Gas Balloon Pilot Interviews

“ Gas ballooning is a very extreme sport,” says Mark Sullivan of Albuquerque, who talked with us recently after returning from the 2004 Gordon Bennett Cup race.

Sullivan, founder of Balloon Fiesta’s America’s Challenge race, is not kidding about the “extreme” part. Pilots go for the distance in both competitions. Their gas balloons fly higher and farther than hot-air balloons, pushing fliers’ skills, stamina, and luck to the limits.

The top three U.S. teams in this year’s America’s Challenge race win the right to compete for the United States in OMIT next year’s Gordon Bennett. The U.S. team of Richard Abruzzo of Albuquerque and Carol Rymer Davis of Denver took first place in this year’s Gordon Bennett. Their victory will bring the Gordon Bennett race to the United States in 2005. The U.S. team of Barbara Fricke and Peter Cuneo came in seventh in the race, which began in Thionville, France, this year.

What follows are question-and-answer sessions about gas balloon racing, held recently in separate sessions, first with Sullivan, who with co-pilot David Levin took third place in this year’s Gordon Bennett. The session with Abruzzo is next. Both pilots are scheduled to fly Oct. 2 in the 2004 America’s Challenge. Questions and answers are edited for length.

Interview with
Richard Abruzzo

Interview with
Mark Sullivan

Interview with Mark Sullivan

U.S. National Gas Balloon Champion Mark Sullivan, an Albuquerque native, was growing up as sport ballooning was taking off in Albuquerque. He took his first balloon flight in 1973. Within 10 years, he earned his commercial hot-air balloon license, and got his gas balloon license in 1985. In 1998, the world’s oldest ballooning organization, the Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI) awarded Sullivan the sports’ highest honor, the Montgolfier Diplome. He has competed in the prestigious Gordon Bennett Cup gas balloon race 10 times, and served as that race’s event director and assistant director. In 1995, Sullivan inaugurated the America’s Challenge Gas Balloon Race at Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. The race’s motto, “Go the Distance,” sums up the spirit of the highly competitive world of gas ballooning. To learn more about gas balloon pilots and the sport itself, see the other sites link.

Q: Why did you get involved in ballooning?

SULLIVAN: I guess the adventure – just going out and flying and not exactly knowing where you’re going to land when you take off.

Q: What do you think about when you’re planning for a race?

SULLIVAN: If you’re planning for a distance race, like a three-day race, you know you’ll want to look at the weather pattern over an extended period of time so you can fly in relatively safe conditions. By studying the weather, you can figure out where you’re supposed to go – generally. We had a real good idea we were going to Sweden when we started, if we could get through the bad weather.

Q: Did you get a lot of bad weather in that race?

SULLIVAN: Lots of it. It rained for probably ten hours on the flight, hard rain. We had a rain curtain, but it leaked in one corner, so we got pretty wet. And it’s really hard to sleep when you’re wet.

Q: So how do you sleep in a balloon?

SULLIVAN: We have a cot that folds down. It’s in the side of the basket, and you just stick your feet out. The basket’s about four and a half feet long. … Usually you try to rest when you can, so part of the time one person is asleep. You’re only up together about eight hours, and that’s the busy time of the flight when you need both pilots working, one managing and one talking on the radio or flying.

Q: How big is your balloon?

SULLIVAN: These balloons are very small. The one I flew has only about 35,000 cubic feet of lift in it, the gas. The standard hot-air balloons, the small ones, are about twice that big. Basically, the sizes of gas balloons go from very small, a lot smaller than this, to the very big ones that are used to fly around the world. Those are more than 400,000 cubic feet.

Q: What kind of gas do you use?

SULLIVAN: This race was using helium. In Europe they mainly use hydrogen.

Q: Why the difference?

SULLIVAN: Because we have a lot of helium over here, and over there it’s three times as expensive. It would cost you about seven thousand dollars to fill the balloon up. Over here, it’s about thirty-five hundred. Hydrogen is about a thousand dollars here.

Q: What do you do to get ready for a race?

SULLIVAN: Weight’s critical. We’re flying as light as we can, and an extra 30 or 50 pounds makes all the difference. You only have about twelve hundred pounds of ballast – sand to throw overboard -- and once that’s gone, that’s the end of the flight. And it’s a cycle. When you fly in the daytime, the sun heats you, and you go up. But at night when you cool, you have to throw ballast to keep from hitting the ground. The next day you go up even higher, and you have to throw more sand out the next night. You normally can only do this for three cycles. Racing balloons can carry twenty-five hundred pounds total weight, but the balloon weighs 500 pounds, and the pilots and gear are another five hundred.

Q: How do people do around-the-world flying?

SULLIVAN: That’s a different type of balloon. They have burners to heat the gas to stay up. They’re called Rozier balloons.

Q: What happens if you have a catastrophe in the air?

SULLIVAN: There are two ropes that hold the balloon down. If something broke, you would cut the ropes and the bottom of the balloon goes up and becomes a parachute and then you cut everything off the balloon. Hopefully, you’ll make it. Your chances aren’t good, but that’s the procedure. We’re not carrying parachutes.

Q: Have you had any bad landings?

SULLIVAN: Oh yeah – I’ve had fast landings. I’ve never broken any bones. Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.

Interview with Richard Abruzzo

In 1992, Richard Abruzzo and Troy Bradley set an absolute world record by completing the first balloon voyage from North America to Africa, flying for 144 hours and 16 minutes. Abruzzo is the son of the late Ben Abruzzo, who with two other New Mexicans made the first Atlantic balloon crossing in 1978 and the first Pacific crossing in 1981. Richard Abruzzo’s flight in that first Trans-Atlantic balloon race covered 3,313 miles from Bangor, Maine, to a landing near Casablanca, Morocco. He will be flying in this year’s America’s Challenge Race with Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico, who also is an avid balloonist.

Q: What was your Gordon Bennett flight like this year?

ABRUZZO: We landed in northern Sweden after having been over the Baltic Sea for over thirty hours. We landed near Umea because the conditions were forecast to become much worse. It was pitch black, there were lots of clouds and it was pouring rain. There was probably quite a bit of luck involved, but it worked out quite well.

Q: Did you know you were ahead by that time?

ABRUZZO: We had been told that all the other balloons had landed, and were still way out to sea. Of course that was good news, but the race was far from over for us. We had to get back to land. Landing at sea would be a bad thing -- we also would be disqualified. We have to land on the ground. We had several hours of flying to get back to land when we heard the news that we were the last balloon in the air.

Q: What was your strategy for the race?

ABRUZZO: The weather was forecast to be difficult – that was something all the balloons would have to deal with. Those conditions were generally to the north. Other balloons decided to go to higher altitudes and find winds that headed to Poland, not wanting to deal with the difficult weather that was going on to the north, over the Baltic Sea into Scandinavia. But several balloons, including us, decided to deal with this weather. We knew that by flying over the sea we could go the most distance to the north. Other balloons went north, but turned to the west sooner than we did. … We took on a greater level of risk by going over the sea for so long in those conditions, but that risk paid off. It allowed us to win.

Q: What would happen if you ended up in the ocean? Does a boat follow you?

ABRUZZO: Once you’re over the water, you’re pretty much on your own. We carry survival equipment in case we’re forced into the water, but that would of course be dangerous. There was shipping in the area, so if that was to occur, we would hopefully be picked up by a ship in a reasonable amount of time. We did have survival suits. But that would never be a good situation.
The water in the Baltic Sea was fifty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, which is pretty cool. I’m glad I didn’t know that while we were over the water. Except for the winning, it was a very wet and miserable flight.

Q: How does the America’s Cup compare with the Gordon Bennett race?

ABRUZZO: They’re identical as far as the rules and the goal of the race – the balloon that goes the farthest wins. … What’s really special about the America’s Cup is the size of the playing field. You can go anywhere in North America, and there are much greater distances available than typically you can go in the Gordon Bennett. With the Gordon Bennett you run into an ocean or a country that is closed to overflight because of political issues or other issues. The majority of pilots really love flying here in the United States.