Page 136 2013 Art & Balloon Festival, August 30, 2013
Special edition of LINCOLN DAILY NEWS.com
Some shifty breezes bobbled the
basket before liftoff, setting the
newbie Pavlik a bit on edge. But on
launch, the balloon quickly gained
altitude and the trio sped away to
the northwest. The mild evening al-
lowed for the smoothest of flights,
and for those in the Bottoms Up
balloon, it was a perfect soft land-
ing about 5 miles away as the crow
flies.
Before the time to land, Kleiss got
a feel for the wind direction at vari-
ous altitudes. Coming over Kicka-
poo Creek at Nicholson Road, she
started looking for a field to put
down in.
Kleiss dropped down and the wind
took her left, where she saw a
cornfield with a washed-out area, a
good spot.
“Being raised a farm girl, I like
to be careful about crops,” Kleiss
said. She doesn’t want any damage
to the crop.
So, while husband, Mike, checked
with the farmer, Betsy and passen-
gers waited in the basket with the
balloon still inflated.
The gentle laughter that comes
only of camaraderie gained through
a shared experience filtered through
the field. Reflecting on her first
flight with a look of joy, Pavlik
said she was a little nervous at
first when she tried to look straight
down. It scared her to be so high.
“Then I learned to look out a way,
and I began to see things, to look
down on the corn ... and it wasn’t
so bad. Later, I could look down,”
she said.
Ramlow agreed it was a beauti-
ful sight, and she, too, thoroughly
enjoyed the flight.
Pilot Kleiss was raised in Seymour
and her husband in Tuscola -- farm
country. They live in Champaign
now.
Betsy said that Dave Reineke, who
pilots the city of Lincoln balloon,
brought her along in learning to
fly. Her first year in Lincoln, 1996,
she flew with Reineke, he as pilot
in command, and the next year she
had her pilot’s license and her first
balloon. In ‘98 she got her com-
mercial license, and now Kleiss has
about 580 hours of flight time.
“Safety is first,” she says.
Pilots take every precaution, go-
ing through rituals and checklists
before flights. Preflight includes
weather briefings. While not re-
quired outside of controlled air-
space, pilots commonly carry hand-
held radios to listen for local traffic
and to apprise one another of their
locations. Equipment is carefully
checked, baskets are examined,
lines are checked to make sure they
are secure and not tangled. One of
the more important balloon devices
are the carabiners. These are the
latches that hold the lines between
the basket and the envelope, lock-
ing the lines into the basket. The
locks are checked carefully each
flight.
Kleiss speaks fondly when nam-
ing her past balloons. There was
Flambango, named by her daughter
for its hot pink colors and difficulty
saying the word flamingo when she
was young; Hot Flash -- the name
speaks for itself; and now there’s
Bottoms Up with its black arrows
pointing down from the top and up
from the bottom.
Crewing for Kleiss were Bob and
Paula Rutherford, of Chestnut, and
Jamie Beard.
While the crew was wrapping up
the balloon envelope, they began
pushing themselves to a huffing
stage. The envelope is quite large
and heavy. It takes some manhan-
dling, or woman handling, and a
coordinated effort to re-contain it.
Betsy urged the group to take
their time. “I don’t want this to be
work,” she said. “I’m here to have
fun and to be safe.”
[By JAN YOUNGQUIST]
