Balloonmeister Brian Boland

by Glen Moyer

Though we have never met, our January Balloonmeister has always reminded me of the movie, Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines - or more appropriately, a line from the movie's theme that says "Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, they go uppity-up-up they go down-diddly-down-down." Like the characters in that film, Brian Boland flies on the edge; the experimental edge. He is as likely to be found flying along under a pink and purple cube, or riding in a gondola made of an aluminum fishing boat, a rubber trash can, or an antique 3-wheeled Messerschmidt automobile.

Boland never started out to be a balloonist. He was an art student at New York's Pratt Institute and in need of a thesis project when he read an article in Sport's Illustrated about balloons. The school allowed students to produce a creative thesis as opposed to the traditional written one, so never having seen anything more than photos in a magazine, Boland built his first balloon as an inflatable piece of sculpture. It's design came from an all-too-familiar everyday object.

"I remember the people who lived in the apartment next to mine had an tiny infant who liked to play with this beach ball. I asked to borrow the beach ball one evening and I took the measurements off one of the colored gores of the ball then I sat that `ball' on a truncated cone and that was the design I came up with.

"Oddly enough," say Boland, "my flying in it wasn't important at all, it was just the creation of the balloon that was important." The Phoenix and Boland did eventually fly, in May of 1971, tethered in a parking lot at Pratt Institute.

Fresh out of school, with degree in hand, Boland embarked on what he thought would be a teaching career at a high school in Farmington, Connecticut. However...

"In very short order these high school kids began pestering me about this balloon thing they had heard about. So it was the prompting of the kids that got me to pull this thing out of the attic and drag it to school one Saturday morning."

What followed was the creation of a hot air balloon club as an extracurricular activity much like the science or math clubs. It was a January evening when Boland and students went to inflate the Phoenix with a new weed burner attached to some handlebars and Boland dangling below in a parachute harness. To their amazement the burner proved so powerful the balloon snapped its small tether line and Boland was off on his first free flight.

"At that time I'm not sure I knew this FAA thing even existed, but they introduced themselves to me and seemed quite interested in my getting checked out and getting a license, probably so they could take it away from me were there ever such an occasion!"

Not long after that, Boland found himself in Albuquerque for the world's first hot air balloon championships where Mike and Tony Fairbanks had purchased a small hang balloon from him. During the week Boland made a flight with Fairbanks then later assembled a log book, "which was mostly letters of recommendation from people who had sort of seen me inflate my balloons" and on that basis he was issued an airman's certificate.

Boland would teach until 1977. "When I began teaching I had this master plan in my mind that every seven years I would take a year off, like a leave of absence, and recharge my batteries," says Boland. "So with this secret system I had devised, I was planning to teach until I was 150 years old. What I never expected was that during that first year off, ballooning would cross the line and become my profession."

Last month Boland completed his 100th balloon and he has just cleared the cutting room to begin another. He now operates from his home, the Post Mills, Vermont airport, which he purchased in 1988. Along the way he has become the guru of the homebuilt/experimentalist crowd in ballooning. He began by experimenting with lightweight fabrics and coupled his envelopes to even lighter weight baskets, constructed of tubular aluminum, wicker and pack cloth. So compact are his balloons he can travel with them as checked baggage on most any airline.

Boland's sense of humor and his love of the balloon as an art form have never left him. Thus he has been seen using a balloon to fly his dinghy to a favorite fishing hole, or more recently to cut the top of a pine tree and fly it home to serve as a Christmas tree.

In 1994 Boland formed the Experimental Balloon Association and in May of that year held the first Experimental Balloon Meet. More than 40 builder/aeronauts attended including a graduate of Boland's high school balloon class, Paul Stumpf.

Soon Boland will begin cutting his next balloon. With more than 60 of his own, and of those perhaps 45 are homebuilts, one might ask `Why do you need another one?'

"I tell people it goes back to my days as an artist. If you are an illustrator or a painter rarely are you satisfied with just one drawing or painting. Whether it is a step forward or backwards, it doesn't matter; what is important is the need to keep creating..."

Important dates:

1970-71 - built first balloon Phoenix for college art thesis

1972 - earned airman's certificate after Albuquerque checkride

1977 - left teaching career for ballooning

1988 - purchased Post Mills, Vermont airport

1994 - formed Experimental Balloon association and held 1st experimental meet

1997 - completed 100th homebuilt balloon