Bottom End Components of Hot Air Balloons

Video Transcript

" Hi! My name is Jeff Thompson for Thompson Air hot air balloon rides and I am here with Expert Village and today we are going to talk about the bottom end. The bottom end is what pilots refer to as their basket of a hot air balloon. Anything that goes below the fabric part, the envelope is called the bottom end. The bottom end includes our basket or gondola, it includes our fuel tanks, it also includes the burners and the instruments for a hot air balloon. And here on the table we have got an actual hot air balloon burner set and instruments. We will talk about the instruments first, because we can go through that real quickly. Basically there are only three instruments in a hot air balloon, a vertical speed indicator, which tells your speed of flight up or down, an altimeter, which will tell you your altitude above the ground level or the above sea level, whichever you set that for and the temperature gauge. It is important as we fly to monitor the temperature of the inside of our balloon so that we don’t overheat the balloon and damage the fabric. A set of burners on a hot air balloon is really an amazing wonder, these burners generate 18 million Btu each, so to give you a comparison your home furnace that heats your entire house is rated around 100,000 Btu, so one of these burner units can produce enough heat to generate the same heat a 125 home furnaces would do going full blast at the same time. They are very, very simple in operation. There is only one main blast valve and this valve is used open and close and turn the burners on and off. There are several bypass layers on them, so that if you ever have a problem with your main valve you have got a backup for it. The flame you see here on the bottom is used to generate our incredible power. One cubic centimeter of liquid propane will go into this and make 40 cubic centimeters of gas, so it is kind of like having a turbocharger on your burner, this will generate 4000 pounds of generated force coming out of the jet from the bottom of the can and that where we get our power. Your barbecue grill at home uses the vapor of the top of the tank, in a hot air balloon we actually draw the liquid out of the bottom of the tank and that where we are getting our power from. This will heat a 140,000 cubic feet of air up a 100 degrees from outside temperature in just a matter of a few seconds, it is amazing the power of these and I am Jeff Thompson for Expert Village."