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Oct 4th-12th
Today, the Albuquerque International
Balloon Fiesta is known worldwide as an event that emphasizes fun
flying and camaraderie over serious competition.
It’s
ironic that the Fiesta got its start, in large measure, as an arena for
that most serious of competitions, the World Championships.
Albuquerque got the nod as the host city for the world championships
when Don Kersten, at the time the President of the Balloon Federation
of America (BFA), asked the organizers of the 1972 “first Fiesta” if
the city might be willing to bid for the World Championships. Sid
Cutter and Tom Rutherford came up with a proposal, which they duly
submitted to Kersten. Today, Cutter notes with a chuckle that Kersten
carefully didn’t tell him that Albuquerque was the only city he’d
approached!
Now that Albuquerque had the event, it had to figure out what to do
with it. Ed Yost, one of the inventors of the airborne heater and today
considered to be the father of modern hot-air ballooning, agreed to be
the Clerk of the Course, or chief official (roughly the equivalent of
today’s Balloonmeister). He and Cutter went to work devising the
“tasks” the competitors would have to perform. Cutter remembers that
many of their early ideas didn’t pass muster with the authority
governing international ballooning, the Federation Aeronautique
Internationale (FAI), because they involved maneuvers that the FAI
considered to be too dangerous. (“And they were,” admits Cutter.)
Eventually, they settled principally upon a series of tasks that
relied heavily on the use of an instrument known as a barograph. The
barograph provides a continuous trace, on a graph, showing the
balloon’s altitude at any given time in the flight. The pilot was
required to fly a profile of ascents and descents to certain altitudes
that followed an optimum pattern. |
