Full of hope, we travelled to the Balloon Festival "Fascinating Rhön"
at Bischofsheim-Haselbach on May 9th, 2003. The organizers there traditionally seem
to have a run of bad luck with the weather: This was the fourth time in a row that
they had bad weather on their event.
The balloon flights on Friday evening
and Saturday morning had to be cancelled.
On Saturday afternoon, the model balloons were the first to conquer the sky.
As usual, the penguin was an almost magical attraction to the kids...
For the evening flight, we were planning something special together with balloon pilot Georg Leupold. He had brought along the 'cat' balloon from the german balloon manufacturer SCHROEDER fire balloons. So we decided to put up our balloons together.
We had already had some appearances with the big 'parents' of our little model ballons. The penguins had met in 1996 at Dresden for the first time, 1997 in the Alps, and in 2001 at Schwäbisch Hall and at the Europapark Rust. The cats had met in 1998 at Landshut (Bavaria), 1999 at Apolda and 2001 at the Europapark Rust, among other meetings.
But this time, we wanted more: Our little cat should rise into the air together with its Mommy!
After I had installed a safety rope of 120 ft. (40 meters) between the two balloons, I joined Georg in the basket, and the cats took off into the calm evening sky.
And it is definitely not so easy to fly a model balloon when you're aboard a hot
air balloon, I can tell you! As you don't know if you rise or fall, you don't have
a clue what your model balloon is doing...
But most of the time, the 120 feet of safety rope were enough to compensate the
different flying behaviours of the two balloons.
Below us, the whole village took out to the streets - this was something the inhabitants
of Haselbach never had seen before.
But not only the inhabitants of Haselbach: In fact, this was the first ever simultaneous
flight of a hot air balloon special shape and its model. This has never been done before.
Though I had enough to do with manoeuvring the little cat in harmony with the big one, I couldn't take my fingers off my digital camera to catch some views of this unique evening atmosphere.
left:
flying into the sunset...
right:
our little cat high above the launch site
In the meantime, my father Werner tried to get the best view from the ground to
photograph and film the flight of the two cats.
After about half an hour of flying, we slowly moved towards the ground again.
left:
The gas supply lasted right to the landing. After a flight of fourty minutes,
our little cat ran out of breath.
right:
At the night glow afterwards, the two cats were voted most beautiful balloons
of the meeting by the cheering spectators.