It is a bit indescribable.
You're up there and you're just floating
and literally floating in the air and everything is just so still
and so peaceful.
Of course you have the competitive nerve
and anxiety and that sort of thing that most people have with any sport
but I find that as soon as I'm in the basket
and as soon as I take off it just, it all goes.
Hello, I'm Nicola Scaife
and I'm the two-time women's world hot air balloon champion.
I don't think many people realise that ballooning is a sport
and it's something that you can compete at.
I think they see images of balloons floating in the sky
and that's kind of about where it stops.
Competitive ballooning isn't so much a race,
it's testing your skill of piloting and your skill of navigation.
There's all different tasks that you have to achieve.
Um, one of them might be a big cross
that the organisers have laid out in a paddock.
So you navigate to the cross
and you throw out a little weighted streamer down on the cross.
So closest is best.
It's pretty amazing during a competition
when you have so many balloons in the air.
You've got to have your wits about you a little bit as well
but yeah, it's great, and you can yell out and say hello to someone
and give them a wave and that sort of thing
and it's quite a nice camaraderie between all of the pilots.
What I love about ballooning is that you can really just go anywhere
and go ballooning.
You pull up in a paddock, we take the basket off the trailer
and attach the balloon
and we start the cold inflation which is just using a fan
to fill it up with cold air.
Then we turn the burners on.
And that heats the air inside the balloon
and the whole balloon stands up
and that's when it's almost ready for flight.
It's so basic it just works.
It's a law of physics, hot air rises
and there's just that little tiny puff of heat extra
and that's enough to make you lift off.
It really is just a complete surprise of how you feel
and what you think about it all but I just remember thinking like
"How good is this?"
Just how peaceful it was
and I guess I just got a really positive feeling from it all.
You can't actually sear a balloon
so when you're flying all you can do is adjust your altitudes.
The winds don't all travel at the same speed
and the same direction,
at different altitudes they're doing different things
so you're using the different wind layers and working out the speeds
and directions of the wind to allow you to get from point A to point B.
Because it's such a peaceful and quiet thing,
when the burners come on I think it is a real surprise for people
so yeah, they are really powerful,
they have to keep all of the air hot and keep us afloat.
Making anything is very rewarding.
Balloons are interesting because they're colourful.
They're handcrafted, we've got a really nice team of dedicated staff
and artisans.
So that's basically a fireproof fibre.
By the time you get to this pink fabric here
it's far enough away from the burner
that you have to be trying hard to melt it.
Ballooning was man's first form of flight
and that was the Montgolfier brothers in France
and it was basically a paper bag held down over a fire.
The air heated up, the balloon flew away,
cooled down and fell out of the sky.
Pretty rough way to go ballooning compared to how it is now.
Ah, the software.
I've designed a add-on to a common mapping program
that has enabled us to write all the tools that competition pilots need
to plan and execute their flights.
Having someone win flying our equipment and using my software?
Very proud.
Yeah. Very excited.
I'm part of a ballooning family.
My husband's parents started ballooning
and that's how he got into it.
In my first competition I was 5 months pregnant with Hugo
so he's been with me for the whole journey of my competition career
for the last three years and I don't know how much of a chance
Hugo has of not being a balloonist, I think he's been in it since day one.
He'll be a competitive pilot for sure.
I'd definitely like to see more women taking up the sport.
It's not a physical sport, it's a mental sport,
and it's about problem solving and it's exciting for me
to know that there isn't anything restricting how I can improve
in the sport and how far I can go.
When you're viewing the world from above
it puts everything in perspective.
You're up there and it's just you and it's nature
and it's a really beautiful thing to experience.