The UK competition club welcomes anyone who would like to find out more about hot air balloon competitions.
There are a range of roles involved in competition ballooning including:
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- Pilot
- Crew
- Officials
- Event director
- Measuring teams
- Scoring teams
Pilots compete by completing tasks based on accuracy of flight. This can involve dropping a physical marker on a target on the ground, or dropping a virtual marker using the Balloon Live app. Typically in competitions, flights will be scheduled in the mornings and evenings. Usually, more tasks are set for a morning flight (often between 4-6 tasks) than in an evening (often between 1-3 tasks) – though this is at the discretion of the event director.
While the pilot is the one competing, they cannot fly without their crew. Typically a team is made up of 4 people – 1 pilot, 1 crew chief, 2 crew members, although there is usually room for more! The crew help the pilot by assembling the balloon and providing ground wind readings as close to the physical targets as possible to give their pilot a good idea of the wind direction on the surface.
Competitions can’t run without the work of the officials!
The event director monitors the weather, determines whether the flight goes ahead or not and sets the competition tasks. They set all the rules regarding the flight, from the launch location, launch time and order of tasks, right up to the colour of the physical markers to be used.
Where physical targets are set on the ground, the measuring teams measure the distance between the center of the target and the closest point of the sandbag portion of the markers. They also record the time the pilot dropped the marker, an approximate landing position and note whether the pilot threw the marker or performed a gravity drop (as is sometimes specified on the task sheet!).
The scoring teams take the results of each task and determine the points awarded to each pilot. The pilot who wins the task automatically receives 1000 points, with the middle pilot awarded 500 points. The scoring teams also determine whether any penalty points should be assigned. Penalty points can be given in circumstances including; late launch, throwing the wrong marker colour, throwing a marker instead of performing a gravity drop, flying within a PZ.