The basket comes to waist height for easy entry and exit.
I did it back about 9 years ago. It was a local balloon co, they have a massive Cameron balloon with a big witch on a broomstick design. The flight was postponed several times due to bad weather until one evening when they 'phoned us to come. There were about six passengers in this big basket then at the last minute two very fat women turned up claimng they had also paid to go up. There was a bit of a discussion and in the end the pilot heaved them over the side into the basket as well. Mistake! He then burned a large amount of gas getting this heavy load up to a couple of thousand feet, I was a bit worried because a couple of miles away there was a nasty looking area of black sky and I didn't fancy straying into that. We dropped to ground level and drifted over Blackburn, which is in a sheltered bowl. Anyway the wind seemed to die and we found ourselves drifting aimlessly around this town at rooftop level, looking for somewhere to land as the pilot looked anxiously at his gas gauges and changed a couple of bottles over. Seemed we were running out of that vital element needed to keep us aloft - fuel!
Eventually we drifted near a park at the end of a street, which was full of over-excited Pakistanis, all gesturing and shouting. The pilot dropped a coiled up rope, which a bunch of Pakistani kids grabbed. Instead of taking charge of the situation and instructing this crowd to pull us over to the park, the pilot just stared at them uselessly while they swung on the rope and ran around like headless chickens. Eventually he pulled the rope back up again and off we drifted, literally at chimney height. We drifted over a patch of waste ground about the size of a tennis court with trees and bushes and lots of rubbish and he dropped the rope again. This time the Pakistani ground crew were a bit better organised as some of the older family members had come out to see what was going on and they hauled us down, smashing through a tree, to the ground. Immediately we found ourselves surrounded by about 300 screaming hysterical Pakistani kids, it felt like arriving in India as a missionary. The faces of the other passengers were a picture; they were horrified. My wife and baby son had been following in our Landy and they got there before the ground crew in a 110 with the trailer, but in squeezing through the narrow back street my wife had scuffed someody's car bumper with the side step on the Landy and the driver was giving her hell for damaging his car.
The useless pilot pulled the ripcord and the envelope dropped on top of us, getting caught up in all the trees and bushes. he was doing his nut about it getting torn and at last seemed to be able to take charge of the collecting and folding of this huge mass of nylon. Meanwhile I ran off to sort out my wife's problem as the Police and Fire Brigade arrived. Eventually with the help of about 200 Pakistani yoofs we got the basket onto the trailer and off it went, we never got our champagne and certificate.
The owner of the car kept accusing my wife of scratching his paintwork; his ghastly fat slapper of a wife was sitting in the passenger seat egging him on to call the Police, we called over a WPC and she wasn't interested. Eventually I got rid of the miserable money-grabbing old bastard and then some hideous old bag turned up shouting that the balloon basket had damaged her chimney and she wanted compensation!
You couldn't make it up, could you?
Next day it was all over the papers and local TV, there was a shot of this balloon "crash landing" in the town, videos, the lot. Then it emerged that the year before the same pilot had been investigated by the CAA for a dodgy landing in which a passenger's leg got broken.
I think I had a lucky escape!
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