Balloonists plan first-ever Black Sea crossing

By Stefan Korshak Sep 9, 2010, 11:05 GMT

Kiev - Hitting the bull's-eye won't be easy, even though the target is 70 kilometres wide.

Ukrainian Sergei Skalko and Georgian Revaz Uturgaur want to be the first people ever to fly a hot air balloon across the Black Sea. Liftoff is set for January 2011 from Ukraine's Crimea peninsula. Their goal to fly some 900 kilometres to Georgia's Batumi region.

'By many standards, this is not much distance. People have ridden around the world in specialized balloons,' Skalko told the German Press Agency dpa.

'But we will be over freezing seas, prevailing winds for most of the year are against us, and if we go off track we strike either mountains or a conflict zone,' he added. 'This flight is something no-one has ever attempted.'

Ballooning is in its infancy in the former Soviet Union, with an estimated 75 rigs operating in Ukraine and a few dozen in Georgia. That compares to an estimated 7,500 in the United States.

One reason for the disparity lies in personal income: A fully equipped hot air balloon that is ready to fly costs between 40,000 and 50,000 dollars - the equivalent of five to 10 years' wages for most people living in countries of the former Soviet Union.

The total cost of the Black Sea crossing is estimated at 350,000 dollars. All participants are volunteers.

'You will find, that most of the people in ballooning in our country have a professional past in the sky,' said Oleksander Novikov, a pilot participating in a late-August balloon navigation competition in central Ukraine.

'For us, ballooning isn't as much a mass sport as a hobby for aeronautics professionals.'

Skalo is a former fighter and helicopter pilot. The preparations he describes for what's called the Black Sea Balloon Run are far from amateur.

The envelope - the fabric part of a hot air balloon that holds the gas - was cut, sealed, and sewn in the Czech Republic by Kubicek Balloons, one of Europe's largest balloon manufacturers.

Completed earlier this month, the inflated gas bag should keep airborne for a planned 30-hour flight. It will carry some 5 tons of weight, including Skalko, Uturgaur, some 3.5 tons of propane gas, food and equipment.

Some 30 people are involved in the crossing, including two pilots and two landing crews. A major challenge will be to clear the flight path through the airspace of five sovereign countries.

Because of the vagaries of balloon travel, the flight route is necessarily sketchy. Pilots have little directional control beyond changing altitude to catch a wind blowing in the needed direction.

Sill, the pilots will have to do their best to navigate a fairly precise path. If they stray too far north, their balloon could pass into the airspace of Abkhazia, a breakaway Georgian province over which Moscow and Tbilisi have fought.

If they travel too far south, the balloon might drift towards Turkey's snow-capped Pontic Mountains. That would mean a forced landing in rocky wilderness or in the chilly Black Sea, whose low temperatures could kill in a matter of minutes.

Because their balloon isn't sophisticated enough, Skalko and Uturgaur won't have the option of flying at a high altitude to avoid such obstacles. That technique was used to great effect by Richard Branson's in his record-breaking crossings of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Weather will be a particular challenge. Winds above the Black Sea generally blow clockwise around the coastlines and most of the year there isn't a straight-line breeze from the north-west to the south-east.

But the balloon team's meteorologists believe they can make the best of the situation by flying in the winter months, when cold Siberian air effectively shuts down the prevailing Black Sea wind patterns and replaces them with smaller masses of air circling over Romania and Russia's Kuban region.

'We have calculated, based on the analysis of 10 years' of weather data, we have about an 80-per-cent chance of hitting Georgia, a 10-per-cent chance of hitting Abkhazian airspace, and a 10-per-cent chance of flying into the Turkish mountains,' Skalko said. 'So we are going to try.'

Internet: www.bsbrun.com