Greetings from New Jersey, USA

[blueskybob]

Greetings All,

Looking to get into FPV flying and taking photos and video of Hot Air Balloons as they are flying.

I currently fly in several balloon rallies in the USA. NJ, NY, PA are the major states I fly in.

Has anyone tried this before?

Any advice is most welcome!

Best Regards,

Bob

 

[Droider]

Welcome to MRF. It has been done in the UK. Have you any RC flying experience?

I doubt if ballooners would want a MR flying around especially with Graupner props on!

Dave

 

[Lucidity]

Hi, Bob!

I'm new to the forum and I was just looking through some of the new user posts to see what other folks were saying when I saw your post. I felt compelled to respond, even before formally introducing myself because, as it happens, we have flown around hot air balloons on several occasions. Here are the two best examples that we have to date:

I'm about halfway done with editing another hot air balloon video, shot this past winter at the Winthrop Balloon Roundup in Washington State, just a few miles shy of the Canadian boarder. It was beautiful, with snow on the ground.

Dave makes an excellent point in terms of safety -- you'll have to work with the event organizers and satisfy them that you know what you're doing. As it happens, the people we've worked with so far have been much less concerned about our props slicing into balloon envelopes than one of our birds coming down on top of a balloon's dump valve, where they spill out the hot air when they land. If that happened, you really could kill somebody.

Anyway, it can be done and since it's one of our favorite things to do, we'd love to talk to you more about it.

Take care and be safe!

Lucidity

 

[Bartman]

Hi Bob

I must have missed your first post but I'm up the road in Milford, NJ. We've got another NJ flyer here that has done some flying in the vicinity of hot air balloons but he's not on the forums much since he's in high school and a little busy finishing up the year.

If you're a balloon pilot maybe we can arrange to have me fly around your balloon as you're lifting off and departing on a flight?

Welcome to the site.

Bart

 

[Lucidity]

Hey, Bob!

I'm on my way to "officially" post this video on the video forum, but knowing of your interest in hot air balloons, I thought I'd quickly put up a link here, too:

This is the video I was describing earlier, from the 2012 Winthrop Balloon Roundup.