For a chap who gets vertigo when he climbs a ladder at home, Steve Campbell doesn't have a problem releasing the tether on his hot air balloon and surrendering himself to the vagaries of the atmosphere over the ACT.
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"It's an odd thing, isn't it?" the former Virgin Airlines flight attendant said with a broad smile as he joined dozens of other pilots in the pre-dawn light for the opening of Canberra's annual balloon festival.
"It must be just that connection with the earth that's unsettling for me.
"Once I'm up there," he said, pointing to the sky, "it doesn't bother me a bit."
In the darkness before dawn on Saturday, thousands of people pattered down to the Patrick White lawns under the murky sliver of a waning moon to watch the spectacle of inflation and departure, with near-perfect light easterly wind conditions sending the balloons aloft.
There were last-minute kisses and hugs, cheery waves and pumped fists as, rather appropriately, the blue RAAF balloon took flight first as dawn broke.
As if by a prearranged signal, the rest then floated skywards in their own good time, drifting serenely out across Lake Burley Griffin toward the Brindabellas, to some impressed "oohs" and "aahs" from the crowd below.
The seasoned balloon pilots always watch the first to take-off closely, assessing its lift rate, drift and trajectory to calculate their own path skywards.
While it all seems a little ah hoc compared with a conventional airfield operation, there's no entanglements, mishaps or harsh words exchanged. Some of the balloons gently bumped against each other as they filled but this appeared to be expected, given the density of the area.
Blessedly, hot air ballooning appears to adroitly side-stepped the modern legal mire of occupational health and safety where flouro vests, no-go zones and pre-event safety briefings so often prevail.
Preparing for their flights, the balloonists didn't mind the huge, curious throng of people milling around their hefty propane tanks and wicker baskets while they rolled out the huge 30-metre nylon bellies for inflation, started up industrial fans to begin the process, and test-fired their burners.
There are some polite warnings of "best step clear, there" and "watch those wires, young feller" but there was a collectively amiable and anticipatory atmosphere during the pre-flight phase.
It's curious, too, that old-fashioned woven wicker is still the preferred material for basket construction, just as French ballooning pioneers the Mongolfier brothers used hundreds of years ago.
Ian Wadey, a visiting pilot from Sussex in the UK, said it was nothing to do with tradition, just practicality.
"A lot of materials have been tried but you can't beat wicker; it's light, strong and flexible," he said.
It was surprising to hear, too, that a typical 105 cubic feet balloon can surprisingly lift as much as one tonne of weight, depending on the ambient air temperature.
Most hot air balloons take between 20 to 30 litres of gas burn to inflate and carry around 160 litres on board in twin tanks. There are two main burners - the extra one for redundancy - and each has a quieter, less vigorous "cowburner" generally used for trimming the balloon during flight.
Most of the balloons lifting off from the lawns carried three or four people although one chap took off alone in what appeared from below to be a dining chair with a propane tank strapped to it, offering a cheery wave to the crowd as he drifted away.
Excellent flying conditions are expected for much of the Canberra Balloon Spectacular, which will be held over the next nine days.
