Tomorrow is the big day...
There was another practice flight this morning:
For the first time since we've been here, we had a laptop in the van connected to a GPS. The competition map is loaded, and as you drive a pointer on the screen indicates where you are. All the goals are in there as well, so it's like having the competition map and all the waypoints in your GPS. We'll have one of these setups in each van (my next project after writing this is to configure another laptop), and most of the pilots here are flying with the same thing in their balloons (see picture from the previous post). Below is a picture of Mike Howard's new Cameron racer. Mike used to live in Michigan and work for Cameron, but now he and his wife Renee live in his home country of Great Britain. The graphics were actually printed right on the balloon fabric using a giant inkjet printer:
After the flight, we refueled the balloon. Here you have to take your tanks out of the basket and carry them to a platform. They're filled for you, then you carry them back to the basket and re-install them.
After that was a 2-hour long Master Briefing. We finally grabbed some lunch at about 3:00pm (a hamburger from the cafeteria here inside the racetrack), then came back to the room to get a little work done. At 6:30pm is the Opening Ceremonies (no flight tonight), and the first competitive flight is tomorrow morning.
For the balloon people reading this: It looks like 80%-90% of the balloons here are "racers". It seems like every company has one now, so there's lots of different looking ones here. Here's a little bit about what the US pilots are flying:
- Nick Donner: Lindstrand 60X racer
- Joe Heartsill: Lindstrand 56X racer
- Johnny Petrehn: Lindstrand 56X racer
- Paul Petrehn: Cameron ZL-56 racer
For the non-balloon people reading this: I promise that soon I'll return to writing about some things that aren't related to ballooning.