JEFFERSON COUNTY — For pilot Gery DeKoevend, flying a hot-air balloon is different than any other type of aircraft.
“It’s different every day,” he said. “It’s never the same, you don’t get bored.”
DeKovened is a member of the Colorado Balloon Club, which flies out of Chatfield State Park, and he has flown balloons on many a Saturday for more than 40 years.
Fellow balloon pilot Frank Riehl said flying hot-air balloons has brought him the camaraderie with other pilots that he used to have when he flew small planes. He’s been flying balloons for 25 years.
“You meet new people,” he said. “I can tell all my old jokes and they’ve never heard them before.”
The has been meeting for the past 41 years and flying out of Chatfield State Park since the park opened. The group has monthly meetings and races, but people can regularly see many of its 130 members taking up their balloon on any nice weekend day in the spring and summer months.
Chatfield is the only state park to allow balloons to launch and land on its property.
“It still is a good place to fly, other than housing moving in,” Colorado Balloon Club acting president Alan Luksik said. “That limits some of the places you can land.”
Luksik has been a member of the club since 1985 and started flying balloons in Steamboat Springs three years earlier.
Pilots must take flight classes and get a license from the Federal Aeronautics Administration. Luksik said it takes about 10 hours of flight time to get a license, and a prospective pilot must pass a written exam, just like anyone getting a private pilot’s license.
The passenger load depends on how big the balloon is. The larger the balloon, the more people can ride.
Ken Tadolini with took up four passengers and himself at Chatfield on April 25. The balloons typically stay in the park and rise a few hundred feet off the ground. The balloons are good to go up about 12,500 feet above sea level.
Tadolini said he was going to go “wherever the wind takes us.”
Wind is the ultimate determining factor for a hot-air balloon on any given day. The pilot can control the altitude by giving heat to the top of the balloon but must read the wind currents to see where they’ll be going once airborne. Winds more than 8-10 miles per hour are not ideal and pilots usually won’t go up in those conditions, according to Luksik.
“Every flight is a new adventure, because balloons are controlled by the winds,” Luksik said. “We have control of up and down, the winds take us sideways.”
Marilyn Pickthall was at Chatfield on April 25 to help pilot Kelli Cook get ready for a balloon club race.
For the race, three targets were set up around the park. Racers dropped bean bags into the targets and got points for proximity. The points accumulate throughout the year with a winner determined at the end of the season in November.
Pickthall said she’s been involved in hot-air ballooning for 22 years and was hooked after her first time going up in the air.
“It’s extremely peaceful and you see the world,” she said. “It’s actually very pretty when you get up in the air.”
Joe Vaccarelli: 303-954-2396, jvaccarelli@denverpost.com or twitter.com/joe_vacc
