Mark Young's Recap

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As far as the launch went, I was clueless and asked lots of questions. It was helpful being able to listen in on the communications.

The glider people were not too happy. First of all I parked the helicopter in the way, then the delays led on. The problem was not so much with the Gliders coming in, but the tow plane coming back in with the tow cable dragging as they landed. They have some agreement with the airport not too land the tow plane on the main runway. Again, none of this was planned and the delays just went on and on. So Scott and I left a little early, mainly to get out of the way. I was very impressed with the "shack" that was set up and the computers tracking, ATV, etc.

Found Scott to be very helpful (lightweight too..) and he had a great handle on communications and in particular digital packet information. For some reason we were not able to get altitude on his little rig and had to rely on relays from base.

The frequency was very busy and I was not able to get my VHF/UHF FM radio to downband into the ham radio frequencies. That made Scott's workload a little heavier, having to relay everything to me.

Another strange thing was that, while the balloon was over us, the Doppler was reading an inverted bearing. The 4 antennas are on the bottom and are set up for 121.5 spacing, but I DF 150-160 all the time. Am not sure why this happened.

Also I could not listen in to the 448 freq and it seemed the frequency was so busy that Scott could not get in a word edgewise. Made me nervous at the time, thinking the balloon was 30K ft and climbing, only to find out it was coming back down.

We intercepted the balloon at about 4000' AGL and began circling it. We made about 5 circles and Scott got some good photos of it with all the payload attached. It came down, drug the GAINS payload about 100 yards and hooked on a fence. We landed close by and a little up wind. The wind was really blowing, and all I could think about was the 2 or 3 times the payload string broke back at Meadow lake. I asked Scott if we shouldn't at least go pull things down from blowing in the wind. All of the payload was airborne except the GAINS unit in the fence. Before Scott could get on the air and before the ground teams could get there, the line broke and off it went.

Now for the scary part. We decided to go try to catch it and had a fishing hook and line (trailer hitch tied to 1/2" nylon rope), yes Scott has pictures. My thought was that there was no way in hell we were going to get this thing, it had just lost about 25 lbs. Sure enough we soon heard that it was headed back through 15K feet, and so we gave up the chase.

We decided to return to the GAINS payload and hang out there. We were trying to find out the status of the remainder of the equipment on the flight and were unable to reach out to the repeater on the ground with the low power radio, but the mobiles could. We then found out that the remainder of the payload had been cut loose and sent to the ground. We got coordinates back, went out and helped out with the recovery.

Now the bad part, the payloads were cut loose and we were without the knowledge that something very lethal (to us) was coming down. Undoubtedly, we passed it in the air while heading back to the original payload. I am not sure how close we may have come to the descending payloads and whether or not we were in danger of its hitting us.

While everyone was making decisions on the fly, some knew more than others, some had better reception than others, and we did not have a way to talk directly to the field trackers on anything other than a repeater that was by now 70 or 80 miles away, barraged by a lot of talk, much of which was unnecessary. We picked up Ann Trudeau and carried her with the rest of the payload the mile and a half back to the road . BTW, sure was nice of the guys there to send the only lady in the group out to fetch it! :) She got her kudos though, she got to ride in the helicopter, they missed out.

We regrouped and decided to go get some food and fuel at Limon. We were able to get into the PPFMA repeater system at Limon and call someone who could provide a cell phone number to call the base camp. We landed at Wendy's, got to meet the town cops, who were wondering who was flying in and landing there, had lunch. We called back in to the ground station and got the latest word that the balloon was still climbing through 90K ft. We decided to head home, defeated with 1 balloon still un-recovered, the GAINS test a failure.

Some ideas to think about:

1. We should have direct communications for the tracking not tied up by all the chat, only to coordinate, with safety as the priority. I would assume a VHF frequency would work for this. After the second recovery, that was done and the ground units all started using a VHF channel as they too, were soon out of reach of the repeater.
2. Publish a list of cell phone numbers of all involved. Believe it or not we had great cell phone coverage out there.
3. Do not make a decision to cut things away without confirmation the helicopter is aware of the dropping objects.

Just some ideas from an ignorant outsider that had a blast. It is an interesting caveat that the weather that NOAA tries hard to understand, was indeed the same weather that caused the best laid plans to go amuck. No one expected or would have ever guessed that what happened would have ever happened. I take my hat off to everyone that was involved. I want to come fly again, I am hooked. I need to get my Ham license, that would help and definitely need to work on the radios in the helicopter to make them work better. For the first time out, not too bad though. We all had fun, found all the payloads, and no one got hurt (the most important).

See you all at the next one. Thanks Scott, you were a great passenger. (no guys, as hard as I tried, I could not make him sick)

Mark Young