What are the dangers of hot air ballooning?

Yes, I can look it up on the net, but I thought it would be more fun to see what kind of answers DUers can come up with.

Give it a try. It will relieve the tension.

Anytime you defy gravity, you're taking a chance.

balloon is basicly a controlled crash. Trick is to have enough control to survive.

:shrug:

basket, and somehow, inhale too much of the gas?

maybe with no soccer ball to talk to.

Where they have those big chickens running around!

...and burned through the gondola ropes. Luckily everyone survived.

Disgruntled passengers I talked to complained people were "packed in like sardines and we couldn't move or look in other directions"

Guess the FAA doesn't regulate guest accommodations in the basket.

My brother bought a hot air balloon, I bought my daughter a college education. His daughter isn't going to secondary education of any kind. She is pissed at her parents because they bought a balloon vs her future.

Can't say as I blame her. He is an ass anyway.

These are the kind of toys that appeal to the very people who love to live on the edge and control the networks.

I keep telling my husband that all the really good dangerous toys (that used to be a way of culling the herd so to speak) are gone now...no lawn darts, no easy bake oven with the original burn your arm off design, no nerf archery sets...and now people like Paris Hilton live to adulthood! :evilgrin:

....oh, yeah, that's why they were outlawed.
:rofl:

catching the fabric on fire. That would be a stressful situation if you were more than 5 or 10 feet off the ground.

Then there are the champaign flights... does the pilot imbibe too? A drunken party in a basket a few hundred feet off the ground might seem like fun, at first anyway.

To be airborne without total control is anathema to pilots.
You can control the up and down to a degree.
But you have very little control of the which way.
'Any way the wind blows.'

want to control everything. Especially the direction. Maybe they do that ahead of time by checking on the direction of the wind?

still :scared:

:scared:

:silly:

:scared:

and picks it up when it lands. If the driver doesn't have a good navigator to watch the balloon and tries to watch it himself the likelihood of rear ending another driver who is gawking at the balloon instead of driving is very high. Happens all the time.

You can think of a hot air balloon as an SUV in the sky. You get lousy mileage, it doesn't carry many people, and releases a considerable amount of carbon.

I would recommend a more environmentally friendly ground pursuit.

I think I would enjoy white water river rafting more.

up in a balloon; just the idea of it makes my acrophobia worse.

Pillows for their botty?

that and the landings seem to be kinda rough.

For awhile it was a pretty event to go to and there were always lots of neat specialty balloons in weird shapes. However, one summer I clerked for a law firm in Albuquerque that was representing the family of a guy who was killed in a balloon crash. The gondola hit some power lines, elevated to a couple hundred feet and then the gondola fell off. The guy hit the ground feet first and it kinda split him up the middle to about mid abdomen. That gave me nightmares for a long time. I also had the opportunity to go up in a balloon once. What I remember most is that the sides of the gondola aren't really that high and the feeling that you're going to fall out at any minute is overwhelming. Also, we didn't have the best landing and we tipped over and kinda rolled out. Won't be doing that again.

It is a strange experience - like most things in flying, taking off and landing are the exciting times, but flying was almost boring. The thing that got me was that you can talk in a normal voice to people on the ground and they can hear you just fine; also flying over a bunch of horses and freaking them out. We did have a controlled crash, although I'm not sure how controlled it was. The guy said hang on and we attached outselves to the basket like a bunch of flies. We crashed, bounced, and crashed again and I got to say that was exciting as Hell. It's not something I care to do now since I'm much older, but I'm glad I did it.

Does thin air cause the ballon to go up higher? hot air rises so, what effect does it have with different atmospheric conditions?

kind of stuff. LOL All we cared about was getting back down.

long before we met.
she enjoyed it considerably

The atmospheric pressure thousands of feet up in an unpressurized gondola would tend to expand gases in your colon.

But at least it's not an enclosed space.

On the plus side, you'd be pre-buried. Just fill in and put up a tombstone.

power lines, and trees.

Either too much air or too much bullshit.