Let's Go Hot Air Ballooning Over Casper

CASPER — The early morning sun was not yet rising at Mike Cedar Park as Cameron Wagner, Fred Dinkler, Willie Taillon and other aeronauts made ready to take to the sky.

At 5 a.m. Friday, it’s finally time for the annual Casper Balloon Roundup, which allows area people a chance to “crew,” or help launch and retrieve, hot-air balloons. For balloonists and a passenger or two, it’s a chance to witness a beautiful sunrise and soar over the Oil City.

The “where” depends on where the winds blow, which anyone who’s spent time in Wyoming knows can be unpredictable and aggressive.

Wagner, a Casper resident, first becoming fascinated with the air sport while attending a balloon event years ago. He said he decided then that he was going to turn it into his hobby to give him a break from his work in manufacturing.

“It turns out there was quite a bit more to it than originally thought,” he said.

At about 5:15 a.m. pilots received a briefing on the weather, and volunteer crew members and riders were assigned. Ten balloons in big bags came out trailers, along with baskets, burners, fans and other gear needed to attach the basket to more than 60-feet of fabric called the envelope.

They’re focused on filling the envelope and safely launching into the sky.

Dinkler, 70, of Preston, Idaho, said the Casper festival was his first visit to the city. He was recruited to come and fly by a festival organizer, and he spends much of the summer going around the country to various balloon festivals.

He and wife, Christel, who drives the chase truck and trailer, also have flown their balloon called “Carried Away” in France and Mexico.

“I’m probably the most senior pilot here. I have been flying since 1972,” he said. “I was lucky. I got in very young and very early. I have about 2,500 hours flying in hot air. I also was a naval aviator in the Marine Corps, fixed wing and helicopters.”

Taillon of Medicine Hat, Alberta, said he and his wife, Cindy, were also at the festival for the first time and planned to do a tour of the state, which will include stops in Riverton, Sheridan and then on to a festival in Billings, Mont.

“We just hope to enjoy the sights and sounds of each place and fly our balloons as the weather permits,” he said.

Preparation

All the crews under the instruction of their pilots worked to pull the envelope or balloon out of the bag, attach the propane burner to the basket, which was put on its side, and then start filling the balloon with a big fan.

Once the balloon starts to open up on the ground, the pilot starts to fire the propane burners to really inflate it and stand it upright.

A nearly 7 mph breeze flew in the park, but Wagner told pilots the air would become much calmer after liftoff.

Cowboy State Daily was assigned to crew for Dinkler and ride with him.

Wagner said balloon pilots need to know a lot of the same things as pilots of private planes. His journey included a lot of home-study, learning about FAA airspace rules, aviation weather, cloud formations and the fundamentals of ballooning.

He found someone in Longmont, Colorado, who taught balloon flight instruction, and told him he wanted to fly balloons.

“He said it’s really like a seven-year plan to do that. You need to crew for somebody for a while and then you start to get the handle on things,” Wagner said.

“I told him I wanted to do it now,” he said.

The man connected him with one of his students who was based in Casper.

Wagner crewed with him a couple of times and then learned there was a commercial pilot in Casper who had recently moved to the area and had not yet flown. Wagner developed a relationship with him and started flying as a crew member. He completed all his ground school requirements.

“As everybody knows in Casper, it’s known for the wind. I’ve flown in a lot of other places and no place is quite like Casper, and so it was a good advantage for me I thought. After I felt confident from him, a normal person would just go take their check ride, and I was signed off for that, but I wanted to make sure that I was actually skilled enough.”

Balloon School

He spent a week in a balloon school in St. George, Utah, that had a more defined curriculum. He flew with other pilots there and obtained his private pilot’s license. The license would allow him to fly and carry passengers, but he could not charge them.

As he started flying, he decided to get his commercial license. There were always people approaching him about a ride, and he thought giving paying rides would help defray his costs. He returned to the Utah school and obtained his commercial pilot rating.

Balloonists typically fly in the early morning hours due to the stability of the air. Once the sun starts stirring the molecules around pavements, house rooftops, prairie grass, rocks and the North Platte River, wind currents start up and can be unpredictable.

The wind needs to blow less than 7 mph to land safely.

To control the balloon, pilots shoot fire out of the propane heater to make it rise. It generally takes about 10 seconds after the burn for the balloon to rise. Descent is accomplished by laying off the heat and the use of air vents that allow the pilot to quickly descend when needed.

Good pilots can read the different wind currents that may be going in different directions and get into the current when they want to navigate toward a certain compass point.

To become a pilot requires 10 hours at the controls with an instructor or roughly 10 flights — but Wagner said that number of hours basically only gives you enough to survive.

“There’s no actual control of steering except piloting the thing, putting it in different air patterns that you can sense or feel as you are flying the thing,” Wagner said. “If you are out in the middle of nowhere, I think in 10 hours you can teach somebody how to land a balloon and live. But to be able to land a balloon on a city street or in a tight (space) requires a whole heck of a lot more than that.”

As a veteran of Casper and Wyoming flights, Wagner said it initially surprised him how winds can vary so much at different altitudes. Pilots try to use the different wind layers to get the balloon where they want to go.

“As the ground heats up and the air heats up, it is constantly changing. I say a lot of times ballooning is 100 percent managing the variables,” he said. “It’s super pretty and calm to watch, but as I was learning we would fly for an hour and a half and sometimes two hours in the morning, and I was so brain drained for the rest of the day because you are so high alert, paying attention to absolutely everything.”

The Challenge

Balloons in the hot air world can range from 56,000 cubic feet inside them to several hundred thousand cubic feet. Wagner said most balloons at the Casper event held around 90,000 cubic feet of air, enough to carry passengers.

As a former pilot of helicopters and jets, Dinkler said a balloon is the most challenging to pilot because there is no directional control.

“If you are trying to fly from point A to point B, and that’s one of the competition tasks in balloon competitions, it’s (necessary) to find out what the wind is doing at all the different altitudes and then putting in your mind together that 3-D map. I’ve got to climb here, get over here, climb this way, you have to put that 3-D together in your head.”

In high-wind situations, Dinkler said, he has used trees to slow himself down for a landing by skimming the basket over the top of a high tree as a means to reduce speed.

As the basket starts to tip into the tree, it will suddenly shoot out of the tree, he rights the balloon, opens vents and lands.

Dinkler dipped his balloon down near a Casper city street to test a landing, before soaring above the trees pumping rapid fire from his burner. Early in his ballooning career he said he narrowly avoided a disaster with passengers on board when he failed to calculate his propane use.

He was in Billings, Montana, flying in the afternoon through a pass that had two big mesas on either side, a freeway running between the mesas and a river beside the freeway.

He tried to make the top of one of the mesas which was about 1,200 feet and when he did, he saw a 1,000-foot TV tower.

“So, I kept burning and about halfway up that tower I was burning vapor. I managed to clear the tower, but when I came down … I hit the ground, and I had two passengers, a Japanese woman and her little daughter,” Dinkler said. He said he tried to use his body to protect them as the balloon got caught up in “30 knots of wind across the mesa.”

As the basket hit the ground, the burner mounted on top of the basket flexed down, hitting Dinkler across the shoulders and everything not tied down in the basket got scattered across a half-mile drag path. The basket was stopped by a barbed-wire fence.

“This thing turned out into a big sail, and it wouldn’t collapse,” he said. “That was a memorable experience that will never happen again.”

The Landing

Dinkler’s first flight in Casper ended in a yard at historic Fort Caspar. Landing instructions for riders in a balloon include holding onto the basket, legs together and knees flexed.

During a recent ride, the basket bounced once and came to a rest. The ground crew arrived and helped scoot the balloon back in the yard so the envelope could be deflated and not fall on anything.

A process to unhook the basket, bring the envelope together and pack it all for the next flight took about 20 minutes.

Casper’s Balloon Roundup continues its daily flights, weather and wind permitting, through Sunday.

Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.