Hot Air Balloon Gallery

Jessica Smith and Her Boys

I am homeschooling my 6 and 8 year old boys this year and since we're reading The Twenty One Balloons, I got the idea to see if it would be possible to make a real, flyable hot air balloon. I was SO happy to find your site and your excellent step-by-step videos. The following are the pictures we took of our process (our son made the balloon with an older friend). They were very able to do most of the steps fairly independently, which was fun to see. We were able to get the right kind of custodial grade bag from our church, where they had rolls of them. GREAT PROJECT!   --Jessica Smith

Measuring the diameter of the bag

Cutting the foil square

Making the straw frame

hot gluing on the candles (we started with 4 and I did cut them down out of weight consideration)

Straw frame done!

Taping it all together

The boys suggested 4 candles gave inflation, but no lift.

The boys suggested more fire power! so we added 2 more candles and got lift off!
They wanted to try it outside and it didn't last long in the breeze.

Professor Adolfo Batisda

Professor Adolfo Bastida of the University of Murcia in Spain and who also runs a science program for young people sent these pictures. The project was complicated by trying to find the right kind of plastic bag. "You cannot imagine how many different bags we tested. Finally we found it: that right plastic is used by some hair dressers to cover the shoulders of their clients! Last Friday we did our balloons following your directions and it was amazing."

Joshua Allen Harris

This video link is to an artist named Joshua Allen Harris who makes surreal inflated creatures from thin plastic bags. I doubt it could be applied to a small hot air balloon (surface area, see Part 6), but the shear brilliance of the art is worth a look.