Checking the sky at dawn, a resident of Huron, S.D., might be surprised to see a colorful hot air balloon floating by. The balloon’s pilot, Dan Strutz of Bethesda Church, recently earned his FAA private pilot’s license with a rating for hot air balloons. As he transitioned from a pastoral role (Community Bible Church in Mountain Lake, Minn.) to joining the team on wife Susanna’s family farm, he also decided South Dakota was a perfect place to pursue this 20-year-old dream. Susanna is Dan’s leading chase crew member.
How did you earn your license?
There aren’t many hot air balloon pilots licensed to train, but I found a guy in Sioux Falls. To get the required 10 flight hours as a student, it was a lot of getting up at 3:30 a.m. to drive the two hours for a dawn flight. A lot of it is learning about the weather, not just what is on the ground, but up to thousands of feet where it affects how the balloon is going to fly.
How do you control the balloon?
With ballooning, where the wind goes is where you’re going. We just have good control up and down, burning and venting hot air. Usually there’s different wind directions at different elevations. To “steer” you navigate the balloon between those layers. Occasionally, we may even use an unusual tool to detect the winds beneath us—our spit out the side of the basket.
So how do you know where you’ll land?
I try to pick a landing spot and then reverse engineer to decide where to take off based off the winds. You can land almost anywhere – in someone’s back yard, on a dirt road, in an open field. The goal is to find a safe landing spot that is easy for your chase crew to get to and pack up the balloon and get home. A flight usually lasts about an hour.
Is it scary to be so high?
I actually don’t love heights, but when I’m up in the basket, it’s a peaceful experience. You don’t feel the wind so it doesn’t feel like you’re high. It just feels like everything is very small down below.
How do people react to seeing you up there?
There’s something about a balloon floating in the sky that’s almost magical. We’ll be flying and I’ll have two or three cars just following along—like a little parade. Or we might land in a road in front of someone’s house and everyone comes running out, sometimes still in their pajamas. To bring other people into this joy is fun.
How does your hobby give you a chance to share faith?
Balloonists are not necessarily a very spiritual community, yet there’s an appreciation for the calm, peacefulness of seeing God’s creation below. It’s a community that has this hint of spirituality and needs to know the Creator.
Kathy Heinrichs Wiest is a freelance writer who loves the smell of whole wheat bread in the oven, the feel of an orange being plucked from the tree and the view from her front porch in Kingsburg, California. On Sunday mornings you’ll find her in the fourth pew from the front on the left at Kingsburg MB Church, moved by the hymns and praise songs and inspired by the stories of God at work locally and around the world. She and her husband, Steve, own Dovetail Remodeling. They have two grown daughters, one son-in-law and a precious granddaughter.
