The thermal airships came to the
11th Gatineau Hot Air Balloon Festival this year, delighting the spectators
and fascinating the balloonists with their speed and maneuverability.by Richard Bray
Photos by Bob Rechs
The thermal airships came to the
11th Gatineau Hot Air Balloon Festival this year, delighting the spectators
and fascinating the balloonists with their speed and maneuverability.
Everything about them was over scale, including the arrival of 14 of them from Zurich in an Antonov 124, the second-largest aircraft in the world. Sixteen airships competed in the Sixth World Hot Air Airship Championship, which began on Wednesday September 2, two days before the official opening of the balloon festival on Friday, September 4.
On Wednesday morning, in La Baie Park, when the airships gathered for the first competition, it was a familiar sight to balloonists, at least at first, as the trucks and trailers moved into position on the dew-soaked field, unloaded and the envelopes were laid out. Instead of baskets, however, crews put one and two-person gondolas into position beside the envelopes. The sound of fans starting up all over the field was familiar to balloonists, but crews use long fabric sleeves called inflation tubes to get cold air into their ships.
Quickly, the blimp shapes began
to billow up from the field, and from the center of the field, everything
disappeared behind a wall of straining fabric. Pilots and co-pilots aboard,
burners lit, and pusher engines running, one by one, the airships lifted
off. Just as burners are used intermittently, so are the engines, revving
nervously to position the ship with the wind, and then stopping completely
if the pilot is satisfied with the momentum.
During a short flight with Benoît Siméons in the Belgian Land and Sky airship, an aviation-style headset effectively dampened both burner and engine noise, making the experience more peaceful and personal at the same time. The motion, of course, was gentle and smooth, but it definitely felt guided and propelled. From the narrow, fore-and-aft seating of the gondola, with the back-seat position slightly elevated over the pilot's, the view was magnificent, because the sight lines to both sides are unobscured. Trusting to the shoulder harness, it is possible to lean down and look under the airship, towards the opposite side.
Watching the pilot use ropes, burner, rudder and throttle to control the airship could be a little disconcerting for people who are used to seeing aircraft pilots keeping their hands on the wheel or stick during flight.
The thermal airships managed four flights at Gatineau, making it an official world championship. The competition was slated to include speed, precision and maneuverability events which could be combined during one flight, on part or all of the course, throughout the week, depending on time and weather.
In the "touch and go"
precision event, pilots must barely brush the ground on a 5-square-meter
surface and take off again right away. In another event, pilots must bring
their ships as close as they can to the ground and drop a marker on a one
meter-diameter bull's-eye, losing points if the airship touches the ground.
Testing their planning skills, another event requires pilots to specify the time needed to reach a given location, taking into consideration distance, wind, turns and possible refueling. In a slalom race, pilots run to their ships and take off at the same time. On the course, gates allow only one airship through at a time.
La Baie Park is a spacious venue, but airships are large and unwieldy. Maybe it was inevitable that some would make contact, both on the ground and in the air, so the competition's safety officer, took a moment to warn pilots about "...some close to serious incidents in terms of mid-air collisions." and reminded them to review the regulations about rules of the road.
Competitor John Addison of Pittsburgh's Ragge and Willow, flying the new Lindstrand, put the incidents in perspective, saying "I've never flown with any other airships around me ever, and now there's 15 of them around me. When you've got traffic, it changes everything."
One competitor dismissed the problem at first but after a moment of thought conceded that metal-to-fabric could constitute a danger. All in all, collisions are best avoided, but one I witnessed generated a primitive kind of air traffic control, with people on the ground running around, waving their arms and shouting, while the pilots, if they noticed at all, calmly gazed down, insulated by their headsets from the warnings.
The airships that took
part ranged from American competitor Brian Boland's Dave, a home-built
machine and the only entrant with a pointed, conical nose, to a Lindstrand-built
airship so new it carried no advertising signage but the company's logo
on the underside.
Also notable was the entry from the People's Republic of China, a red envelope with a gondola made by aeronautical engineering students from a cut-down microlight fuselage. At 300,000 cubic feet the biggest airship there, France's Radeau des Cimes was well known to many through television documentaries about its role in tropical expeditions, placing an enormous "raft" on the rain forest canopy where scientists can study its lofty ecology.
There has been a great deal of development work on airships over the last ten years. Many team members and interested observers agreed that the machines are now much more reliable in performance. More popular in Europe, they may provide an affordable alternative to the gas-filled airships that appear at public events across North America.
The airships came together with large numbers of hot-air balloons when the Gatineau Festival formally opened on Friday evening and the number of balloons at the site suddenly increased to about 100.
At the Festival for the first time were the tallest hot air balloon ever built, a 150-foot tall rabbit coming out of a hat, and the upside-down and right-side-up Festo balloons from Holland.
It was wonderful and strange to literally stand inside the upside-down Festo while it was tethered. The illusion of inversion is created by a skirt that descends from a conventional balloon shape down and under the basket. The pilot is very dependent both on his companion balloon and the chase to guide him to a safe approach and landing, lifting the skirt up and away during descent
Event manager Gary Lockyer had the task of making sure that the hot air balloon pilots took the airship competition seriously, telling them, "For the next four task sessions you will be sharing airspace with the competitors in a world championship. And I need you to stay out of the way. The legal minimum over built-up is 500 feet. Beyond that I want you to be 500 feet above an airship. That way there is no possibility of you getting in the way of the airship competition and I won't face an angry competitor with a protest who will try to invalidate his results, which could end up destroying the competition."
That, fortunately, did not happen,
and on Monday night, on the outdoor stage, the airship winners were formally
announced and introduced: Swiss pilot Jacques Besnard, the new world champion,
Belgium's Benoît Siméons took second place, and former world
champion Guy Moyano of Luxembourg was third. A hot air balloon pilot before
moving on to thermal airships, Jacques Besnard, 32 years old, was taught
by his father, Charles Besnard who was also in the competition.
"I think the most difficult part of the competition might have been the lack of wind," he said, "because I was a little handicapped. In a very short competition like the one here in Canada, the person who makes an error on departure does not get the chance to get back in the running. I was fortunate to make good starts."
It could be a long time before the Airship Championship returns to North America. Everyone who was fortunate enough to see them congregate at Gatineau will certainly look forward to seeing them again.
