Donnie Brainard holds a photo of his father and stepmother, Nick and Pamela Jones Brainard, who died in a balloon
accident in 1982, the worst disaster in Balloon Fiesta history.
Photo Credit – Marla Brose/Journal
A breaking news bulletin cut in as Donnie Brainard,
then 14, watched Balloon Fiesta coverage
while eating breakfast with his grandmother. On the TV screen, a hot air balloon burst into flames. He saw two people hold each other as they fell to their deaths.
“I sure do feel sorry for the families of those people,” Brainard recalls his grandmother saying.
Those words still haunt him.
A few hours
later, he learned that
the two people he saw falling were his
father and stepmother, Nick and Pamela Brainard. Pamela was four months pregnant.
The accident,
the worst in Balloon Fiesta history, happened 30 years ago this October.
Four people died, and five were injured.
“It was such a traumatic
event and such a huge event,” Brainard
said, now 44, adding that it seems as
if people had forgotten
about it.
Since then, there have been other accidents
at
the fiesta, but none so catastrophic, in part because of the large size of the balloon, aptly named El Globo Grande. The 12-story-tall balloon was authorized to carry eight people, according to Journal stories from 1982, although it held nine people that day.
According to National Transportation Safety Board data, it appears
there have been 11 balloon-related deaths at the fiesta,
with the last one occurring in 2008.
That’s a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands
of
safe balloon rides
over the last 40 years
of
the fiesta.
“It’s a very safe form of aviation,” said fiesta executive director
Paul Smith, who stressed the fiesta’s main focus is safety and said “even one death is too many.”
A memorial
to lost balloonists is
scheduled to be dedicated at Balloon Fiesta Park on Oct. 2. Among those remembered will be the victims of El Globo Grande.
Clear, crisp morning
Sunday, Oct. 3, 1982, dawned crisp and clear. El Globo Grande — one of the largest standard hot air
balloons made at the time — was
owned and piloted by Joe Gonzales of Albuquerque. Also on the ride that day were Dick Wirth, designer of the craft, and Christina Robinson, a balloon seamstress, both of London.
They had come along to observe after Gonzales
had complained of problems, according to
the FAA investigative report, cited in the Journal of Forensic
Sciences. For many of the passengers, it was a last-minute flight.
Tom and Ann Speer, who lived in Lakewood,
Colo., were introduced to the pilot that morning by Ann’s cousin.
C. Vincent
Shortt, 35, from North Carolina,
was at the fiesta promoting
a motion picture he was producing
called “Hot Heir.” He, too, arranged for a ride through
an acquaintance. Barbara
Mardyla, then 28, hitched a ride after meeting Shortt on the flight into Albuquerque.
The Brainards weren’t going to go to the fiesta grounds that day, Donnie Brainard recalled. Rather, they were planning
to watch from the mountains. But Donnie remembers persuading them to go to the field, where they also nabbed spots
on the flight.
The passengers clambered on, toting cameras with long telephoto
lenses. Although mostly strangers, they chatted gaily through the hourlong flight. When, after 90 minutes, they appeared
to touch down for a safe landing in a North Valley
field, the ground crew broke out champagne to celebrate, according to a Journal story from 1982.
That’s when things
began to go awry. Propane leaked out of a tank, hitting a burner
and creating a fireball within the gondola while it was still on the ground.
It’s unclear
in what order people began jumping — or were thrown
— from the balloon. Shortt, Mardyla, Tom Speer
and Gonzales all escaped while the balloon was low to the ground. Gonzales was on fire as he hit the ground. The heat and loss of weight caused the balloon to soar.
Ann Speer was still in the balloon as it ascended. Her husband recalls yelling: “Get out! Jump! Jump! Get out of there!”
She finally flung herself from the gondola at about 30 feet in the air. He rushed under her to try to break her fall.
The others
did not survive.
Al Utton, the late University of New Mexico law professor who witnessed the event, said at the time that the remaining passengers were faced with “the cruel dilemma of being burned alive or jumping hopelessly.”
Christina
Robinson and Wirth fell or jumped next. Nick and Pamela Brainard were the last to plummet to the ground.
Two propane tanks exploded after the balloon rose.
The probable cause report from the National Transportation Safety Board found that
Gonzales had improperly made alterations to the balloon’s fittings and hoses attached to the propane cylinders. A subsequent report from the FAA was unable to determine whether a line or fitting
in the fuel system had failed. Attempts to locate Gonzales for this story were unsuccessful.
Years to recover
Brainard
said the crash put him into a tailspin that took years to recover from. He felt tremendous guilt for encouraging his dad and stepmom
to go to the fiesta that day. He recently
started writing about it on his
blog as a way to confront
his feelings.
“The level of guilt that I carried
for the next 20 years was absolutely brutal,”
he wrote. “No 14-year-old boy should ever have to shoulder this kind of responsibility. It warped my life in the most incomprehensible ways that
you can think of. I feel incredibly fortunate to have survived.”
He said he’s
been surprised by the popularity
of the blog, where he also chronicles his daughter’s struggles
with cerebral palsy and other aspects of his life. Brainard’s dad, Nick, was mostly absent from his
childhood. But about a year before the accident,
he and his wife, also called P.J., moved back to Albuquerque. Nick Brainard
worked part-time at a law firm and part-time
as a radio DJ.
In the blog, Brainard calls
that year “the best 12 months
of
my life.” As
an
adult, Brainard has
worked in the entertainment business and created the show, “Win Ben Stein’s Money.” He is currently
working as an Albuquerque property broker
at Maestas & Ward.
He said that, for many years,
he didn’t talk
about the balloon
crash, but his wife encouraged him to write it down. His brother found the autopsy report and recently gave it to Brainard. He wrote that he was “rattled by the brutality inflicted on my dad’s young body.”
“It takes a lot of energy to relive it,” Brainard
said. “It helped to get it out. It was
very painful going through
a lot of it again.”
Moving on
Three decades later, the survivors say they’ve moved on, but the memory of the accident
will probably never leave them.
Shortt,
then 35, suffered burns to his head and left hand. When he returned to North Carolina, he forged ahead with two ballooning-related projects: organizing a balloon festival
in North Carolina and producing
“Hot Heir,” a balloon comedy.
He moved away from balloon-centric projects after those were complete,
producing TV shows on country inns and historic hotels.
He didn’t
go on another
balloon ride for 13 years, when he decided to return to the Balloon Fiesta.
“I just felt I didn’t want the last experience I had in a hot air balloon
to be a negative
one,” Shortt said by telephone
from Virginia, where he now lives.
Ann Speer, now 64, still has
rods in her back
where she broke it in three places and some chronic pain. Her husband,
now 72, estimates that she was in the hospital for about a month in Albuquerque and off work for several more months after that. They both returned
to active lives, even giving ski lessons,
and now live in Arizona.
“We both picked up and continued
to move forward,” he said. “I don’t think
it’s had any lasting effect other than just bad memories.”
Barbara Mardyla — now Gaiser — returned to Ohio with singed hair and eyebrows only to find out that the local radio station
had reported her dead.
“So when I did go back to work, everyone was saying ‘Oh my gosh, we thought you were dead.’”
she said.
She withdrew
for a while and saw a counselor.
“I didn’t talk
to reporters,” she said. ” I just kind of wanted to go home and hide.”
Her mom is turning 80 this
year and wants
to go on a balloon ride. Gaiser is
still deciding whether
she’ll go along.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal
