David Fleming is an amateur pilot, but found a way to get an even better view of earth with the help of a weather balloon.
To figure out what he would need and how to do it, Fleming looked online to see what he would need and how to see it up.
After a couple of months and about $500, he had a balloon attached to a parachute and a lunch box.
Inside that lunch box were two cameras, a GPS and a transmitter.
Once he had everything assembled and put together, he took it to Thrasher Park. That is where he launched it.
Once it was in the air, he used the GPS onboard to get the balloons coordinates back to their laptops to see where it was going and how high it was, so hopefully he could find it when it landed.
As the balloon lifts, you get a bird’s eye view of the Roanoke Valley. As the balloon lifted higher, you see the clouds in the sky. Going higher and higher, you can see the edge of the earth.
Then, after climbing 95,000 feet, it fell and then the fun of finding where it landed.
“Well, it went a lot farther than I thought it would go," said Fleming. “From the winds aloft data that I had, I was expecting it to land a little northeast of Bedford, but once it got into those winds, especially on the descent, it just took off and went about 45 miles farther than I thought it would."
Instead of Bedford, they found it in a field in Nelson County.
After a successful first flight, Fleming says he plans to send another balloon into the heavens. “I’m working on a weather station that will measure temperature, atmospheric pressure and humidity. It will be interesting to see how all that chances as altitude increases," Fleming told men.
Because the package attached to the balloon was under four pounds, Fleming was not required to alert the FAA. He did, just as a heads up.
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