Correction Appended
Ed Yost, who fastened two propane tanks to what essentially looked like a lawn chair, attached that contraption to a 40-foot-diameter white nylon balloon and sailed above the Nebraska plain on a brisk fall day in 1960, becoming “the father of modern hot-air ballooning,” died May 27 at his home in Vadito, N.M. He was 87.
The cause was a heart attack, his son Greg said.
By using propane, rather than the far more combustible hydrogen (witness the Hindenburg disaster), Mr. Yost was the originator of a sport that now has thousands of aficionados around the world. And his feats, often with balloons far larger than that first propane-powered craft, included measuring cosmic rays in the stratosphere, crossing the English Channel and barely missing becoming the first balloonist to traverse the Atlantic — he came down 700 miles from the coast of Portugal.
It was on Oct. 22, 1960, on a farm in Bruning, Neb., that Mr. Yost strapped himself into that chair, placed his feet on a dowel dangling from ropes, ignited the propane tanks to heat air that had been pumped by fan into the balloon, and lifted off. The flight lasted 25 minutes, reached 500 feet and covered three miles.
“It changed ballooning forever,” said Becky Wigeland, curator of the National Balloon Museum and the Ballooning Hall of Fame in Indianola, Iowa. “It started the modern sport of hot-air ballooning.”
The first human-bearing balloon flight — in fact, the first human flight in history — occurred in Paris on Nov. 21, 1783, when Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent, the Marquis d’Arlandes, lighted a pile of wood and straw on a small platform to lift their silk balloon 500 feet in the air.
Continue reading the main storyIn the 177 years between that first flight and Mr. Yost’s propane-propelled launch, the rare balloonist either pumped helium, at great expense, into the balloon or used hydrogen to heat the fanned-in air. Most people could share the experience only by buying a ride at a carnival, Ms. Wigeland said, and rising “maybe 20 feet” in a balloon tethered to the ground. “Ed’s flight showed you could fly from place to place,” she said. “Balloon manufacturers got into the business, and now flying hot-air balloons is a growing passion throughout the world.”
Mr. Yost would eventually hold 26 patents dealing with ballooning equipment, including inflation mechanisms, balloon body structures and gondola designs. In 2003, he was the first inductee into the National Ballooning Hall of Fame, and last year the British Balloon and Airship Club presented him with the Lipton Award.
Paul Edward Yost, who preferred to be called Ed, was born in Bristow, Iowa, on June 30, 1919. Besides his son Greg, of Houston, he is survived by another son, Dale, of Singapore, and a granddaughter. His wife, Suzanne Robinson, died in 2001. Mr. Yost’s first marriage, to Charmian Kilson, ended in divorce.
After graduating from the Boeing School of Aeronautics in Oakland, Calif., in 1940, Mr. Yost was hired as a civilian employee of the Army and assigned to balloon technology. One device he worked on was a box sealed with dry ice to be lifted by a black balloon that would drop propaganda leaflets into occupied lands when the ice evaporated.
Mr. Yost was a bush pilot in Alaska for several years after the war. In 1949, he was hired as an engineer by General Mills, which at the time had a high-altitude research division doing contract work for the Navy. In 1952, Mr. Yost’s team sent a 3.3 million-cubic-foot balloon into the stratosphere to study cosmic rays; his first balloon had held 30,000 cubic feet of heated air.
When General Mills stopped working for the Navy, Mr. Yost and three colleagues started Raven Industries, in Sioux Falls, S.D., to work on government contracts; the military was then interested in the potential of balloons to lift equipment behind enemy lines. After Mr. Yost’s propane-powered flight, the company also produced balloons for the growing commercial market.
Mr. Yost did not just manufacture balloons. On April 13, 1963, he and a Raven employee, Don Piccard, became the first hot-air balloonists to cross the English Channel. The flight took three hours and 17 minutes, with the balloon flying between newly erected power line poles in its rapid descent.
Thirteen years later, Mr. Yost set records for distance and time aloft in his solo attempt to cross the Atlantic. His balloon — with a boat-shaped gondola — flew farther than the distance to Europe, but was blown too far south. Leaving Bar Harbor, Me., on Oct. 6, 1976, Mr. Yost was in flight for 107 hours and 37 minutes and traveled 2,740 miles before hitting the sea 200 miles east of the Azores. The balloon, called the Silver Fox, was featured on the cover of National Geographic.
Two years later, Ben Abruzzo, Maxie Anderson and Larry Newman completed the first balloon crossing of the Atlantic, landing in France. Their balloon, the Double Eagle II, had been designed by Mr. Yost.
An obituary on June 4 of Ed Yost, considered the father of modern hot-air ballooning, referred incorrectly to his use of hydrogen before air inside a balloon was heated with propane. He used hydrogen, which is lighter than air, to fill balloons — not to heat air that had been fanned into balloons.
The obituary also included erroneous information from the National Balloon Museum about two of Mr. Yost’s balloon flights and the Navy research contract under which Mr. Yost worked, and it referred incorrectly to an associate, Don Piccard. The balloon Mr. Yost flew on Oct. 22, 1960, was not orange striped, it was all white. The Navy research contract that Mr. Yost worked on was held by a company that Mr. Yost and three colleagues from General Mills formed, Raven Industries — not by General Mills, for which he went to work in 1949. Mr. Piccard, who flew with Mr. Yost on April 13, 1963, in the first hot-air balloon to cross the English Channel, was an employee of Raven Industries, not a partner in the company. On the balloon’s descent during that crossing, it flew between newly erected power line poles, but did not narrowly miss power lines, because no lines had yet been strung on the poles.