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Friday. October 22,1976 _Three Killed As Balloon Hits Area Power LineCHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP)-A hot air balloon making a promotional flight across Charlotte Thursday struck a 100,000-volt power line and exploded into flames, killing the gondola’s three occupants.t The balloon crashed minutes before i p.m. near a city park in a residential area about one mile east of Independence Square in the heart of the city.The Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses and inspects balloons, began an investigation of the crash. An FAA spokesman declined to speculate on the cause of the accident.The dead were Identified as Sidney Gibson, 53, and his son, Patrick, 28, the balloon owners from Levlttown, Pa., and a passenger, James E. Vogan, 29, of Towson, Md.The balloon was being used to promote the Mecklenburg Jaycees Charities’ Old Time Fair, which opened Tuesday at the Metroiina Fairgrounds on Charlotte’s outskirts.Vogan was an employe of the Tidewater Helicopter Co., Sparrows Point, Md.f which is staging $6 helicopter rides at the fair. Workers said he had gone along for the ride.Guy Henderson, 30, general manager at the fair, said he last talked to the three men about 10 a.m. He said the balloon carried a loudspeaker with which they could shout to people on the ground.“We’d canceled flights on Tuesday and Wednesday because of the wind conditions,” Henderson said. “But they decided they’d go up for about two hours today and fly at about 50 feet, so that people could hearthem.”The orange, red, blue and yellow balloon, described as 10 stories high, was launched from the Johnson C. Smith University athletic field about 12:30 p.m., according to assistant football coqch Kenneth Powell.The balloon might have ascended to as high as 2,000 feet before it began a sudden and steep descent,according to two aerial photographers who watched from an airplane several miles away.“We were flying at 1,500 feel,” said pilot Blaine Nash. “It looked like they could have been up about 2,000 or maybe 2,500 feet. They fell very fast.”Tom Johnson, 14, was among a group of Piedmont Middle School pupils who watched the balloon descend as they prepared to go to lunch. The ninth grader said the balloon passed over the school and appeared as though it might land in the school’s football field.The balloon began to rock back and forth, passed on beyond a line of trees and then blew up, the boy said. “It looked like someone had dropped a bomb. Then it went up in smoke,” he said.Businessman Joe Townsend, who was watching from the 24th floor of the NCNB Plaza at Independence Square, told newsmen the balloon and gondola appeared to fall straight down to the power lines. “It just seemed to disintegrate in one ball of fire,” he said.At least two acquaintances of the Gibsons told newsmen they saw the father stitching a footlong tear in the nyion balloon earlier in the week.“He told me it tore when he took it out of his van,” said Tom McCoy, 21, who was helping to set up rides at the fair. Gibson told another acquaintance he was sure the patchwould hold.The balloon, which had pictures of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S, Grant on the sides, was used in the 1968 Warner Brothers* movie, “The Great Bank Robbery.”It was to be used at the fair for rides, a fair spokesman said, but it had not yet been used for that pur* pose.Friends of the Gibsons in Pennsylvania described the father-son team as “barnstormers,” two men who loved the adventure of flying balloons but were not making much money at it.
Newspaper Details
Statesville Record and Landmark
Statesville, North Carolina, US
Fri, Oct 22, 1976
Page 4
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NC, USA 02 Sep 2019
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