Captain’s Log: Entry 006

Chapter 6 – Flight with Mayor Ryan

WXXI in Rochester was concluding their annual fundraising drive. They asked if I would fly a flight from Genesee Valley Park as the climax. Having just obtained my balloon rating last fall, I thought the publicity would be great so I agreed.  No charge…

So on the evening of May 5, 1977, on a grassy area in the Park, I assembled the Piccard, pulled out the envelope and set the capewell. The wind was light out of the Northwest, so the envelope was stretched toward the southeast, still in a column, not spread out sideways. We were just across the river from the Rochester Airport, so I went to a nearby shelter to find a pay phone to call the Tower to get clearance to takeoff.

When I returned from the phone call, the wind had shifted. It was now out of the southwest. I’d never faced this situation before (now the balloon as not lined up with the wind) but got a couple people to help and we all picked up the envelope and rotated it 90 degrees to the left. The inflation went smoothly from there, so I was pleased with myself for handling this new wrinkle. What I realized later was that I never considered the fact that I would now be angling toward Lake Ontario.  As it turned out, the flight was fine…but if that wind shift had been a few more degrees, I might have flown over the City, then Irondequoit (with no place to land), then the Lake!

What would have made a Lake landing particularly awkward was that the point of the flight, the reason it was expected to garner WXXI some publicity, was that I was going to take the chairperson of the WXXI volunteers (a lovely middle aged lady in a long dress named Toni Frame)…and the Mayor of Rochester, Tom Ryan.

But the Lord watched over us. The flight was fine. The only thing I remember was the Mayor commenting as we passed the “Can of Worms.” Maybe the plans for rebuilding it were in process.

We landed in an orchard in Webster.  As we were packing up, Mrs. Frame wanted her picture taken…crouched down in the basket, peering over the edge. She was pretending to be scared. At least I thought she was pretending…but then again, I’m not sure I would have recognized it if she was terrified.

So with 24.2 hours of balloon time, I was flying my first VIPs over Rochester, oblivious to the big blue “field” just north of the City!

“So basically all the nerves and anxiety that you *should have* had in the 70s I rounded up for myself in the 2020s. 😆”

– A family member who shall remain anonymous

Your mom and I often wonder how we survived those early days.  Two answers:

1. The hot air balloon system is pretty safe (“How hurt are you going to get at 5 to 10 MPH?”)
2. God was watching over us.

And He still is.

Dad