The Day The Balloon Crashed

When you take people on these rides, you know, what do they tell you? What keeps them, what makes them want to do it? What a great question. It's hard to describe. It really is just what you said. It's magical. But magical means something different to most everybody. Y'all commented on how quiet it is. That's something that people comment on a lot. Just the sense of we're at the will and whim of nature, of the winds. I mean, how else are you going to be able to do that? Going down and touching the tops of the trees. I mean, all that's just unique. So, that's magical. A hot air balloon doesn't really fly through the wind. It travels with it. There's no steering wheel, no engine. The pilot heats the air inside the balloon with a burner to make the balloon rise and float, searching for air moving in the right direction. And that same pilot is always looking for a safe place to come back down. tell me about power lines and balloons so we don't like them the interesting thing for us i don't know if you can see but if you look down in this field you can see poles but if you look between the poles you can't necessarily see the power lines guaranteed if you run into power lines it will make the news. It was October 1976. America had just celebrated its Bicentennial. Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford were involved in a close race for president with the election less than one month away. And in Charlotte, the Mecklenburg JCs were putting on a county fair. One of the most prominent attractions at the fair was an enormous, 10-story tall hot air balloon that was advertised by its owners owners as the largest hot air balloon in the world. Seven years earlier, it had appeared in a 1969 Hollywood movie called The Great Bank Robbery. Now, it had been purchased by a Pennsylvania father and son team, Sydney and Patrick Gibson. Their plan was to make money by using their balloon, both for promotion and for balloon rides. Sydney Gibson had been a B-17 bomber pilot in World War II who flew 38 missions. The airplane that he flew was named Yvonne, Y-V-O-N-N-E, which was my mother's name. My dad was a pilot. My brother was taking pilot life. So they drew a ribbon on the edge that was the two of them against the world. Sydney was 53 years old. Patrick was 28. On Thursday, October 21, 1976, they both climbed aboard their balloon, which they had named the Spirit of America. Their idea was to fly high above uptown Charlotte and advertise the county fair by yelling to curious onlookers below with a bullhorn. A third man climbed aboard too. He was just along for the ride. James Vogan was 29 years old, living in Maryland. He was a Vietnam veteran working with a helicopter company that was also at the Mecklenburg County Fair, giving rides to customers for $6 apiece. Bogan had two young sons in Wyoming, biological son Lee and stepson Brandon. Neither had seen their father in years. He treated me like, you know, like his own son. I would have liked to have known my dad a little better, but it happens. It is what it is. He was, by all accounts, he was a good man, served his country. The balloon had always been used while tethered. rising about 100 to 150 feet above the ground while still secured firmly below but that day it wound up in free flight exactly how and exactly what happened during that flight is something of a mystery half a century later what is known is that the balloon left around 12:30 pm from Johnson C. Smith's football field and drifted across Charlotte it was seen by office workers and school children floating through the air but shortly before 1 pm it descended into Charlotte's Belmont neighborhood, about two miles from where it had lifted off. And at 12.53 p.m., the balloon struck 100,000-volt power lines. All three men were killed. Across parts of Uptown Charlotte, the lights flickered. Charlotte Observer photographer John Daughtry arrived on the scene to document the aftermath on October 21, 1976. Fifty years later, he returned with us to the neighborhood where the balloon went down. It stands out as probably one of about three or four really tragic in terms of human loss of human life. I don't think you worry about the needlessness of it so much as the as the accidental circumstance that these people were sort of thrown together by a series of decisions. In the case of the reporter, Vanessa Gallman, she took a different boat that day. Gallman wasn't the only person who was supposed to ride in that balloon that day. For my recollection, he was supposed to ride the balloon, and he just got busy at work and just didn't make it. Guy Henderson was helping to run the fair, and incredibly, this was the second time in two years that pure chance had kept Henderson off of a doomed aircraft. aircraft. Two years earlier, on September 11th, 1974, he'd been booked on Eastern Airlines Flight 212 from Charleston to Charlotte. Henderson overslept and missed the flight. The plane crashed approaching Charlotte. 72 people died in the worst aviation disaster in Charlotte history. Henderson still had to confront what he'd escaped. As one of the fair's organizers, he had to go to the crash scene and help identify the bodies of the men who had died. Henderson lived another 40 years, dying in 2016. But his two brushes with death did not substantially change him, his daughter said. He got brought up over and over again. I think he felt like it made him special somehow. I don't think it really changed him at all. I think it gave him a fun story, like I said, a conversation starter, a fun story to tell. Charlotte Observer reporter Vanessa Goleman carried her own near-miss differently. She was 22 years old and just months into her first newspaper job in 1976. She'd been assigned by the Observer to ride in the balloon and write about it, but that morning, she repeatedly tried to reach the balloon operators to figure out where to meet them and couldn't find them. So eventually, she gave up and took another assignment. The next morning, Goleman wrote about what she missed and what she gained. She was supposed to be aboard the balloon, but instead, after finishing her workday, She went home to her four-year-old daughter. I was a teenager before my mom really told me about the incident, the fact that I almost lost her, because when it happened, you know, I was four years old. And interestingly, it was like a week before my fifth birthday. I can't imagine that, you know, I could have lost my mom before I was five. Vanessa Gallman lived another 48 years. She went on to a long career in journalism. Decades after the crash, she wrote about the near miss and how it had left an undertone of blessing, guilt, and foreboding in her life. I never saw the guilt part, but I saw that my mom worked from sunup to sundown. She didn't waste a lot of time. She didn't let a lot of grass grow under her feet. Well, we could land right there, looking for grassy fields with easy access, no power lines, no trees, friendly landowner. That's what we're looking for. Now, think of all the places you wouldn't want to land. I've probably been there. Thank you very much.