The ballooning ebook E-Book

Volker Löschhorn

• Herausgeber: epubli
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Humans conquered the skies with balloons. But there is something mysterious about balloons: are they really just toys of the wind, or can they be steered? Not directly, but indirectly by exploiting different wind currents. Modern wind forecasting techniques complement the pilot's intuition. A balloonist needs a deep understanding of the atmosphere and the laws governing the processes that take place within it. The troposphere is their playground. Balloon flight has many facets: commercial passenger transport for tourist purposes, advertising, leisure activities and sporting competitions. Almost everyone has seen a hot air balloon, but the much rarer gas balloons are hardly noticed. Yet they have been ruling the skies alongside birds for almost two centuries. And they are the longest-lasting mass-produced aircraft: they can stay in the air for over a hundred hours without landing. Such flights differ from ocean-going voyages in the same way that inland waterway transport differs from coastal shipping. This ballooning eBook aims to explain how it all works and how it is done. The author of the book, Volker Löschhorn, is himself an active balloon pilot and flight instructor. He is also active in the sport and has been German champion in gas ballooning several times. Here he shares his extensive experience mainly in text form, supplemented with a few illustrations. The book is aimed at those who are curious about balloon flights. But even experienced balloonists can discover something new – I promise!

Leseprobe

Volker Löschhorn

The ballooning ebook

Imprint

Text: © 2025 Copyright by Volker Löschhorn

Cover: © 2025 Copyright by Volker Löschhorn

Library

Volker Löschhorn

Dattelweg 37 B

70619 Stuttgart

GERMANY

E-Mail: [email protected]

Homepage: www.loeschhorn.name

Production: epubli – a service provided by neopubli GmbH, Köpenicker Straße 154a, 10997 Berlin, GERMANY

Contact address in accordance with EU Product Safety Regulation:

[email protected]

You can find more books and other items by me on my homepage.

www.loeschhorn.name

Disclaimer

Despite all due care, errors may have crept in. The explanations regarding the legal framework refer to Germany and the EASA member states. For balloon flights in other countries, the regulations of that country apply. Air law, and law in general, is subject to constant change. Therefore, you should familiarise yourself with the current regulations applicable at your location.

Foreword

When did the first human being look after a bird and wish he could do the same and take to the skies? We don't know, and that it took many thousands of years for the first humans to leave the ground and take to the air. It is interesting to note that they did not imitate the flight of birds and did not take to the air with the help of aerodynamics, but ascended with the help of static lift. This is the greater intellectual achievement as no natural model was imitated, but aerodynamic flight was obviously technically more difficult to implement. Although Archimedes of Syracuse discovered and described the principle of hydrostatic lift in the 3rd century BC, more than two millennia ago, he did not apply it to the air. In 1650, Otto von Guericke had the idea that Archimedes' principle could also be applied to gases and gas mixtures such as air. He developed the dasymeter, which could be used to determine the buoyancy of a body in the air.

However, he was not thinking about airship travel, but he did inspire Francesco Lana de Terzi, who designed an airship in 1670 that gained its lift with vacuum spheres.

Vacuum is ideal for generating lift, but unfortunately to this day vacuum containers have to be built so heavy that they are heavier than the lift they generate, making them unsuitable for taking to the skies. There are various legends about fire-breathing figures and similar bodies that have risen into the air. The best evidence is that Bartolomeu Lourenco de Gusmão launched a small balloon at the Portuguese court in Lisbon in 1709. But it was the Montgolfier brothers' experiments in 1783 that set the development in motion. Yet despite this long history of balloon flight, ballooning remains a mystery to many: the fact that you can rise upwards with warm air or a light gas is generally accepted. But what happens next? How do you steer a balloon? Why are there balloons with sandbags and those without? And why do balloons no longer have an anchor? Balloonists are asked these and many other questions. In this book, I would like to answer these questions and explain how ballooning works.

Balloons

Ballooning today is done with three different classes of balloons, you could also say balloon types: Hot air balloons, gas balloons and Rozières (Mixed balloons). There are over ten thousand hot-air balloons worldwide, around half a hundred gas balloons and single-digit Rozières. Why one class of balloons is so common and the others so rare is revealed in the introduction to the individual balloon types.

Hot air balloon

The hot air balloon was the first balloon in the sky - its buoyancy is simply generated with hot air. In 1783, the brothers Étienne and Joseph Montgolfier launched the first hot-air balloon in front of an audience in the small town of Annonay in the south of France. As simple as the principle of generating hot air with fire was, the associated fire hazard was problematic: there were no non-combustible materials available for the envelope - the Montgolfiers built their balloons out of canvas coated with handmade paper - nor was heating with solid fuels such as straw practical. The hot-air balloon therefore led a shadowy existence for almost two centuries until the materials and fuel for the modern hot-air balloon became available in the 1960s: Plastic fibers for the envelope, and propane as an easy-to-handle fuel. Incidentally, hot-air balloons are often referred to as Montgolfières after their inventors.

Hot-air airships

Hot-air airships are hot-air balloons, also known as guided balloons. They consist of a balloon envelope that is aerodynamically shaped for horizontal movement against the air. They have a rudder and a drive with a propeller. As with a hot-air balloon, the height is generated by heating the air in the balloon envelope to varying degrees. In some hot-air airships, a slight overpressure is generated in the envelope with the help of a fan, which stabilizes the envelope and enables higher speeds. The operation of a hot-air airship requires many helpers and is therefore time-consuming. There have been championships, including world championships, but these do not take place regularly. Most of the time, the few hot-air airships are used for promotional purposes.

Gas balloon

The invention of the gas balloon was a commissioned work. News of the balloon's ascent in Annonay spread like wildfire to Paris, where people also wanted to see a balloon rise. The scientist Professor Charles was commissioned to carry out the project. He had heard that the Montgolfiers had invented a new gas. He suspected that it was the lightest of all gases - hydrogen. Together with the Robert brothers, he built a gas-tight envelope and a hydrogen generator, and just two weeks after the first Montgolfière ascended, the first gas balloon was launched in Paris - the Charlière. Once filled with gas, a gas balloon should be able to fly indefinitely - provided the envelope is tight - as it does not need to be constantly reheated to maintain buoyancy as a hot air balloon does. This would also work if it weren't for the sun. This heats up the lifting gas during the day, and at night it cools down and contracts, and the balloon loses volume and therefore buoyancy. This loss of buoyancy is compensated for by jettisoning some of the ballast carried for this purpose. This cannot be done as often as required, but under favorable conditions a modern gas balloon could be used for three to five days without landing in between. Today, hydrogen is generally used as the lifting gas for gas balloons. The only negative property of hydrogen gas for use in balloons is that it is flammable. To prevent the hydrogen gas from igniting due to electrostatic charging, the envelopes have a conductive coating so that no charge differences sufficient for ignition sparks can form. The non-flammable but twice as heavy and very expensive noble gas helium is rarely used. Unfortunately, neither hydrogen nor helium or other suitable gases are available everywhere, and transportation is complex and therefore expensive. Hydrogen can only be obtained cheaply at launch sites that are supplied by a pipeline. Unfortunately, these launch sites are very rare; there are five in Germany and none abroad.

Gas balloon launchsites

Here are the launch sites in Germany that provide hydrogen either via a pipeline or a stationary tank:

Düsseldorf: https://www.ballon-duesseldorf.de/

Gladbeck: http://www.ballon.org/

Münster: https://www.fsv-muensterland.de/

Ibbenbüren: http://www.ballonclub-teuto.de/

Bitterfeld-Wolfen: https://www.ballon-bitterfeld.de

Burgkirchen: https://freiballonclub-salzach-inn.chayns.site/

Gersthofen: https://www.augsburg-ballon.de/

Stuttgart: https://ballonsportgruppe-stuttgart.de/

Rozière

Is there an advantage to combining gas and hot air balloons? Pilâtre de Rozier asked himself this question and built a combination of the two, the Rozière, named after him. He used it to attempt to cross the Channel to England on June 15, 1785. Unfortunately, he had neither the incombustible lifting gas helium nor incombustible materials for the envelope. Even heating the hot air envelope under the hydrogen envelope with straw was not possible without flying sparks. The cause could not be determined, but the hydrogen gas ignited during the flight and the balloon crashed from a height of around 900 meters.

Today, Rozières are filled with the non-flammable but very expensive helium gas. But their use is only worthwhile if you want to travel safely for more than three to four days. The advantage of the Rozière over the pure gas balloon is that the burner can be used to compensate for the nocturnal cooling of the lifting gas without having to release ballast. It is also possible to change the altitude by heating more or less. This means that the duration of the flight can be considerably extended with relatively little fuel compared to the gas balloon. For example, the round-the-world flights were made with Rozières - the balloons were in the air for weeks at a time.

Model balloons

All balloons can also be built as remote-controlled models, but most model balloons are also hot-air balloons. Model ballooning is a hobby in its own right, but also an excellent way to introduce young people to ballooning. You don't need a pilot's license for model balloons, but today a proof of knowledge. More information, not only about the legal framework, can be found here:

http://www.modellballone.de

But the small remote-controlled model balloons react much more sensitively than their big brothers - anyone who has mastered flying a model balloon will find it easy to manoeuvre the big balloon during pilot training.

Model airships

Airships are rare and can be built both as hot-air airships and as gas airships. Do gas-filled model airships count as balloons? It's debatable, but some of them combine aerostatics and aerodynamics to travel through the air. If you are interested, the homepage of the aerarium Luftschifftechnik e.V. association is the right place for you:

https://www.aerarium.de/

Other types of balloons

The balloons presented here have a non-expandable envelope and the internal pressure is not increased, the envelopes are not designed for internal overpressure. Balloons with an expandable envelope are available as children's balloons and as weather probes. Expandable balloons and overpressure balloons do not play a role in human balloon flight.

Pilots

Becoming a pilot means learning to make decisions and learning to implement decisions. And to be able to make decisions, you need knowledge. And practical skills to implement the decisions. It follows that to become a pilot, you need theoretical and practical training. A balloon pilot must be able to take responsibility and lead a team. And above all, he must be aware that he is responsible for his own skills. Flight instructors and curricula can only be a guiding thread in the acquisition of knowledge and skills, but in a changing world, the willingness to educate oneself further is part of it. Only then will you be in a position to make competence-based decisions.

Prerequisites

Can anyone become a pilot? Or do you have to fulfill certain requirements?

The formal requirements for becoming a pilot are minimum age, medical fitness and reliability.

Listing the criteria for medical fitness to fly here would only be confusing. Because if you read these criteria, which are formulated in technical jargon, as a medical layperson, you only ask yourself whether there is anyone at all who is fit to fly. In practice, most people meet the requirements of fitness class 2 or LAPL, which applies to balloon pilots. The only way to find out for yourself is to undergo a medical examination by an aviation medical expert. The most common causes of unsuitability are diseases of the cardiovascular system, diabetes and excessive visual impairment.

Reliability is proven by a police clearance certificate and an extract from the central traffic register. For example, someone who has committed frequent and/or serious traffic offenses may be considered unsuitable to fly an aircraft. However, there are other requirements in addition to the formal ones: Enthusiasm for ballooning, a willingness to get involved and take on responsibility, and to lead - not only the balloon, but also the team you need for ballooning.

Training

The training takes place in an aviation school. There are commercial offers, but many clubs are also authorized to train their members.

Theoretical training

The theoretical training includes air law and air traffic regulations, radio, navigation, meteorology, aerostatics, technology, behavior in special cases and accidents and, last but not least, human performance.

Aviation law - by far the driest subject that you learn mainly for the exam, for practical purposes it is important to know what is written where, where you have to look it up - aviation law is also changing rapidly due to the ongoing European integration.

Rules of the air - for balloonists the visual flight rules - must be known.

Flight radio - here you learn how to communicate with air traffic control - important for obtaining information and clearances for controlled airspaces while flying.

Navigation - has been considerably simplified by satellite navigation, but you should still be able to navigate using a map. And you will also learn how to extract information about airspace and the terrain from the map.

Meteorology - background knowledge and understanding are essential for balloon pilots - especially when it comes to the wind, you have to be able to read the terrain and learn to "see" the invisible wind.

Technology - of the balloon and the on-board instruments - is the easiest to learn, because here you not only have the theory, but also a direct link to practice during training.

Behavior in special cases and accidents - the subject with the longest name - this is about dealing with incidents and accidents - not the most pleasant subject, but you learn it so you don't have to use it.

Human performance - is the most recent subject, because at some point it was realized that knowledge of human "function" is just as important as knowledge of technology. The English term "human performance and limitations" emphasizes even more that it is particularly important to know where the limits of (one's own) performance lie.

Practical training

The practice - the ballooning - is what the whole training is for. But practice is not just about operating the balloon, practice includes:

Getting to know the balloon and its accessories - the balloon itself with its components envelope, burner, bottles, basket - and the flight instruments variometer and altimeter - and the flight radio and the transponder.

Flight preparation - organization of everything needed for the flight: Balloon and team, weather information, launch site.

Flight decision - are the weather conditions okay, is the launch site okay, is the balloon okay, am I okay as a pilot, and is my team okay?

Briefing the team - what do I have in mind - who does what?

Set up - assemble the balloon - inflate.

Flight - Take-off - Maneuvering - Flight planning and flight monitoring - Landing - Disarming and packing.

Debriefing - flight analysis

Examination

The training concludes with a theoretical examination using the multiple-choice system and a practical test flight. And if you pass both exams, you will receive the coveted pilot's license and can then fly balloons independently and on your own responsibility.

Further qualifications