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Balloon Flight with Dale Wilson in Seventh Heaven

July 2, 2010 by 2 Comments


I didn’t expect to get up in a balloon today. Or this year, for that matter (or at least not during this particular year’s iteration of the Battle Creek Field of Flight Airshow and Balloon Festival). After all, I had a spectacular experience with Dave Emmert four years ago or so. But, then, again, the show was audio-only at that point and now I travel around with something like five HD video cameras and am getting a little better every day at editing video and making video episodes.

So I showed up this morning bleary-eyed with about two hours of sleep under my belt, intending to say hello at the media center, shoot a few pictures to back an arrival blog post, and then go sleep in the parking lot of a Starbucks for a few hours.

But, through a happy twist of chance, Dale Williams had an open slot for a flight in his balloon, Seventh Heaven (N7252W, a Firefly AX7 with about 76,000 cubic feet of envelope volume). Might I be interested? Do bears dookie in the woods? Heck, yeah!


I met Dale and his happy band of balloon chasers just outside the gate and we headed off to Emmett Township, south and east of the airport. This was a three-point target exercise where we’d launch wherever we wanted at least 2,500 meters away from the first target and then try to drop streamers on each of the three targets.

It turns out that Dale and Dave Emmert are friends and, the more I think about it, I seem to recall Dave talking about Dale during the recording of the prior episode. In any case, Dave was there on hand as we tried to figure out where would be best to launch Seventh Heaven. As before, this involves some science, some magic, some consent by landowners, some hemming, some hawing, and some BS. Various groups released small helium balloons (called “pieballs”) to try to obtain a near-realtime guess about the winds. Our group was no different and we released one and then watched it intensely.


There seemed to be consensus about where the ideal launch point would be, given the winds aloft. Many of the teams ended up along the same stretch of road where we were.


Then came the process of attempting to obtain permission from the landowners to launch from their fields and/or yards. Imagine someone knocking on your door at 0700 on a Friday and a asking permission to grow a 76,000 cubic-foot multicolored bubble on your lawn. We actually knocked on the door of the house in front of which we stopped. No answer.

I’m still surprised at the spaces in which balloon pilots will launch. The yard looked small to me, but these guys were talking about whether they could get two balloons up from the space.

I got a kick out of one team that launched before we did. They set up in someone’s front yard and the balloon actually required a lane of the road to fully inflate.


We obtained permission to launch from a recently-mown field and we were in the second wave of balloons to do so. It begins with a gasoline-powered fan to inflate the envelope (the bag that most of us think of as the “balloon”), Then you begin blasting away with a 2 million (yeah, that’s million) BTU burner and the envelope stands up pretty rapidly and is ready to fly.

I climbed in and off we went.


We spent a lot of time around 1,400 feet AGL, which is where the winds that we wanted seemed to be. Balloonists “steer” by changing altitude. As nearly as I can tell, the ideal situation for a balloonist is two wind currents at roughly 90 degrees to one another. You let the higher one push you along and then you descent into the lower transverse one (at the right moment, by the way) to hook around to the target before ascending into the higher one again to set up for the next target.

Dale prefers to be closer to the treetops. I agree with him. It’s really amazing just cruising along less than 100 feet off the canopy of trees. As I alluded earlier, this is going to be primarily a video episode and you’ll definitely get a sense of the drift from the video. Maybe mot Will Hawkins quality, but it should be pretty good.

We essentially missed the first target, but scored on the second. The third proved to be out of reach, so we began looking for a place to land.


We found it in the form of a residence off to our left. If the places in which balloonists launch surprise me, the places at which they land amaze me. But, then again, I suppose that someone brand new to airplane flight might be surprised that I can put an airplane down reliably on a runway that’s 75 feet wide. It’s all in the experience.

Dale deftly maneuvered the balloon onto the back yard of the residence. We missed the power lines, the ornamental shrubs, and everything else. A couple of bounces and we were on the ground.

You leave the balloon standing up until the crew gets there. There are several reasons for this. First, your footprint is pretty small. Second, your crew can wrangle the balloon to the ground relieving you of most of the worry about dropping the balloon onto something like the ornamental shrubs. (Or the dog. Yes, there was a dog. Or, rather, a horse shaped like a German Shepherd. Named Ozzie.) And, if there are obstructions between where the balloon is and the chase vehicle, you can just lay on the burner until the balloon is neutrally-buoyant and you can have the crew walk the balloon over fences and other stuff to reach a more suitable place to deflate it.


It turns out that we weren’t even the first balloon to set down in this yard. I guess it’s just something that comes with owning a house near Battle Creek. Ballooning is more intensive here than in most other similarly-situated geographies and the balloon festival and airshow brings in competitors and fun fliers from all other the region. Not the worst thing to have come out of the sky every once in awhile.

And, in fact, the people to whom we talked from the balloon (yeah, you can do that) seemed un-fazed by the balloon floating less than 100 feet above their heads. I even had a casual conversation with a lady in her driveway about how she could e-mail me and I’d send her the picture that I had just shot of her and her house. I got her e-mail a couple of hours later and I e-mailed her a couple of pictures in the middle of writing this post.

I have some video editing and production to do, but this ought to make for a good episode. I’m looking forward to putting it out.

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Spins with Barry

July 1, 2010 by Leave a Comment

I have a really cool Air Force ride coming up in California in a couple of weeks. Think helmet, mask, and speed jeans. (Yeah!) And, although I’ve filmed other people doing aerobatics a lot lately, I haven’t flown a lot of aerobatics. Out of respect for the crew chief (and personal pride), I decided to get up and crank an airplane around for an hour or so.
So I scheduled the Citabria and Barry for a couple of hours. We went out and did some falling-leaf stalls, an incipient spin or two, and then some genuine spins. Good kill-proofing no matter who you are and I highly recommend doing it at least once a year. And it was also enlightening in terms of the control inputs required. I really over-controlled the first couple of recoveries, but got pretty good about just relaxing on the subsequent recoveries.

And, of course, I hung some cameras in (and on) the airplane. I might use some of the footage as B-roll for Acro Camp. But the primary use is likely to be an episode about spins. The in-cockpit camera leads this post. This one is a view from the wing camera. This is the first time I’ve flown a forward-facing wing camera with no airframe in the picture. I think it worked out beautifully and I’ll probably shoot more with this POV. The only change might be that I’ll land abnout five feet to the right of the centerline so that the camera (mounted on the left wing strut) is directly over the centerline, this giving the viewer a sense of floating in over the center of the runway.
I also flew a camera mounted directly above my lap to show the control inputs associated with the maneuvers. The stick disappears below the dash at some points, but the angle generally gives a good view of the controls. “Knees and nuts!” as my CAP NESA MAS instructor likes to say.

I’m off to the Battle Creek Airshow tonight and hope to get out to the balloon launch first thing tomorrow morning. Thus, I leave you with these teasers. More soon from Battle Creek!
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Frame Grabs from the B-17 Ride at the Indianapolis Airshow

June 27, 2010 by Leave a Comment

I’m digging through the footage from the Indianapolis Airshow from a couple of weeks ago as I prepare to edit the content down into episodes. And there’s some really great footage in there! For the B-17, i mounted a GoPro HD Hero up behind the pilots, as shown above. That’s me at the lower right shooting with a handheld. I also mounted a Contour HD in the nose and another Contour HD looking out the left window. I also roamed the aircraft with both a still camera and the Panasonic.
This was the view in the cockpit most of the ride. The crew chief spent a fair amount of time standing behind the pilot and copilot during critical phases of flight, but this was the scene during cruise.
Here’s one of the turns during the overflight of the Indianapolis Indians game. All eyes paying attention to the flight path and looking for traffic. (And that included me!)
I have something like an hour of cockpit audio that includes ATC, the calls guiding us in for the fly-over, the coordination with the other aircraft, and the cockpit resource management going on with the crew. I’ll be going over the audio during the next couple of days and making notes and getting ready to drop it into both a video episode and an audio episode.
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RTB from NESA MAS 2010

June 20, 2010 by Leave a Comment

I’m back from Camp Atterbury and Columbus, indiana, where I spent the last week attending Mission Aircrew School at CAP’s National Emergency Services Academy. I arrived last night in time to watch a DVD with FOD and Deadly and unload the car. Then a night in my own bed. Nice!
I took the intermediate track as a mission pilot trainee. The track is for pilots with 175+ hours PIC who want to go out and learn search patterns and the ins and outs of CAP aircrew operations. We completed five scenarios over the course of three flights.
My aircrew consisted of four trainees and an IP. We flew three-man crews consisting of two trainees and the IP. Training aircrews usually consist of two pilot trainees and two observer trainees. My group consisted of four pilots, so each of the pilot trainees also flew all of the missions an an observer trainee and will likely get a mission observer qualification as well.
I’m internalizing the experience and will likely have a pretty comprehensive episode on the experience ready to go soon. I’m in that really cool part of the Airspeed season in which I have a lot of content, but little time to polish it and get it out. Making lots of notes and categorizing images, audio, and other material. Stay tunes for some really interesting episodes!
And, by the way, I just scheduled another really good USAF ride for mid-July. More about that once it happens.
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Indy Airshow 2010: Friday

June 12, 2010 by 2 Comments


This is a regular blog post. If you’re looking for show notes or links to show audio or video, you’ll find them in the other posts.

How is it that I feel so at home at Indy when this is only second year here? Part of it probably has to do with the luck I had last year in terms of the people I met. Billy and Haley and so on. Part of it might also be that I’m reaching a critical mass of acquaintances in the airshow community so that I can be reasonably assured of knowing at least a few people at any given medium-sized-or-better airshow. Folks like Indy chairman Roger Bishop, Fence Check maven Liza Eckardt, and AirPigz creator Martt Clupper.

Whatever the reason, it’s really good to feel so at home on this ramp and among these people.


And, while we’re on the subject of people, let’s talk about Roger Bishop for a minute. Roger is the Enoch Root of aviation new media and social media. At least that’s how it works in my imagination. He’s omnipresent and influential, yet modest about taking credit for the work he does.

And I really admire his management abilities. Not in a smarmy business-school sort of way. I mean that he really seems to know how to delegate and then be in the present and effective during the actual chaos. I’m not saying that his battle plans survive first contact with the enemy any more often than the battle plans of others. But be has a Zen ability to simply, well, manage.

I’m not that guy. I’m proud of the way I just talked things over with Will Hawkins during the filming of Acro Camp and then just let Will and David Allen do things as they saw fit. But I was way too obsessed with getting the in- and on-aircraft cameras and audio devices deployed, collected, and offloaded. The project probably suffered from the attendant lack of top-down observations and nudges that I could/should have made and performed. And I know that I’ve left a lot of work for myself in the editing process because, although we got all of the video and audio, I still have to do some detective work figuring out which audio goes with which video, etc.

This isn’t hero worship and, as I said before, it’s not the smarmy new-MBA buzzwordy heaping of praise into which it might otherwise degenerate. But I said it last year and I’ll say if again this year. Roger’s really on top of his projects and they seem to go as smoothly as possible without him being a walking nerve-ending. Like me.

Much to learn. But, in the meantime, it gives me a really nice airshow in which to bask for a few days.

Airshow. Remember the airshow? This is a blog post about an airshow.

This was my first full day at this year’s show. Media credentialing first thing and then an attempt at a Huey ride. Some piece of equipment on the Huey was not working to the satisfaction of the pilot and crew and they elected to scrub the morning flight. No problem. Safety first. And, in fact, I’m planning to get to the show site tomorrow at 0700 local in case they get to try it again before the airspace.


We hit the 10:00 briefing with air boss Ralph Royce. All of the performers, or their representatives, attend and get a weather briefing, talk about the airspace, identify emergency procedures, and otherwise coordinate the big and complicated ballet that is the airshow. Check out my posts from the ICAS convention in December. An air boss briefing is one of the bellwethers of how well your planning has worked out. If your ducks are single-file by then, the air boss briefing will sound a lot like the one that I attended this morning.

The media chief then slotted Airpigz’s Martt Clupper and me, among others, on a flight of the Yankee Air Museum’s B-17, Yankee Lady. The show time was 5:30, so we had plenty of time to head out and check out the airshow grounds and watch the practices.


I’m taking a slightly different approach this year. Most of the interviews I’m doing are video instead of audio and I’m focusing on aerobatics as opposed to platform and other performer-specific subjects. I got Pitts S-2C driver Billy Werth and Jelly Belly Interstate Cadet driver Kent Pietsch today, which makes three when you add A-10 East demo pilot Maj Johnnie Green. I’m thinking a lot about loading relevant parts of the interviews with these veteran performers into appropriate places in the film. Certainly, some of this material is going to make it into the podcast feed, but this is such a prime opportunity to get film of these performers that I can’t pass it up.

I have another few that I really want to capture. One is Mike Goulian. I got great footage of Mike mentally walking through his program there on the ramp and then the launch and recovery from his practice performance. Being that we used his book as the text for Acro Camp, I think it’d be great to get an interview with Mike into the film. Besides, the book kept me awake at night bed-flying some of the maneuvers and trying to develop some kind of kinesthetic sense for them. Mike owes me. Whether he knows it or not.


A very pleasant surprise at the end of the day. The ride in the B-17 turned out to be a real treat. You could be forgiven for thinking that I prefer the heavy iron. After all, I spent a fair piece of 2008 getting a DC-3/C-47 SIC type rating. And I’d love to help fly the Yankee Air Museum’s C-47 at some point. But, when I’m at an airshow, I’m usually about chasing the crank-and-bank performers that have two-seat aircraft.

But what an experience! As soon as I heard that I had a B-17 slot, I walked over and buttonholed copilot Ray Hunter and asked about camera mount spots. He was kind enough to let me crawl around the aircraft and identify some spots. When 5:30 rolled around, I showed up as early as possible and mounted a GoPro Hero above and behind the pilots, a ContourHD looking out the left window behind the left-seater, and a ContourHD looking out the front window. In addition to that, I plugged into the intercom and radio from the seat just behind Ray and had my still camera and a Panasonic HDC-SD9 in my hands. Five cameras and audio, baby!

I couldn’t see out the window when sitting and strapped in for takeoff, but could stand until we took the runway and again once we reached cruise altitude. I didn’t bring the Mac on this trip and I’m spending the next week at Camp Atterbury, Indiana for CAP Mission Aircrew School as a part of the National Emergency Services Academy, so it’ll be later this month before I get to see how the video turned out. And edit some of it and get it up as a video episode. And I can’t wait to do that. I see a video episode and a long-form audio episode coming out of this.

Shortly after takeoff, we got the okay to unstrap and roam around the aircraft. Martt Clupper got the bombardier’s seat and I joined him in the nose. The plexiglass in the nose is pretty crazed, but it’s serviceable and it was interesting to get that view out in front without having to look through a prop, as I usually do.

Can you imagine being up there in the very front of the aircraft trying to concentrate on a bombsight with nothing but some plexi between you and the flak over Germany? All I could think about was pickling and getting the hell out of there. The Americans did mostly daylight bombing and left the night bombing to the Brits. It was a brute force thing. You fly over continental Europe in broad daylight at a mere 150 knots and just hope that you’re not the one that the Messerschmitt Bf 109s decided to single out. And remember that the allies didn’t always have the P-51 Mustang to escort them. The Mustang came along late in the game. In much of the going in WWII, the B-17s were out there alone with no little friends to stave off the incoming waves of German fighters.

I also wandered back through the bomb bay to check out the rear of the aircraft. The most pleasant surprise was the open-air roof of the mid-empennage. Really weird to stick your head up and partly out of it into the 150-knott wind blast and watch Indianapolis slip below you.


The mission was to form up with several of the aerobatic performers and go do an overflight of an Indianapolis Indians game at Victory Field downtown. Airshow announcer Rob Reider was plugged into the PA at the field and ready to do commentary for the crowd. We proceeded to a lat-long waypoint and formed up from there for the pass(es).

I was back up in the cockpit for the overflight. I need to review the intercom and ATC audio to get a better idea of what happened, but I did hear us getting steering vectors over the target. I could see the 48-story Chase Tower off to the right and the Garmin 530 was showing an obstacle proximity warning during the pass. I’ve always wondered what kind of coordination went into formation join-ups and overflights and this audio is probably going to answer a lot of my questions.

On the way back, I got a chance to stand up in one of the turrets and shoot some video and stills of the other ships in the formation. It was pretty hazy out there. Solid VFR to be sure, but it had been in the 80s and muggy all day and the air wasn’t letting the pretty photons through. A good first subject for color correction when I start learning how to do that.


Probably the most interesting part from a pilot’s perspective is that it takes a lot of hands to fly this beast. Copilot Ray Hunter flew the formation pass and the return and landing. Pilot Dave Cobaugh managed the throttles in addition to command other checklist items. What I didn’t expect is that flight engineer Norm Ellickson stands behind and between the pilots for critical phases of flight and manages some of the controls on the center console. It’s a real collection of hands on the controls. Up to five hands at times. I’m guessing that I’ll be able to understand a little more from the intercom audio about the division of responsibilities. But the general sense that I got is that critical phases of flight are busy times.

The downside is that the GoPro HD Hero that I mounted above and behind the pilots is likely going to feature views of the back of Norm’s head a lot of the time. And mostly at the most interesting times. But that’s okay. Those are the kinds of things you learn as you do this in different aircraft. I pulled the camera down and re-clamped it over Ray’s left shoulder. It was a less stable mount point and the moment of shake was a lot bigger, but we’ll see how it turns out. I also shot a lot of video with the Panasonic and I don’t think that the obscuration of the Hero is going to be a problem.

What a great ride! I was torn between staying put focusing on the cockpit activity and heading to other parts of the aircraft. I think I made the right decision by wandering. IO’m pretty sure that I’ll be able to figure things out from the partial video and the complete audio. And I’ll naturally bring you both in a couple of upcoming Airspeed episodes.

As usual, it’s really late (about 1:00 a.m.) and I need to get some sleep. I pack up tomorrow morning and check out of the hotel and run to make the Huey flight. Then it’s more wandering of the grounds and the Saturday show. I bust out after the Saturday flying is complete to head to MAS, so I’ll be nomadic for most of the day.

Watch the Twitter feed (@StephenForce) and I’ll try to give occasional updates as cool things happen. And cool things happen at the Indy Airshow!

Photos with me in them courtesy Martt Clupper (www.airpigz.com; mcc@airpigz.com).

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