OUTDOOR LIVING

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Adrenaline Rush

Cleary loves taking trips in his hot air balloon

Story Mark Shaffer | Photography Jeremy Holtzapfel

Bob Cleary loves to fly… although he prefers his hot air balloon to an airplane.

“Every flight is nice,” he said. “I love every one of them. Every flight is a challenge, every one is exciting. Every one is an adrenaline rush.”

Cleary, owner of BC Tool and Party Rentals, Ironton City Council member and former Ironton mayor, said he has been flying for 20-25 years and got his pilot license in 2001.

“I’ve always had a love for aviation and flying since day one,” he said. “My dad had his pilot’s license.”

He started off with a license for fixed winged aircrafts and has had several airplanes.

“I had that for four or five years and that got boring” he said. That all changed when his wife bought him a trip in a hot air balloon for a birthday gift. “When I landed, I had to have one, I had to have my license, because it is one of those things.”

He said he found airplanes boring because, in an airplane,

living | Outdoors

Outdoors | living

you take off from an airport, and then you fly to another airport to land or circle around and then land back where you took off from.

“A hot air balloon is totally different,” Cleary said. “Like if I got in one right now and took off, I would have no idea where I’m going.”

Before a flight, he releases a helium balloon to see which way the wind is blowing and makes sure the fuel tanks are topped off. That’s about it.

“We get in and we go, we don’t know where we are going to land,” he said, adding a chase crew with a truck follows along to pack up the balloon when it comes down.

“It is an adrenaline rush the whole time, from the time you inflate it until the time you touch down on the ground again,” Cleary said. “It is really, really exciting.”

Cleary has had three balloons over the past decades. The first was what he calls a “beater,” a used model that had three 10-gallon fuel tanks on board.

“I was lucky to get 45 minutes of flight time,” he said. After he got his license, he sold that one and got a better one that had about 90 minutes of air time. His current model has four 10-gallon fuel tanks.

“I have flown it about two and a half hours and that used about a tank and half,” Cleary said. “So, I think I could easily get three hours on a good cool day.”

He said there are several things that affect a balloon flight. Obviously, the wind. Less well known is the temperature. The balloon’s fuel has to be heated up to be hotter than the ambient temperature.

“A 50-degree day is good. When it gets up into the upper 80s or lower 90s, you

living | Outdoors

Outdoors | living

living | Outdoors

really use a lot of fuel to overcome the outside temperature so it will fly,” Cleary explained. “A lot of people like to go out when it’s around 30 degrees, you just get off the ground and go. I could probably get about five hours flying time, but I don’t like the cold that well.”

Typically, Cleary goes up somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 feet. Sometimes, he goes up around 2,000 feet.

“Typically, if I have passengers, I let them pick how high up we go,” he said. “Some like to stay close to the ground, some like to be up high. The only law out there is you have to stay 1,000 feet above any group of people. You couldn’t fly over the high school at 500 feet during a ball game, unless you were coming in for a landing.”

And unlike an aircraft, Cleary can land his balloon wherever there is enough space.

“It is a controlled landing. We’ve landed over Town Centre Mall, at Buffalo Wild Wings. We see a good spot and we just bring it in and land,” he said. “People are usually pretty receptive because you just don’t see balloons that often. Kids love them. It’s really enjoyable for me.”

He sometimes does fixed balloon rides at things like Vacation Bible Schools. The balloon is tethered to the ground and he takes the kids up about 40 feet high and then back down.

“The last one we did was at a church in Worthington,” Cleary said. “And we ran about 270 kids on tethered flights in two hours. It was fantastic.”

As for those with a fear of heights, Cleary said it isn’t really much of a factor in balloon rides.

“It goes up so slow,” he said. “In an airplane, you’re at a little over 100 miles an hour when you leave the ground. In a balloon, you’re going maybe 50 feet a minute going up. It’s slower than an elevator. You take off, you just float. And you can go back down if you don’t like it.” a

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