The new EF Type Hopper balloon is born
/Over the last few months a joint UK and Kubicek factory project have been working on a new type of Envelope design. The result is the EF Type balloon.
Several ideas were looked at but the balloon had to hit 3 key principles.
It needed to be a 12 gore design
It needed to be a smooth design capable of holding complex artwork
It needed to be a lightweight design which incorporates our lighter fabrics, load tapes and pulleys.
While using computer models we discovered that the best design to work from was actually our E Type model sizes above 65,000 cu ft which is a fairly smooth 12 Gore design.
After several tweaks to account for with the smaller balloon design 3 sizes were designed and sent to EASA to be approved. The sizes approved are BB9E (31), BB12E (42), BB16E (56). Our first customer with the new design was for our Danish dealers father.
