"Snagged by balloon ropes, woman soars, falls"

By Joe McDonald Tribune Newspapers: The Morning Call
Fri Nov 4, 9:40 AM ET

Standing by the hot-air balloon as it rose, Kathleen Long was warning others to watch out for the vent ropes when two of them caught her ankle and hoisted her into the air.

Her husband, John, who was the pilot with two passengers, heard a commotion below. He looked over the side of the balloon and saw his wife dangling upside down, 60 feet above the ground.

He saw the bottom of her sneaker, yelled and heard her calmly say, "I'm OK," as people on the ground screamed, "No, no, no" and the balloon swept Kathleen Long away.

John Long described Sunday's mishap in Hunterdon County, N.J., during a news conference Wednesday in St. Luke's Hospital in Fountain Hill, Pa., where his wife is recovering.

As his wife hung in the air, Long, a steam-fitter from Warren County, N.J., said he remembered the balloon safety tapes showing how "it's always bad" when accidents like this happen and kept thinking, "I have to get her closer to the ground."

There were big trees and one smaller tree looming. Long said he "got lucky" and his wife, 58, a former teacher who works at a Lowe's store in Phillipsburg, N.J., hit the smaller one.

Long, 55, hoped "Toady," as he affectionately calls his wife, would catch onto something, maybe a limb.

He later learned she crashed through the tin roof of an old barn and landed head first on rotting floorboards.

If she had sailed through the barn at any other spot, Long said, she could have hit old machinery or bracing that probably would have killed her.

He said the part of the roof where she fell through, leaving a 4-foot hole, was at a seam with no underlying supports.

"If she landed anywhere else, we wouldn't be having this conversation," Long said. "Everything was rotted and soft."

The Longs were working their side business, The Flight Fantastic, which takes people on balloon rides.

He was taking a couple for a ride that was supposed to include a proposal.

After the balloon was filled with hot air, Long told four people holding it down to let go, and as it began to lift, his wife's ankle got snagged.

At the speed the balloon was rising, it would have reached 500 to 600 feet in a minute.

"Toady, are you OK?" Long said he yelled over the side of the basket. "She said, `I'm OK."'

After his wife fell from the ropes, the balloon gained altitude, Long said, and he began looking for a place to land, but there were no good spots.

He got on his two-way radio and told his ground crew he needed help and called his daughter, Jess, at her home in Frederick, Md., telling her there had been an accident and her mother was hurt.

"I need you home now," Long told his daughter.

Long spent about 45 minutes searching for a place to land, and along the way asked the couple to do him a favor and get engaged. They said "no."

"We're going to pray for your wife," he said they told him.

Long said he finally found a place to land, a cornfield near the Mountainview Youth Correctional Facility near Annandale, N.J.

He told his passengers, "It's going to be a little rough." The rectangular basket hit the ground on one of its narrow sides.

After landing, he said, "I just started to cry and said, `I made it."'

Neither he nor his passengers were hurt.

Long said his wife spent 25 hours in the hospital's intensive care unit and her condition has been upgraded to fair. Doctors have said Kathleen Long, who suffered broken bones and bruises, will be "back to normal" in two or three months.

"Your wife is one lucky lady," he quoted doctors as saying. "I told them `No kidding."'

Long said he has not decided whether he will return to the skies after the balloon is repaired, or whether he will sell it.

Thanks to painkillers, Kathleen Long thinks she's in the hospital to have a baby. At least for now, her husband said, she doesn't remember the real reason.

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