If all goes as planned, Bobby Bradley will lift off from a desolate patch of central New Mexico on Saturday and float into history.
The nine-year-old son of two of Albuquerque’s well-known balloonists hopes to become the youngest trained pilot to fly solo in a hot air balloon shortly after dawn.
For the past week and half he has been practising takeoffs and landing in an ultra-light balloon built specifically for his big day.
“He tethered last Saturday, Sunday and Tuesday,” said his dad, Troy Bradley, who is one of the local ballooning community’s most respected instructors.
“So he’s got three days of tether in and actually did 50 take offs and landings. He was going up to maybe 30 to 40 feet, 40 feet tops. So it was a very controlled situation where we able to get him up and down.”
Bradley on Friday afternoon said that the weather forecast was looking perfect for his son’s early morning flight and a caravan was being planned from a local hotel parking lot to the site where Bobby will launch his balloon. Bobby, he said, was “very, very excited.”
The ultra-light was built by family and friends from a larger traditional hot air balloon that Bobby was piloting with his mother, Tami Bradley, and fellow pilot Randy Rogers.
Bobby has been flying in balloons for more than half his life.
He has nearly 30 hours of flight time with his father in a standard hot air balloon. But he can’t get his pilot’s license until he’s 16, so his family and friends built the smaller balloon that is classified as an ultra-light aircraft to enable Saturday’s solo flight. —AP