Airborne at last - by balloon!

A beautiful morning flight from Gloucester Airport

After having carefully plotted a master plan for days, an unexpected locked gate nearly destroyed a beautiful morning flight from Gloucester Airport.

Thanks to the airport manager Darren Lewington’s dog, who woke him at the crack of dawn,  two balloon- and film teams could enter the site and set up next to ‘Betty the Beech’ in front of her hangar.

Shortly after 7am the first balloon with pilot Nick Dunnington (Phil’s son and also a commercial pilot) took off with his own son Cameron Dunnington, Phil and cameraman Mat.  

A few minutes later myself and Beeches RGV engineer Roger Shepherd took off in the Cameron V-65 ‘Silver Lining’ – the balloon which will go aboard the aeroplane on its long journey.

Calm winds allowed both balloons to hover over for some time over 'Betty' and the airfield...

.....before stronger winds aloft took them up onto the Cotswold escarpment flying appropriately over the ‘Air Balloon’ pub.

The new ‘minimus’ basket (designed by Don Cameron performed very well) and we survived a speedy 8kt tip over landing in a tight grass field after a beautiful 1.15mins flight.

I think I can say that Roger enjoyed his first ballooning experience and might be prepared to do it again! Correct Roger?

It turned out that today was also Roger’s birthday so a subsequent ‘German style’ baptism ceremony was inevitable! (shame only for the wasted drops of Champagne and sorry for your burnt hair!)

Thanks to all our friends and family – Nick and Cameron Dunnington, Steve Richards, Kyla Rhind, Linda Hamblyn, Trevor Henegan, Kevin MacDonald - for their great support and help to make this a truly special event!

And now I am going to shoot anything ‘Apple’ as their new OS operating system has buggered up my entire computer, photos and I had to re-write this over again….

photo credits to:
Phil Dunnington, Trevor Henegan, Steve Richards, Kevin MacDonald and myself