Event Programs

Liberty Balloon Company can provide a hot-air balloon for any event, from weddings, graduations or mitzvahs to corporate events such as company picnics, grand openings or special sales. Typically, a balloon event or promotion involves a tethered flight. This means that the balloon (or balloons) are inflated and fly while still anchored to the ground by ropes.

CORPORATE PROMOTIONS

Few sights are as impressive or magnetic as a giant hot-air balloon inflated to full size. This is an excellent way to draw attention to your Grand Opening, Sale, or other special event.

These promotions can include advertising with a banner attached to the balloon. Tethered rides to about 50 feet can also be arranged.

Everyone around a balloon has a smile on his or her face. It is amazing, awesome, and fun!

So your company gains huge benefits of name recognition, public awareness, and community appreciation when your balloon (or our balloon with your banner on it) gives tethered rides at the 4th of July celebration in the evening before the fireworks, or at the Historical Society Strawberry Social, or at the balloon festival.

The public appreciation goes up even another notch if the proceeds of the tethered rides are donated to charity.

NEWS AND MEDIA RECOGNITION

Newspaper reporters and TV cameramen are just as excited and inspired by a balloon as we other mere mortals. So the public relations impact of your balloon can often be magnified to huge proportions. If you make your balloon available to morning TV or radio shows, evening news, weathermen riding over fall foliage, sportscasters flying over sports events, and other mass media uses, you will be amazed at the results.

Imagine a news article showing your balloon surrounded by 500 school children as your pilot conducts an exciting and educational program explaining the science of hot air ballooning!!

Weddings and Social Events

A hot air balloon is a wonderful addition to a wedding, family reunion, bar/bat mitzvah, or other social event.

PARTIES

A tethered balloon is a wonderful highlight of any party

• Graduation
• Birthday
• Anniversary
• Customer or Employee Appreciation
• Bar/Bat Mitzvah
• You name it!

OPERATIONAL CONSIDERATIONS

SPACE REQUIREMENTS: We need a space of approximately 200 feet by 200 feet. This space should be clear of obstacles, especially powerlines. Preferably it would be a grassy surface.

WIND AND WEATHER: Because a hot-air balloon is so big (7 stories tall, and 60 feet in diameter), even slight breezes blowing against it cause considerable force. This quickly makes a balloon hard to handle and small increases in wind speed or changes in direction can be hazardous. So to operate a balloon we need not only a nice day (free of precipitation), but we also need very calm winds. 

We may be able to partially inflate a balloon (and put on an entertaining show) but not fully inflate it, in wind of up to about 10 mph.

We may be able to fully inflate, and perhaps take off in free-flight, in wind of up to about 8 mph.

But to give tethered rides, we need wind of less than about 4 mph. So: see "time of Day" below.

WEATHER: Balloon fabric is given a polyurethane coating to make it air-tight. This coating is vulnerable to moisture.. So we do not operate in precipitation, or with the threat thereof.

TIME OF DAY: Since we need calm wind and stable air, the best time to schedule a balloon event is during the 2-3 hours immediately after sunrise, or during the last one or 2 hours before sunset. Summertime balloon events scheduled during the middle of the day are rarely successful. Our recommendation is to use the balloon to create a climactic event at the end of the day.

LENGTH OF OPERATION: Our balloons are epuipped with more fuel than most balloons. If the wind and weather permit, we can often tether for a period of two hours.

TETHERED RIDES

Tethered rides usually take approximately 5 minutes. 

Our balloons can carry 3 or 4 passengers besides the pilot. So we may be able to give nearly 100 people rides in a 2-hour period if the wind and weather are cooperative.

We usually go to a height of about 50 to 70 feet. When you are watching this from the ground it doesn't look very high. But this is because the balloon itself is so big that your eye is deceived. When you are in the basket, it feels higher than it looked from the ground.