Word: hot-air
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With the development in the mid-'60s of the modern hot-air balloon, equipped with a Ripstop nylon envelope and a lightweight propane burner, drifting aloft became a relatively simple-and safe-divertissement. In 1963 there were only six hot-air balloons in the U.S. A decade later the number was 300, and today there are nearly 1,000. In this age of Concordes and space shuttles, some 3,000 balloon pilots are licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration, and perhaps twice as many friends and relatives serve as nonlicensed crew members...
Some 150 aeronauts took their airships to Indianola, Iowa, this month for the twelfth Balloon Federation of America's national hot-air balloon championships. They competed in events testing precision flying, wafting in gaudy splendor over the rolling farm lands. Former B.F.A. President Bruce Comstock, who practices three times a week with friends in Ann Arbor, Mich., captured his third title with his striped balloon, christened John Jacob Jingle Heimer Schmidt...
...seek out the fun seekers, our 50 writers, correspondents and photographers joined them, traveling across the country, stopping at Tex-Mex food stands, riding hot-air balloons and Giant Dippers and taking on the great outdoors. A roller-coaster aficionado since she rode - and rerode- one at a county fair in her native Georgia, Staff Writer B.J. Phillips last week crisscrossed the country from New York to California, visiting six amusement parks in search of the ultimate ride. Her technique was simple: sit twice in the front car for the view, twice in the rear car for the speed...
...towns have their boostering stunts. Tiny Pittsfield, Me., will hold the Central Maine Egg Festival, with 600 eggs being scrambled simultaneously in one frying pan 10 ft. in diameter. Jacksonville, Fla., just turned out to celebrate the end of pollution in the Saint Johns River, with stunt flyers, hot-air balloons, parachute jumping, the mayor waterskiing, and trucks dumping hundreds of fish into the cleaned-up waterway. In the Texas hill country, the tiny town of Luckenbach (pop. 6), now made famous by Waylon Jennings' country-and-western song about the simple life there, is holding Saturday night dances that...
Keeping a Carter down on the peanut farm these days is not easy. The President-elect's younger brother Billy, 39, figured it would be a lark to go up, up and away in a hot-air balloon. "I ain't worried about getting up," he said. "It's coming down." A contingent of reporters big enough for a moon shot watched Billy soar aloft, narrowly missing a utility pole, and sail over the pine trees of Americus, Ga., with the pilot and a friend. Billy blithely ignored federal recommendations that ballooners use hard hats. Instead...