The classic hot air balloon with the round balloon and gas burner thing. It’s easy to see how it goes up or down, but how do people go where they want to – or get back!
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You are at the mercy of the wind but the wind often doesn’t blow in exactly the same direction higher up as it does close to the ground. So, if the pilot rises or descends, they can steer *a bit*.
Pilots kid here. Grew up around them, trained for a bit. Y’all. Before technology got to be so good and weather apps and what not, the pilots would let a dark colored balloon up to watch where and how the wind would take it.
In a balloon you can control the up and down. Different wind layers blow in different directions. You find one that is going in the direction you need and steer that way. When you see a spot you want to land you talk to your ground crew for permissions and access to landing spots.
Champagne is always available after because tradition states the very first pilots where from France, they would have bottles of champagne for peasants on the ground, because the peasants would shred the balloon thinking it was a dragon that had captured people.
Yes, actually. Balloons are at the mercy of the wind. On a traditional hot air balloon if the wind is blowing east by north east, your going to go east by north east. There’s no lever, rope, or rudder we can direct that will get you to go against the wind. The only thing a pilot really has direct control over is height off the ground. A sailboat has more control over their heading than a balloon pilot. That being said, depending on the time of day, location and prevailing winds there are ways to ‘steer’ a balloon.
For example, early in the morning, around sunrise, their tends to be a separation in the winds at different altitudes. At say 300 feet above ground the wind may be blowing at 115 degrees (as in compass degrees) and at 800 feet it may be closer to 125. Not usually a huge difference but enough to ‘steer’ away from undesirable landing zones. This ‘steerage’ tends to go away as the sun gets higher and the sky and the temperature differences in the atmosphere tend to blend. The winds aloft then mix and become more uniform.
We also have complete control over where we take off from. Usually we’re taking into consideration the wind, the distance we can travel with the fuel onboard, maps of the area, and where we’ll be landing when we’re picking our takeoff area. We’ll look at our maps and the winds aloft and know “well if I take off here I’ll have to land in a swamp… but if I take off from a mile to the north, there are some nice open pastures to land in.”
There are some places that have interesting geography that creates some interesting wind. Namely around mountains, you can have areas of what we call “box winds.” That is at one altitude you’ll have winds blowing at say 115 degrees and at a higher altitude you might have winds that are blowing the opposite direction at 290. There are commercial ride companies that will take off at one location, fly for an hour, and land right where they took off from. These are the exception rather than the rule though.
There’s a reason that balloons have what we call “**chase** crews” while a pilot may know the general area we’ll land in we don’t generally know the precise field/backyard/location that we’ll be landing in Which is why pilots are always in contact with their chase crews.
I’m a hot air balloon pilot!
Basically it’s a primitive degenerate form of the ‘reading the winds’ kind of thing you see in Pixar movies. We generally have an idea of how the wind in our area will behave that morning or afternoon, usually based on a combination of local knowledge and weather forecasts. In addition, we’ll often inflate a small helium party balloon and release it into the air before setting up. This is called a ‘pilot balloon’, or ‘pi-ball’ for short. As it ascends we watch to see the different directions it moves in at different altitudes, which gives us a very local sense of exactly where we can expect to go at a given altitude.
Once we’re flying, I’ll generally pop up high for a bit and slowly come back down, watching to see when and how high I turn this or that direction. Winds change, obviously, but for a short 45 minute flight in the usually calm air of morning or late afternoon, it can be surprisingly consistent.
So I might know for example that if I want to turn ‘left’, I can fly at 400′ AGL. If I want to turn ‘right’, I’ll get that around 900′ AGL. It’s that sort of thing. As we’re going, I’ll occasionally spit over the side of the basket (not onto people or property of course, but on trees, fields, etc. One time I hit a deer!). You can actually watch your spit ball fall and see how the winds below you affect it. Pretty neat!
As to homing in on a particular target, it’s all about skill. You need to develop an intuition for how long to stay at each of your turning altitudes in order to arrive right where you want to be. For example, you might be making a beeline for your target field, but you’re going to miss it if you forget that descending to the field takes you through 10 seconds of left turning wind, which will cause you to miss your target.
To practice and celebrate that skillset, one of the common competitions for balloonists is something called the Hound and Hare. A single pilot is designated the Hare balloon, and they inflate alone and take off. All the other balloons, designated the Hounds, are not allowed to begin their inflation until the Hare balloon has left the ground. Inflation for the average balloon takes around 10-15 minutes, so the Hare gets a decent head start. After flying for about 30 minutes (long enough for the Hounds to get airborne and see the Hare), the Hare will land in a field and set up a big red X at their touchdown point. The object of the game is for the Hound balloons to drop bean bags as close to the center of the X as possible. This requires a supreme amount of skill, because you’re not just flying your balloon, you’re ‘bowling’ for a specific target on a path that was set half an hour ago. And the Hounds aren’t allowed to touch the ground!
I think my second proudest moment as a balloon pilot was absolutely nailing it as a Hound. I managed to glide the balloon about 12″ over the grass, reach out, and manually place the bean bag in the center before climbing back out of the field to go find a landing spot.
Ballooning is super fun! Any other questions feel free to ask.
Wind blows in different directions at different heights, apparently. Go up to north up a little more and it’s north east. Up a little more and its east. Up a lot and it’s south west. Down a whole lot and it’s south. Except with really complicated directions and stuff probably.
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