An Art of Air and Fire: Brazil’s Renegade Balloonists

Following in my father's footsteps, I became a commercial pilot really young, before quitting to pursue tech, I had logged a couple of thousand hours. I still fly teach at a flight school for fun.

"TV news increasingly reported sensationalistic stories of the dangers of ballooning, and public opinion started turning against baloeiros."

This statement made my blood boil since me and other 13 people almost got murdered by those "artists", this is what happened:

In 2009 I was flying a cessna caravan with 14 people on board. We had IFR clearance on 35R in SBSP. Since this was a precision landing you don't exactly pay attention to what's outside. At around 7500ft out of nowhere a balloon was in an odd position right above the airplane, without much time to think we "dove" a bit to go under it, only to be surprised by some kind of basket full of fireworks, attached to the main ballon with a single line. We hit the line, luckily it broke and both the balloon and the basket didn't get stuck in the airplane. The line got into the right wing 2cm short of a tank.

This balloon fell in the urban area of a city with 11 million of residents.

My story is just one out of thousands, which will not make into that documentary.

I'm just gonna copy & paste my comment on another site about this: As a Brazilian, I can tell you that this is more than moral panic. Those balloons are a major fire hazard. There are many, many instances of fires breaking out because of balloons in forests, houses, warehouses... They're also a huge air traffic hazard (listen to ATC near Brazilian airports and you're pretty much guaranteed to hear pilots complaining about them). Just last week a balloon "landed" in the tarmac of Brazil's largest airport, barely missing an airliner. To top that off, they're annoying. These balloons usually carry fireworks and are launched late at night, so you'll wake up at 2 AM to the awesome sounds of fireworks. Sure, they're pretty to look at, but they're also a really bad idea.

As a Brazilian, I don't like the tone of this article at all. This is not about criminalization of harmless behavior, it's about criminalization of a major fire hazard in a country with lots of trees to be burned and little infrastructure to deal with it.