Free Balloons

While most of the country's air consciousness is concentrated on airplanes, and to a lesser degree on rigid dirigibles and still less upon semi-rigids ("blimps"), free-ballooning is still extant in the U. S. The Army and Navy still keep spherical gasbags for observation purposes. Tire companies build balloons to sell rubber and to keep ballooning alive as a sport. Newspapers also enter balloons in races, mostly for publicity but partly for tradition. The trophy for the world's ballooning championship was given by a newspaper man, the late James Gordon Bennett.

National elimination nights are held annually to determine the U. S. entries in the Bennett Cup race. This year's elimination flight started at Pittsburgh. Better luck has been experienced when the start was made farther west, in the flatlands. In fact, last week's start was tragically unsuccessful. Rising above Pittsburgh, the big bags were caught and jostled like soap-bubbles by a 55-m.p.h. wind. An electrical storm of mountain violence broke upon them. Eleven of the 14 starters were driven down, three of them by direct hits of the lightning. Lieutenant Paul Evert, pilot of the Army's No. 3 balloon, was killed. Pilot Ward T. Van Orman, winner of many a big race, and Walter T. Morton, his ballooning comrade of years, guided a wreck to earth as best they could. Morton was killed in the crash. Van Orman's leg snapped.

Pilot Carl K. Wollam of the City of Cleveland, the third balloon blasted, had luck, landed safely. But his aide, James F. Cooper, was seared by the electric bolt.

While morticians laid out the dead, three balloons rode out the storm and drifted far away. The Army's No. 1 balloon, piloted by Captain Edmund W. E. Kepner, landed at Weems, Va., to keep from being blown out to sea. Captain Kepner found himself to be the probable winner of the race though he had ballooned only some 539 miles.*

*Ward T. Van Orman won last year with a flight of 715 miles, from Akron, Ohio, to Bar Harbor, Me. Balloon-race winners are not officially announced until after their instruments have been examined and checked.