General News
1 September, 2025
Agronomist by Trade, Pilot by Passion
Looking up in the sky on a clear morning in Warracknabeal this time of year, there's a fair chance you might spot a hot-air balloon smoothly cruising with the air currents, piloted by local agronomist, Sarah Ellis.
As one of only about 200 pilots qualified for the 'aircraft' in Australia and with about 20 years of flying behind her, she's as enthusiastic about the activity as ever, determining her opportunities to take off with careful attention to detail.
"You look at the weather for every day for about a week before you go flying," Ms Ellis said.
"Balloons need calm, stable winds that you get under high-pressure systems.
"You build up a picture about what the winds are going to do and where you might go and what you might think you're going to do.
"Then all of that can change anyway, so you have to be adaptable."
Her primary consideration was obviously always to ensure a safe landing at the end of every flight.
"It depends on the wind speed and direction, so you always launch in order to give yourself landing options," Ms Ellis said.
"(Recently) I was taking off here in Warracknabeal, aiming for some vetch paddocks where we wouldn't do any harm when we landed.
"The week before, I was taking off at Polkemmet – there's a few pasture paddocks there. "So it just depends.
"When landing option one doesn't work well, you just work on the next one.
"The Wimmera is a great place to fly as most farmers are welcoming and not bothered by a balloon landing in their paddock."
She said summer was not generally a good time to fly – "it's too hot and windy" – instead making the most of the six to eight months of autumn to spring to try to get airborne "every fortnight or so", always hoping for the ideal conditions.
"You need calm, still air, and we fly at dawn when the air is laminar, so it's in smooth layers," Ms Ellis said.
"At sunrise ... the air is smooth for the first hour or two of the day.
"Temperature doesn't matter as much (but) it's better in colder weather because you've got more lift.
"But the most ballooning in Australia actually happens at Mareeba in North Queensland (inland) from Cairns – they fly busloads of tourists … every week in huge balloons.
"My balloon holds pilot plus two. They fly balloons that hold up to 30 passengers."
With hot-air balloons potentially costing up to half a million dollars for massive, custom-made special shapes, Ms Ellis said even a "starter" balloon, like the one she flies, was still very expensive and usually owned by a collective.
"I'm talking $50,000 just for a little bag of air that gets you going," she quipped.
But finding the money to buy one was only one of the obstacles; you need someone to fly it, and with a relatively small number of balloon pilots in Australia, locals in the area can usually guess correctly that she's the one in the skies above the Wimmera.
"When people ask if it was me (in a spotted balloon), I always laugh and say, 'Well, yeah,' because it's me, I'm the only balloonist in the district," Ms Ellis said.
"There's actually seven hot air balloons in Mildura now, because I've just helped train three new pilots up there.
"I spend a lot of my time now training new pilots and people interested in the sport, but I'm not a commercial pilot, so I can't take paying passengers, just people I know."
Sometimes her preference to fly away from towns is limited, as was the case recently when her weekday job at Robert Smith & Co CRT Warracknabeal meant she was forced to run a proximate training flight before work.
"Last weekend the weather was rubbish," she said.
"But my student had come in from interstate to do some training, and in order to get a training flight in and then get to work on time, I flew here in Warracknabeal and we were launching and flying across town as people were on their way to work, instead of flying out of Pimpinio or somewhere where nobody sees me."
Ms Ellis said she and her team occasionally deal with livestock.
"Cows are really curious and will walk right up to look at the balloon, and walk on it, or chew on things if you're not careful," she said.
The winds can also vary the distance covered.
"On Monday last week, the balloon flew about 40 (kilometres) in 40 minutes – that's really fast," she laughed.
"Then the next day, we flew eight kilometres in 45 minutes."
In a way, she said both her career and the airborne pastime have a connection.
"My work is all related to the weather, and my hobby is all related to the weather," Ms Ellis said.
So, in the back of her mind as she flies and notices "the Wimmera is really green", she was also conscious of the truth: "the season is still uncertain".
"It looks good at the moment, but we're right on the knife-edge because we have no stored sub-soil moisture," Ms Ellis said.
"Our crops are not by any means guaranteed a yield at this time. We are still right on the cusp of too dry.
"We can still get frost coming into spring, or heat stress, but our biggest constraint is we really need a lot more rain.
"We normally grow a lot of our crop yield on stored water from a metre deep in the profile – and there's nothing down there.
"So here's hoping the spring rains continue."
