rat6666

Forwarding this message received from another balloonist today: Although I think his date is wrong (11/16, not 11/13). Note: I have zero sympathy for any balloon companies or DZ's left owed lots of money (yet again) by these scumbags.

Rushcube is apparently out of business and a lot of their websites (the ones I can find that are still indexed by Google) are gone/404! Seems like something good has finally happened. Does anyone know any more details? The ballooning industry is giddy with excitement.

This. Pay close attention to the direction of travel immediately after launch.

I fly balloons for a living in Northwestern New Jersey & Southeastern PA... Jumpers are more than welcome (however, please bring a functional rig!). Round these parts the going rate is $225 per person for an hour-long passenger flight. Like the previous poster said, we can either work it off through crew labor, or it's generally a little less than half the price of a full ride :) However, I'd be most interested in trading balloon jumps for my skydiving ticket. Check us out at www.njhotair.com

I can only think of these: 1. REALLY precision air-to-air shot 2. Remote camera on a nose-mounted pole (which has been airbrushed out of the photo) Note the aileron positions. That and the propeller blur convinces me it's a legitimate photo and not a clever 70's cut & paste / airbrushing job.

Eule - As I am not a fixed-wing pilot, I can only offer this as my basic understanding and assumption: The emergency fuel lever does not affect engine power - it's just there to make sure fuel is able to be manually pumped to the injectors. All throttle functions are still controlled by the throttle lever. Please correct me if I'm wrong... It's happened a couple times

I had an interesting visitor to 1800skyride.org the other day. See attachment. Also, I compiled a list of all the instances where my images were being used illegally on literally dozens of Skyride's websites and forwarded that list to their web hosting companies. Maybe I'll see some results from that.

I'm not a jumper (yet), but I am a hot air balloon and thermal airship pilot looking to get into skydiving. I don't know any history of the WFFC. What happened with the Family Channel blimp? Although I have limited skydiving understanding, I can say that helium airships are highly impractical jump ships at best. They rely on being carefully ballasted slightly heavy at takeoff, to account for the fuel burn that will occur during flight. They want to land slightly heavy or at equilibrium, since it's tough to land a blimp that wants to "fall upwards." Dropping a payload of jumpers in flight would make for an incredibly tough journey towards the ground (for the blimp crew) unless a quantity of expensive helium were to be vented. That's not something they do without good reason (emergencies, superheating, etc.). Now, I've got myself a hot air airship (see attachment), but it only seats pilot plus one, and it's Experimental to boot. Guess that takes it out of the running!

You mean as on this site: Adventure Balloon - near the bottom of the page [CT] or this one ? Champagne Flights - near the bottom of the page [Ohio] or this one ? Fantastic Fall Balloon Flights! - middle of page [Iowa] . Hooray, my first post here, and on my birthday nonetheless. These three particular sites are all owned by different individual balloon ride companies. I'm personal friends with the two pilots from Connecticut & Iowa, and have traded links with the Ohio pilot and emailed back & forth with him on an ongoing basis. They're all class acts and run respectable flight operations. I'm not sure I can make out the motive of the two posts on here from the context. Perhaps it's just a little alarming that these three sites all used the same text for their warnings? If that's the case, you've got nothing to fear. The international balloon email list (aka "reflector"... balloon@lboro.ac.uk) had a big discussion about the ride broker issues not too long ago and a lot of list members rallied by putting up similar or identical warnings on their websites. That explains why the wording is the same on each of those sites. Some people just aren't creative enough to write out their own unique wording. The same thing is happening in ballooning as in skydiving, and we're just now beginning to step up to the plate to combat SKYRIDE and other similar unscrupulous companies. Personally, I'm really furious because my copyrighted artwork and photos have been used on countless "newyorkballooning.com" and similar sites. Original Artwork copyright 2002 by myself: http://www.njhotair.com/index/arrows.jpg Actual location on my site: http://www.njhotair.com/index/balloons/ Their lovely version (it can be seen on MANY such sites for different states): http://www.newyorkballooning.com/pilotcert.html Original image on my site (original frame grab from MiniDV video I personally shot in 2000): http://www.njhotair.com/index/lookup1.jpg Second photo from left is mine (notice their bastard version has been enlarged, with JPG artifacts): http://www.soaringsports.com/balloon_gallery.htm So... Count me in. I've PM'ed PhreeZone and am more than happy to add these copyright violations to his list. In the meantime, I've set up http://www.1800skyride.org as my humble contribution to the great war. If there's anything I can do with it, I'm open to suggestions. At this point it deals only with balloon rides, since that's my living, (plus I put the site together and had it fully functional online in the course of an hour after initial domain registration). However, it's only logical to combine ballooning & skydiving efforts there at some point. I must admit I borrowed much of the text, as well as the caution tape, from http://www.skydiveoc.com/scamCaution.html... With all good intents. I'll hope to check back on this thread soon... But if anybody needs to get in touch for whatever reason, PM or email me. Soft Landings, Jon Radowski http://www.njhotair.com rat6666@gmail.com