Kathy's Aerial Surveyor Diary

Production team

Day One

Building an "airborne Mars Rover" - hopefully it'll be easier than a Mars Rover stuck on the ground. We have black plastic bin bags and sticky tape, so we tried sticking bits together to make a giant cylinder and a giant sphere to compare.

It sounds so simple - the black plastic bodies will absorb the heat from the sun like crazy, get hot and rise. But the wind is a real issue; it always is in ballooning. I live in Bristol, a Mecca for balloonists. There's a world famous Balloon Festival there every year, but balloons can only fly when the wind's not too fierce. The wind whipped the cylindrical balloon to shreds - it looked mad, lashing about all over the place. So we focused on the spherical balloon, which was calmer in the winds.

By the end of day one, we decided we'd build a sphere - but it needed to be bigger.

Day Two

Since we're going to have to try flying our balloon in the early morning - to avoid the winds that pick up from about 8.00 am - we have to finish it today, to fly it tomorrow morning.

So we cut plastic, lay it on the ground and stuck it together. A lot of cutting, scrambling around on the floor, and sticking. Got covered in dirt. Covered everyone in dirt. Stick here, cut there. Finally, we manage to stick it all together and ... disaster. We stuck it together wrongly and it wasn't a sphere - it was a crazy thing with ears.

Cut it to bits and began again. More dirt, more sweat, more sticky tape ... it took hours.

And what do you know? We messed it up AGAIN! Just astonishing. Not enough time to do it again, and it was slightly better than before, so we decided to live with it (no choice really!). Ridiculous!

Production team

Day Three

We got up around 5.00 am, to make sure we could fly the balloon before the winds picked up. On the way towards the mine we got closer and closer to a band of cloud ... I was not hopeful the balloon would fly anyway, but no way would it fly in even the slightest cloud cover.

After some deliberations, we decided to drive away from the cloud and try in the desert - appropriately in the same place we'd tried the Mars Rover in the first challenge. So we stood in the desert, and wafted the balloon full with air. The series producer wandered off back to the vehicles to get his camera, saying to the crew, "Don't worry, guys - not much is going to happen It’s not going to fly" - and the beauty started to rise from the ground! Again, it was another hopelessly exciting moment. We were all dashing about like crazy things, hearts lifting as the mad, black, eared balloon lifted. We even got worried it was going too high!

Mike B worked like a trooper getting the carbon dioxide filter working. It needed some delicate balancing to make it a 'fair test'. We joined in, trying to help where we could. All very excited at the end - it working was the best end to the day we possibly could have had.