These days, there are a lot of ways to take to the sky, but for Ravenna Balloon A-Fair Balloon Meister Paul Suttle, there’s nothing like a hot air balloon.
“You look up, you see a helicopter, you see a plane flying by, you watch it for a second or two and then you’re right back to what you were doing,” Suttle said. “When a balloon floats by, almost everybody just stops what they’re doing and watches. There’s something magical about man’s earliest form of aviation. It still fascinates people. Balloons are for fun; you just go to fly and look out at the scenery.”
The 47th annual Ravenna Balloon A-Fair will take place on Sept. 24-27 at two locations, downtown Ravenna and the Portage County Fairgrounds in Randolph.
The festival will begin on Thursday, Sept. 24, in Ravenna with registration at 5:30 p.m. and a children’s parade at 6:30 p.m.
Gates open Friday evening at the Portage County Fairgrounds with live music, children's shows, helicopter and monster truck rides and, weather permitting, tethered hot air balloon rides. There will be food vendors and a beer and wine garden, as well.
The grand parade will take place in downtown Ravenna at 9 a.m. on Saturday, followed by a day of activities planned until 5:30 p.m., including two stages with live music, food and craft vendors and children’s activities at Children's Alley. Gates open at the fairgrounds at 3 p.m. on Saturday with entertainment for all ages and the hot air balloon lift off at 5 p.m.
Gates open at 1 p.m. on Sunday with festivities lasting into the evening.
Hot air balloons come in many shapes and sizes, often categorized as sport, commercial, racing and special-shape, but local balloon pilot Joe Clark said the majority of balloons seen in the sky are multi-purpose, teardrop-shaped sport balloons.
Clark owns a 10,000-cubic-foot sport balloon that he’s piloted at the Ravenna Balloon A-Fair for the past four years and flies every chance he gets.
He said getting off the ground in a hot air balloon requires days of planning and a well-trained ground crew that stays ahead of a balloon to help navigate a path and find a safe landing spot, as well as to help load the balloon into a trailer after it’s been deflated post-flight.
“We’re starting days in advance; we’re watching weather, planning landing spots based on where we’re going to take off,” Clark said. “I personally like to get in a habit of using check lists and getting crew trained. When you have a very good crew, you can set the balloon up from the time you take it out of the vehicle until it’s ready to fly in about 10 minutes. You’re dependent on your crew for a lot of different things, because ballooning is a community-type flight. You can’t just take off by yourself and do everything, because there’s too many moving parts, and once you take off, you basically don’t have a ride back the way you’re going, unless you’re carrying a bicycle.”
Hot air balloon pilots generally fly in the morning or in the evening to avoid the daytime thermals that are created when the sun heats the ground, causing upward air currents that produce severe drafts. In the absence of daytime thermals, a pilot can expect more stable and predictable wind conditions that are desirable for ballooning.
Clark said you can do things in hot air balloons that you can’t do in any other aircraft, like hear what’s happening on the ground, as sound travels through calm, quiet air. And because balloons move slowly, there’s time to enjoy the view and to look at the houses and people down below.
On the evening of Aug. 15, Clark and local balloon pilot Mike Lorentz took flight from the Portage County Fairgrounds in Clark’s balloon. They headed eastbound with a compass and a walkie-talkie to communicate with the two-man crew following ahead on the ground in a truck pulling a trailer. Before Clark’s balloon crossed over Fairground Road in Atwater, the two spotted eight-year-old Lucy Bissler looking up at them from her porch.
Clark and Lorentz anticipate having spectators during a flight, so they bring along toy parachutes to throw out of the basket as souvenirs for people on the ground. During that flight, they threw down a little blue plastic man strung to a tangle-free miniature parachute for Lucy Bissler.
Lucy Bissler’s father, Mike Bissler, said he’s been around hot air balloons his entire life, and even took a ride in one two years ago, but he’s never seen a pilot throw a toy parachute to an onlooker.
“I could hear her from the front of the house. She said, ‘they dropped something, they dropped something,’” Mike Bissler said. “I’ve never seen that before. It’s pretty cool, especially for the kids. She loves it. It’s sitting in her room; we put it up on the ceiling.”
Lorentz said while pilots do have indirect control to navigate their flight path by changing altitudes and catching wind layers that blow in different directions, you can’t technically steer a hot air balloon and, as a result, you don’t always land where you thought you were going to. Oftentimes, pilots land their balloons in people’s yards, which opens up the opportunity to interact with people, many of whom are interested and eager to learn about hot air balloons.
On that evening’s flight, Clark and Lorentz spotted a yard they thought would make the perfect landing spot, so they radioed to their ground crew to go to the house to ask the homeowner if it was OK to land in their yard. They got the go-ahead and so they did. Upon landing, a couple and their two children showed up at the balloon and were given a tour of the basket.
“When I land somewhere, I try to involve the family that owns the place, and the neighbors, and anybody you can talk to,” Lorentz said. “We don’t land at airports all the time; we land in neighborhoods and on streets. You’re landing an 800-foot tall balloon, which is basically an eight-story building, on their residential street and it surprises people, so we try and hang out there at their house, or in their yard, with the balloon inflated and let them ask questions and come and see it and let them know that we didn’t crash, we’re not blown off coarse. You had a nice, big, welcoming yard and that’s why we landed there.”
For more information about this year’s Ravenna Balloon A-Fair, visit https://www.ravennaballoonafair.com/.