Hot Air Ballooning

Hot air balloon is a light balloon which contains a lot of heated air. Hot air ballooning is the activity of flying on hot air balloons. Balloon is made of rip-stop nylon. The balloon moves with the direction of air. During this activity you feel like a cloud and see a bird's-eye view. This is a fantasy for many people. Hot air ballooning started in 1783. There are three major parts in the Hot Air Balloon envelope, the burner, and the basket. 

Hot air balloons are generally used for recreational purposes. In addition to quiet morning or afternoon flights drifting across-country to enjoy the view, multiple balloonists enjoy competitive sporting events and trying to set new records. A balloonist may fly alone in the basket or carry several passengers. Frequently several balloons meet to launch together without any competitive goals. Individual flights generally last from one to three hours and may go several kilometers, though they frequently land very close to the take-off point.

Balloon rallies may consist of just a few balloons for a one- day outing or up to several hundred balloons for a weeklong festival. Competitive events include distance within a time limit, spot landing, and “ hare and hound” races. Hare and hound races are easy to organize and judge since they only require one (hare) balloon to launch first and fly a reasonable distance. The challengers attempt to land as close as possible to the hare’s landing position. In crowded conditions, markers are frequently dropped to simulate the landings, and the balloons fly on to more open locations.

Commercial ride operators are in business nearly everywhere in the world. Some ride balloons carry 10 to 20 passengers at a time in gigantic partitioned baskets. In California and France, wine- country flights are popular tourist attractions. African safari flights, at low altitude over vast game preserves, are maybe the pinnacle of ride ballooning.

History of Hot Air Ballooning

Hot air ballooning started in the year 1783 when two French brothers, Joseph Michel Montgolfier and Jacques Etienne Montgolfier, created and set aloft a 17.37 m high fire balloon from the courtyard of the Versailles Palace. This massive balloon didn't carry human passengers but a sheep, a rooster and a duck. After an eight- minute flight, the balloon landed safely3.2 km away from the palace. 

Later that year, two French noblemen, Pilâtre De Rozier and (Marquis) François Laurent D’Arlandes, mustered up enough courage and became the world’s first human passengers in a hot- air balloon. Over 50 times after that, hot- air ballooning became very popular in Europe but with the coming of the airplane, the activity was by and large forgotten. It's only in the last couple of decades, with the development of modern high-affinity burner systems, that it has formerly again caught the fancy of adventurers. It was revived in the US but now is fairly popular in Europe and other parts of the world.

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