Military pilot makes most of colorful balloon race

Publication Date: 06/17/02

By EVELYN GANDER
Staff Writer

JUNCTION CITY -- The clouds have always commanded the attention of Bill Smith. Across a 30-year career in the Kentucky Air National Guard, the 49-year-old Louisville pilot has flown U.S. planes all over the world for military purposes. Sunday afternoon, he flew his own hot air balloon over the backyards and farm fields
of central Kentucky -- for the sheer joy of flying.

"The reason I enjoy balloons so much is the thrill it gives other people," said Smith minutes before he and his wife, Janet, got to work with four other crew members to inflate "Aeroforce One," the 65-foot high, 90,000-cubic foot balloon that showed off the colors of America at the Great American Balloon Race Sunday at Stuart Powell Field. "It's a red, white and blue configuration of the American flag," Smith said.

"It just fits," said the pilot about the intensified
patriotism of the 13th annual Great American Brass Band Festival and the balloon that was one of 26 lifting off from Stuart Powell Field early Sunday night. "It was on the cutting table last September."

The career military pilot didn't have to explain the
coincidence of this All-American item being put
together at the same time terrorists were taking apart the Pentagon and World Trade Center. 

Operation Enduring Freedom went into action. And so did Smith, who was sent to the United Arab Emirates in February. For the next three months, he was at the controls of tanker aircrafts flying out of the U.S. base at Al Dhafra for mid-air refueling of planes headed for Afghanistan.

"We flew combat sorties day and night out of there," he said about the 90-day deployment he completed in May. After Sept. 11, a lot of Americans found out where Afghanistan was from televised news reports in their living rooms. Smith and the thousands of his counterparts found out where it was from the skies above it.

The deployments are getting longer than the few
weeks customary in the past. "Now it's 90 days or
more. And it's always to the desert."

The career pilot allowed himself a smile when he
thought about the simplest parts of American life that take on larger than-life meaning in that desert. Green grass. That's what he kept looking for and not finding over there. He shook his head and had to grin. "Of all the things I missed," he said.

Despite the desert, despite the hostile places, despite the time away from home, Smith would not have been anywhere else doing any other job. "I have loved, almost, every minute of it."

Next year will be his 31st year and his last. "To me personally, you really don't appreciate the United States and our way of life -- until you're away from it."

That way of life took on life-size meaning Sunday, as cars filled with families filed into the parking area near the Danville-Boyle County Airport at Junction City.

When he leaves military service next year, Smith will have more time to spend working with hot air balloons at Balloon Odyssey in Louisville. 

As he got ready to get his red, white and blue
Aeroforce One off the grass near the airport runway, he brought the idea of freedom squarely down to earth at the Great American Balloon Race. "On a larger scale, an event like this makes you appreciate what freedom's all about."