I write this column once a quarter, and usually right on deadline. So much that should be timely seems inappropriate because it will be over a month before it comes back to my inbox as compared to Balloon List postings that sometimes have responses back within a few minutes. But there is one topic that has been on my mind for months and even years: Spot Landing competition.
It may not have been true, but my father regaled me as a child about the Swiss Aero Club’s competitions in the first part of this dying century. Of course that was still in the first third when I heard the tales. When the Balloon Club of America was formed at the mid point, one of our first events was in conjunction with the Philadelphia Region of The Sports Car Club of America. We did some rallyes with them based on the Swiss Aero Club and the Swiss Auto Club activities. With the right amount of wind it was great sport. But what a mess when the wind was so slow that one could chase better on foot than in the racy cars. (Dropping war surplus pilot chutes every fifteen minutes for points became a real Donnybrook.) When it was a high wind, the final landing was the only scoring point and that for a small percentage of the cars.
He also told about spot landing events for just the balloons, where they would put out several bed sheets in suitable fields in various directions from the launch site. He claimed, which I believed with open jaw, that on occasion two balloons picking sheets in opposite directions would have to bring the sheets in to compare to see which had the most wicker imprint from the impact of a real spot landing. That was with a half a dozen competitors. Before hot air.
At the start of our hot air sport it could have been about the same, but shortly there were far too many balloons to have them making an actual spot landing on a given "X". So then came the baggies.
The alleged purpose of horse racing is "To improve the breed", but I don’t see any horses doing much better than Dan Patch a century later. Is balloon racing doing any better? I think it is, kidding myself that competition is getting stiffer rather than that I am getting poorer. The purpose of a spot landing race should be to improve our ability to make a safe landing in the place of our choice. But does playing drop the handkerchief from some higher air strata, with temperature and wind direction inversions the rule rather than the exception, do that?
There have been proposals for bomb sights, no throw rules, and whatever, but they don’t cure the root of the problem. Let us consider a proposal to have a real simulated spot landing and fly on that can be judged and scored easily with little opportunity for fudging the simulation of a real landing. We want the pilot to see how close he can come to a determined spot as if he were actually landing there, not ten or twenty or a hundred feet above where there might be a more favorable wind to make corrections for an unfavorable approach. So we want him to come in at inches altitude, make his mark, and go on to clear the way for the scoring and the next balloon.
Consider a marker similar to a giant ski pole. Make the disc solid and a foot in diameter out of Styrofoam. Now, the pilot can’t throw it, he must actually plant it like Marco Polo’s cavalry picking up apples with their lances. (Now that’s an idea. A bushel of apples in a parking lot. See how many you can get...) Even if he is an Olympic javelin champ he will still have to come in at landing level. If he does throw it, it is going to invert and not stick - no score. I would hope the committee would not pick a target on a paved area, let’s keep it for the mortals.
When skills improve to the point that pilots are, like Robin Hood, splitting the other competitors shafts, the judges can do a quick measure and remove the flag before the next approach - sort of like golf. When skills improve to the point that scores are all zero, then require the folks to only sink their poles from, say, the right side of the basket as it approaches. If you have to make it still harder in order to get variations in results, put a twenty foot high crepe paper ribbon around the target some feet out in a circle - breaking the ribbon would disqualify the pass. That would be the simulation for a tight landing spot.
This proposal would cut down on the multitude of baggies in a pile, would hone skills to a higher degree, and probably be even more exciting for the spectators. If anyone does try this as a demonstration event, I’d sure like to hear about it ahead of time so I could come and watch. Email me at "Balloon@msn.com" and I’ll be there. For that matter, email me with your comments on this or requests for another subject for my next quarter’s column.
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