"The first two times I was involved with a balloon I wasn’t in one, but under it. I was flying a hang glider and to me the balloon seemed boring, all it did was go up and down," Arras recently recounted for Balloon Life.
That was in 1983 and it took another two years, and a cross-country trip from his home in Oregon to visit a brother in Connecticut before Arras found himself actually flying in a balloon. "My brother was crewing for this balloon so I went along for the ride," says Arras, "and it gave me the idea that maybe ballooning was more than just going up and down."
On his return to Oregon Arras ordered a new AX9 then stumbled upon a used Piccard stretch 6 in which he took his first lessons in March of 1986. Because the nearest instructor was three hours away Arras brought the instructor to his home and learned to fly there.
"That proved a smart move, because in some ways my instructor learned as much as I did, like flying in thermals which he had not experienced before." And because he still wasn’t sure exactly what he was going to do with his big balloon, Arras had a friend learn to fly with him, so the friend could pilot the balloon while Arras was dropped from his hang glider!
His hang glider experience proved useful and because of his already thorough understanding of winds, Arras soloed in just six lessons and had a commercial license in just two months. He began flying passengers, not so much for the money, as for the experience.
"Then I learned of all the events around the country and signed up for a couple, but the one that caught my eye was in Saga Japan," says Arras. While in high school, Arras had visited Brazil as an exchange student and the experience instilled in him a love for travel to foreign lands. Not surprisingly, this love carried over into his new found sport of ballooning.
"Saga was a real eye opener because it was the first time I had flown in real competition," says Arras. "I was fascinated because I had found a whole new world of ballooning. Only then did I start to learn about the Nationals and how to qualify for the championship and that entire area of our sport."
Arras would go on to compete widely across the United States and internationally, even serving one term as a member of the Competition Division Board of Directors. But for Arras, the solitary challenge of competition was not enough. A photographer friend would recruit Arras and his balloon for a shot he wanted with skiers jumping from a balloon (Balloon Life cover February 1989). This experience led Arras to want to learn more and more about what different kinds of things one could do with a balloon. From that point on, Arras says he has continued to stumble along from one exciting balloon adventure to another. While some are content to focus their careers on competition, or world records, or passenger flying, or some other singular direction, Arras looks for the out of the ordinary, the oddball, or the extreme and he has always become involved in a project just because it felt like the thing to do. Thus he has experimented in many phases of the sport. He has traveled internationally, he has competed, he has set world records, and he has built his own lightweight balloons, in part to help gain a world record, but largely again from his recurring interest in travel.
My interest in small balloons was definitely driven by international travel," Arras says. "I found that I was spending a fortune shipping the balloon around to every country and said ‘phooey’ on this." Brian Boland who often traveled with a balloon as excess or even checked baggage was a definite influence on Arras. But instead of buying someone else’s kit or model, Arras wanted to build his own, so that set him onto a new adventure, research and development of ultralight balloons. He would complete his fist homebuilt balloon in 1993. Two years later he used a homebuilt balloon to set an AX-5 World Duration Record.
His most recent exploits sent him traveling to the edges of the earth, Antarctica. However, his experience their has once again started him dreaming of what many might consider impractical...
"As a result of having been in Antarctica (with its season of continuous daylight) I’ve become interested in solar ballooning and the possibilities a solar balloon might offer for truly long duration flights, not of days or even weeks, but perhaps months. I don’t know yet how best to approach the idea," he says, "either as a purely solar balloon, or in combination with a traditional hot air balloon or possibly even the triple combination of a solar Roziere. Of course, one outcome of a flight of such duration, might also be distance, possibly even around the world."
No, Arras is not the newest contender in the current race to be the first to circumnavigate the globe by balloon, but he does dream of the possibility. Indeed it seems that his dreams have driven him more than anything else to discover new horizons in our sport. After a decade in ballooning, the sport he once thought boring, one never seems to know where Bill Arras might next appear.
"There is not a specific direction that I have chosen at this point," he says of his future, adding, "thankfully, there are endless challenges out there."
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