With only a week’s notice, Carleton student Shawn Glover was on a plane to Australia, heading to the outback to fly “the big ones.”
“I just kind of stopped everything and left,” the part-time general arts student says.
Glover ventured over to Australia for three years to fly hot air balloons — something that has been part of his life since he was a child, he says. His aunt was a pilot and so was his father.
But instead of letting his family teach him ballooning, Glover started training with Sundance Balloons as soon as he turned 17.
“It’s kind of like learning to drive a car with your dad,” he says, laughing. “You don’t really want to.”
He set his sights on Australia because of the demand for pilots down under, he says, but also because holding a British or Australian license helps pilots find work. In Australia, the balloons he flew were a lot bigger than the ones he could fly in Canada.
The average balloon in Canada takes two passengers at a time, whereas in Australia, they take 16 to 20, he says.
Glover trained in the desert, building his experience with both ballooning and learning to survive on his own.
He says he’s never lived alone, so learning to do that in a strange place was one of the biggest challenges he faced in Australia. Also, the average age for pilots was 60 to 65 so his co-workers were often far older than him.
“They didn’t always appreciate having a young gun around,” Glover says. “They don’t give you an advantage.”
He says part of what drew him to Australia was the challenge of flying in Melbourne, a city approximately the size of Toronto.
Launching and landing a balloon in such a challenging city may have kept him in Australia, but he says he was eager to return home.
“I went and did it, and wanted to come back to my family,” he says.
After three years away, things seemed to fall into place upon Glover’s return to Canada.
A friend of his accepted a piloting job in Africa, freeing up a job in Ottawa. Glover says he jumped at the opportunity to take over the position.
He took the lead pilot role in the city and is now the only full-time pilot in Ottawa flying hot air balloons, he says.
Ballooning and school are sometimes cross paths for Glover — physically, that is.
He sometimes lifts off from the fields next to Carleton, as he did on a clear fall morning Nov. 5.
Balancing his ballooning with school can be tough, especially around exams, but Glover says he enjoys his time in the sky enough to make it work.
In a way, ballooning takes the pressure off school, because it stops it from being a necessity.
“It’s a challenge, but I’m doing school because I want to get an education, not because I need to,” he says.
And as tough as it can get, it’s not nearly as challenging as performing a precautionary landing in a burning balloon.
Glover had to do just that on July 14, 2010, after strong winds pushed the material of the CTV balloon he was piloting into the burner.
The balloon caught fire and forced Glover to conduct an emergency landing.
“I don’t want to talk about that one much,” he says, adding he acted appropriately under the conditions.
He returned home for few months last summer and was filling in as a pilot, he says. A precautionary landing wasn’t a scenario Glover could have imagined when he launched his balloon that summer day.
“Sometimes you get caught up in difficult conditions,” he says. “Everything looked good.”
Glover landed safely on a residential lawn near Algonquin College. His passengers also made it through uninjured, the Ottawa Citizen reported two days after the emergency landing.
It was the first time he’d been put in such an extreme situation, he says, and it was also his first time being investigated by the Transportation Safety Board of Canada. He was cleared and back in a balloon a week later.
“You try and get back on the horse right away, and that’s what I did,” he says, describing it as a pretty big situation for ballooning.
But it’s a different kind of excitement that keeps Glover flying high — the thrill of never knowing what the next day will bring.
“It’s always new,” he says. “Even if you take off and land in the same spot, it’s always different.”
To him, it’s like three-dimensional sailing, he says. You use what nature gives you and find a way to ride the winds to where you need to go.
And Glover says he doesn’t expect to stop sailing the skies any time soon.
“No matter where I’m at in my life, ballooning’s always going to be part of [it],” he says.
