Think of a balloon and you’ll no doubt conjure up a wicker basket with a bubble envelope. For a few adventurous souls, ballooning is much different, indeed. You’ve seen the illustrations from the movie Up, in which the house floats away under an umbrella of beautiful helium balloons. It turns out that’s not some Pixar fairy tale.
Cluster ballooning is a type of gas ballooning, and just a handful of people in the world do it. One is Jonathan Trappe, pictured above right, who has crossed the English Channel and the Alps, flown a house, and attempted to cross the Atlantic. The basic principle of flight is no different from releasing a party balloon. The helium-filled balloons, which are lighter than the surrounding air, rise up through the atmosphere. The balloons expand as the surrounding air pressure decreases. Trappe has flown as high as 23,500 feet, but regularly flies in the mid-teens, primarily for airspace considerations.
Although the basic premise of gas ballooning is simple, a number of complexities must be considered. The balloons, for example, expand with an increase in altitude, but also with temperature—some by as much as 50 percent. Flight planning also is complex, and it takes months. Without an ability to steer, the initial preparation must consider flight in all directions. It’s a flight with only a departure at this point. As the flight gets closer, the destination can be narrowed down with some forecast winds aloft, and half of the work is thrown out. Closer still, controlling agencies are called, and a more detailed plan is developed.
Finally, at the launch site it can take dozens of volunteers to fill all the balloons, which begins many hours in advance. This is not the type of flying you do at the last minute, or on a shoestring budget. “It is prohibitively expensive for an individual, but trivial for a corporate organization,” says Trappe. “Let’s say it makes flying fixed
wing look cheap.”
The effort is worth it for Trappe. He speaks romantically about the flights, saying of the attempted Atlantic crossing, “We dream of going further. We dream of going again. We dream of the great Atlantic Ocean. Hope springs eternal.”
The balloons expand as much as 50 percent as the pilot climbs because the ambient air pressure exerts less force on the helium inside (top).
Each cluster is a unique configuration, based on the promotional needs, weight of the gondola, and expected route (bottom)
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