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A Hot Air Balloon passenger's emergency guide

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  If You Have to Land the Balloon Yourself A passenger's emergency guide — for a Temecula flight, when the pilot is down and you are the person closest to the burner. By Stephen "Pseudo Publius" This is a realistic what-to-do-if essay, not a flight manual and not a substitute for FAA training. Nobody reading this is qualified to fly a balloon. The goal of this writing is to keep you alive long enough for a trained person on the ground to help you — and to prevent the worst common mistakes a frightened passenger would otherwise make. If the pilot is incapacitated, your first priority is the cell phone, not the burner. Read on. First: Breathe. The Balloon Is Not Falling. If the pilot has just collapsed, or fallen, or is otherwise not flying the craft, the most important thing to understand in the first five seconds is this: the balloon is not going to plummet. A hot air balloon without a pilot is still a balloon. The envelope above you is full of hot air...
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how to pilot a hot air balloon

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  Flying Without a Rudder An essay on how to pilot a hot air balloon — the navigation problem of an aircraft that cannot be aimed, the fuel arithmetic that defines every flight, and the curious sport of racing an aircraft with no forward thrust. By Stephen "Pseudo Publius" · April 2026 The first thing to understand about piloting a hot air balloon is that the verb "to pilot" does most of its work sideways. A fixed-wing pilot flies an airplane; a helicopter pilot flies a helicopter; in each case the verb implies a machine that is doing what the pilot tells it to do. A balloon pilot flies a balloon in the way a sailor sails a current. The aircraft has exactly one control axis — up and down — and every horizontal decision the pilot makes must be extracted, indirectly, from that single degree of freedom and from whatever the atmosphere happens to be doing that morning. Everything else in the craft is in service to that one trick. This essay is a wal...
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Hot air balloon with 13 aboard makes emergency landing in California backyard

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Mind if we drop in? This photo provided by Hunter Perrin shows people riding a hot air balloon posing for a photo after making an emergency landing in Perrin’s backyard on Saturday, April 18, 2026, in Temecula, Calif. (Hunter Perrin via AP) Hot air balloon with 13 aboard makes emergency landing in California backyard Kissing the Fence A hot air balloon carrying 13 people dropped perfectly into a 10-foot strip of Temecula grass on Saturday morning. The bigger story is why the balloons no longer come in from Del Mar. By Stephen "Pseudo Publius" · April 22, 2026 Hunter Perrin was watching television around 8:30 Saturday morning when the doorbell rang, and rang again, and rang once more. His wife Jenna was doing yoga in another room. Their backyard security camera had just pinged his phone. Movement detected. By the time he reached the front door, a neighbor was standing there with a sentence that didn't quite parse on first hearing. "They just lan...
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Don't Waste Your Time — It's Kabuki Time at City Hall

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 Opinion · Civic Affairs They're Not Listening The arts community will show up to San Diego City Hall next month by the hundreds, with flutes and French horns and earnest two-minute testimony. The decisions that matter were made months ago, in rooms they'll never see. By Pseudo Publius · April 21, 2026 The makeshift orchestra at the Civic Center Plaza on Monday was touching. Musicians answered a 48-hour call, brought their own instruments, and filled the downtown concrete with "Eye of the Tiger" and "I Gotta Feeling" while arts nonprofit directors prepared their two-minute remarks for the council inside. It was democratic, spirited, and, by the architecture of the San Diego budget process, almost entirely beside the point. Mayor Todd Gloria's proposed Fiscal Year 2027 budget, released April 15, cuts arts and culture funding from $13.8 million to roughly $2 million — an 85 percent reduction. It also closes library branches on additio...
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