ATLANTA — As a fierce thunderstorm that came out of nowhere closed in, hot-air-balloon pilot Ed Ristaino spotted an open field 4,000 feet below and calmly and tersely warned the five skydivers aboard the craft, “You need to get out now.” He may have saved their lives, but he lost his own.
With lightning spidering across the sky and the wind rocking their parachutes, the skydivers floated safely while the balloon was sucked up into the clouds, then sent crashing to earth. Ristaino’s body wasn’t found until Monday, nearly three days later.
“If we would have left a minute later, we would have been sucked into the storm,” said skydiver Dan Eaton.
The group had taken off Friday evening in blue skies from a festival in Fitzgerald, Ga., south of Atlanta. From the air, they could see only a haze that soon turned menacing.
“It started off as just a red dot on the radar, and then it mushroomed very quickly into a big storm,” Ben Hill County Sheriff Bobby McLemore said.
Ristaino, 63, spotted a 15-acre clearing, then calmly told the skydivers to get out.
An updraft took Ristaino into the clouds, 17,000 or 18,000 feet up, he told his ground crew via walkie-talkie. Then the storm apparently collapsed the balloon. In his last transmission, he said he was at 2,000 feet and saw trees beneath him, the sheriff said.
Ristaino’s body was found in his twisted craft about 8 miles from where the skydivers landed.
