hillside, the balloon rebounded and tried again, only to miss altogether, much like coming to the top of a staircase and expecting another step that isn’t there, or throwing a roundhouse punch at a target who dodges out of the way. It became apparent that there would be no more chances to pound this particular piece of landscape. No round-topped hill this, it ended in a sheer cliff, fortunately of the downward variety. The pendular motion of the gondola, by now increased to alarming angles of departure from the perpendicular, took a long time to damp out, and hadn’t fully stopped by the time the next unusually high piece of desert presented itself for punishment.

My tactic this time was to attack the hill closer to the top, use it to slow the forward motion of the balloon, a hitherto elusive goal, and then use the lee side of the hill (assuming there was one) to bring us to a stop. This particular maneuver would be the most difficult to bring to a satisfactory conclusion for several reasons, not the least of which was the row of large and pointy rocks that were arrayed across our path on the near horizon. Another problem we could encounter was one very well known to the hang gliding community as rotor. When a moving air mass encounters an obstacle such as a hill, it speeds up. The highest speed winds being found above and before the top of the hill. As the wind passes over the top it tends to swirl in the shape similar to a wave approaching a beach. The air often moves downward with considerable vigor in the lee of a hill. The faster the air mass approaches the hill, the move energetic the rotor in its lee. My reasoning, subconscious though it may have been, was that, if I could remain close to the ground as I passed over the summit, then being pushed down was exactly what I wanted. With or without reasoning, conscious or otherwise, I was determined that this is where todays flight would end.

And so it was. It may be that the previous ground contacts had taken the sting out of the subsequent encounters, but this time the impacts didn’t seem to have quite the same emphasis. Probably, we were punch drunk. Exciting as the landing was, it was somehow anticlimactic. The balloon whacked into the ground, to be sure, and bounded upward again, but the enthusiasm seemed to have gone out of it. Like a wild pony that has failed, despite its best efforts to unseat a determined rider, and stands panting in the dust wondering what to do next, the balloon came to earth meekly enough when I pulled on the vent line like Quasimodo on his best day. The fight just wasn’t there anymore.

The gondola finally stuck to the ground on a moderate downward slope, with the envelope billowing ahead of it like a spinnaker. Attached to the ground it may have been, but it was far from stationary. Our bow wave consisted of sagebrush, rocks, and the grayish desert soil in which they had been previously embedded. Thumping and bumping our way down the slope I became increasingly aware of what lay ahead of us. As the balloon closed the distance to the row of massive rocks I noticed with considerable interest that I could see nothing beyond them. No continuation of the slope over which we were sliding at an alarming rate. No rising ground either. No more sagebrush and no more rocks. No more anything.

The balloon, by this time, was enjoying itself playing land yacht. It was however, in no position to become airborne again. Not on this flight. It’s amazing how much windage there is on a balloon envelope, even with a twenty-foot hole in the top. Eventually though the whole contraption must come to a stop. This was the thought that sustained me as I pulled grimly on the rope that held open the parachute top. And then the flight was over. With a final lurch the Sun Dragon came to a stop. The envelope flapped in the wind with no more fight in it than washing on a line.

I secured the balloon and took stock of our situation. We were alone on a hillside high above the nearest road. Not a track was to be seen. No other balloons had landed here. No chase vehicles could be seen or heard. We were alone with no sound to break the silence but the whistling of the wind and the rustling of the sagebrush.

Occasionally, a balloon would sweep by in the distance. One even flew close to us at a speed that took my breath away. As it passed overhead the pilot called down to us Did you drag?

Did we drag! Not much! Look for the absence of sagebrush behind us, the overturned rocks, the trail of destruction that ought to be visible from space. Many smart and caustic replies crossed my mind afterwards, but time was short, leaving little opportunity for anything but a simple ‘yes’, and then he was gone.

My radio, by some miracle, was still in the gondola. I tried to raise the chase crew on 123.3 megahertz. There was no response. My passenger had a cellular phone with him and he walked back the way we had come (well, limped really, rubbing a bruised hip on his way) to use it at the top of the hill. Taking the radio I moved in the other direction. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, VHF radios are usually very good for communications of the ‘line-of-sight’ variety, and I had a feeling I knew what I was going to see when I got to that row of rocks up ahead. Secondly, I had a morbid fascination with discovering just what would have happened had we continued dragging down the slope. I soon found out. Climbing onto the first of the megaliths my fears were confirmed. I saw a large, flat area. Unfortunately, it was vertical, and it went on for a couple of hundred feet before connecting with the valley floor. Below, I could see a small community bordering a freeway. In the distance, several balloons had put down in the valley. Whether they had encountered similar excitement on landing to that of the Sun Dragon, I could not tell from this range. One thing was for sure: no chase vehicle would be climbing up to us from this direction.

Before I could try the radio again it burst into life, Sun Dragon, this is chase, do you read?

I responded at once, but received no reply. I initiated my own message but heard only static in answer. This game went on for quite a while. I heard occasional messages from my crew, but they didn’t hear my replies. My radio waves, apparently took one look over the cliff and, deciding that this drop was not for them, scurried off to hide amongst the rocks. Once in a while my transmissions got up the courage to leap over the edge and slither across the valley, establishing a brief communications link of dubious utility. It was difficult to describe our location to the chase crew.

Are you anywhere near…

No, I can’t see that.

Well, what can you see?

I can see lots of rocks, and they all look alike. And sagebrush…

It’s no good, we can’t see you.

"I can see you. We’re UP here. Look east. Think high."

My dark blue truck chased up and down the distant road, its crew oblivious to the observer high above them. It’s hard for pilots to imagine why the chase crew can’t seem to figure out where the balloon is at any time. All they have to do, after all, is to stand still for a while and watch the balloon, then extrapolate the line-of-flight. The balloon is obviously at the end of that line. Simple. It’s equally hard for the chase crew to understand why the pilot can’t seem to realize that the chase vehicles don’t travel in straight lines, but actually accumulate many more miles than the balloon, because they drive all over the landscape trying to figure out where their charge went after it disappeared behind the hill.

Of the two chase trucks that were following us, my sponsor’s four-wheel drive rig was the only one to make it up the hill to us, following the approximate track of the balloon. What attracted the chase crew to us was not my VHF transmissions but the cell phone link my passenger established.

The process of dismantling and packing the balloon into the truck began, only to stall when I discovered that the wrenches used to disconnect the fuel lines and to uncouple the overhead frame, burner, and envelope from the gondola were missing, casualties of that first ground contact. The only tools we could lay our hands on were one open-ended wrench that was too big to fit any of the nuts that needed to be turned, and a flat-bladed screwdriver. For several moments we stood around scratching our heads and considering this insurmountable problem. Then we surmounted it. The answer was quite simple, of course. The two engineers in the group came to the same conclusion at the same moment. As I stood with the wrench in one hand and the screwdriver in the other, a light bulb went on above my head. I looked at my crew chief, Jay and he looked at me. I knew that he had the answer, and he knew that I had seen the obvious too. Jay has been with my crew longer that anyone else. As a safety engineer for Boeing, he has a good gasp of the physics of things that tick, spin, and whir, so it was hardly surprising that