Construction of Hot Air Balloons Made

Video Transcript

" Hi! I am Jeff Thompson, hot air balloon pilot for Thompson Air hot air balloon rides. We are here talking with Expert Village about hot air balloons and we are going to talk in this segment about what the balloon is made of. A hot air balloon is made out of a nylon. This nylon is a real lightweight and only weighs 1.2 ounces per yard. It has a 4 ounce urethane coating on the fabric on the inside of the fabric to seal the fabric make it airtight. This keeps the air in the balloon. The hot air balloon envelope is about 77,000 cubic feet, to give you an idea how big that is your average 2000 square foot home holds about 18,000 cubic feet of air. So a balloon like this would hold the same amount of air that you would find in about five 2000 square foot homes. The balloon is generated literally by hand, the fabric is cut in pieces and these pieces are sewn together in what we called gores. There are about 18 panels in a gore and there are 24 gores in a balloon and so it takes about six weeks to sew a balloon like this together. This fabric is extremely strong. This fabric will hold 65 pounds of weight per square inch of fabric. So literally a fabric piece 3 or 4 inches will lift a human being off the ground, so extremely, extremely tough stuff. The average life of a balloon like this is around 500 flights, about 500 hours of flight time before the fabric will be degraded enough that it won’t pass its inspection, because it is a licensed aircraft, it has to be inspected every year, the fabric is tested for porosity how much air will leak through the fabric as well as strength to see how strong the fabric is. Anyway that is a balloon envelope and I am Jeff Thompson from Thompson Air and we talking with Expert Village today."