by Bill Murtorff
Back in 1973 I wanted to get the hot air limitation removed from my license. All it took then was passing the written test for gas balloons. I went and took the test 2 or 3 times, failing each. I knew about balloons and could not believe I couldn't pass a simple test. I knew the answers to all the questions. They just seemed to be the wrong answers. In Albuquerque that year Chris Mullins, one of my students, introduced me to Willie Williams from the FAA office in Oklahoma City. Willie was a nice guy and very proud of seeing his very first balloons. In our discussion it came up that it was his job to write the balloon written tests. I told him my problems and he told me where he had gotten the answers that the test required. At that time there was a book out that was full of errors about ballooning. Most balloonists thought it was no more than a joke. To Willie, this was the gospel of ballooning and he had devised all his balloon related questions from this one book. Needless to say, I went home and retook the test giving a lot of wrong answers to the questions on ballooning and VIOLA! I was a gas balloon pilot.
I have just finished reading most of the FARs that came into place this summer. When I was in the service we had a term, "Feather Merchants," for those government employees that held their jobs by wasting the government's money doing things that were entirely unnecessary and convincing others that what they did was worth what they were getting paid. The guys putting together these new FARs were Feather Merchants of the highest class. I'll bet they are out right now writing up changes that will effect ballooning in the future. They don't have to understand the problems, if there are any problems, they just need to be able to convince their superiors that there is a problem and these guys can solve it.
They did lower the altitude requirements for licenses that I thought were too low already. Most of the new part is the old part in different words. But I found a couple of things of interest. Flight time can be counted from the time when an aircraft begins moving under it's own power until it come to rest after landing. We have been told that when on a tether, a balloon pilot can only record that time spent in free flight between the ground and the top of the tether lines as flight time. Now once a balloon leaves the ground and flies to the top of the tether, at say 50 feet, it is in flight. But when it reaches the top of the tether lines, it has not landed, it is merely at rest 50 feet about the Earth. So I assume that a pilot can count all time on a tether as PIC time.
Speaking of tethers, can they be used to count as training flights? I think they can according to what the FARs say. And can they be used to qualify a person for night flight carrying passengers? You must do three take offs and landings to a complete stop at night before you can take a passenger. Sounds OK to me. The guys doing the writing have already got some fodder for their next rewrite.
And it that's not enough to start on, how about a new Transport Pilot Certificate for balloons. This would be something that all pilots carrying four or more passengers or flying a balloon bigger than 105,000 cu.ft. would have to have. This new rating would require 150 hours of PIC and 20 hours of training in a large balloon, a 2nd Class medical, some drug testing and I am sure a lot more things. The jobs of some FAA employees are secure for another couple of years. Let's get to work.