Team member and fellow pilot Katie Gower attended the 2025 Chatsworth House balloon meet, the below blog details her and her teams adventures over the weekend. Photo credits also to Katie and her team.

At the beginning of the week the weather was looking far from perfect and not flyable at all. However, it’s Chatsworth and anything can happen. Due to Chatsworth house being located within a valley the conditions were vastly different from the main forecast. We managed two lovely short flights within the grounds of Chatsworth House.

Friday morning:

We woke up went to briefing where we were told the good news, it’s flyable! We got the trailer and the crew together and travelled to the furthest point in the grounds we could go to get the longest flight possible within the grounds as if we went out c the weather would change and become slightly faster wind speeds which picked up as the morning went on.

Katie flew with Andy Austin (examiner and instructor) and Tony Taylor (PUT) due to not having enough hours to fly at the event by herself. We had a lovely fifteen-minute flight where Tony practiced flying in some difficult conditions. The conditions were difficult in the sense that there were lots of balloons and the ground was uneven terrain. Tony did a wonderful training flight and we landed safely within the grounds by the balloonists camping! After that we sat up at the tents and caravan cooking a well-deserved breakfast!

Sadly, Friday evening was missed by our team due to the forecast changing, so only four balloons flew that day.

Saturday morning:

We got up and attended briefing to hear the good news, we can fly! Then we stumbled along a problem… Katie only has 22hours P1 and to fly at this event you need 35 hours P1. Andy had prior plans to fly with someone else, so we needed a pilot with enough hours to let us fly! Luckily for us, we found a pilot to supervise the flight.

Katie instructed Tony for the flight under the supervision of Collin Butter. We had a 20-minute flight within the grounds again, but this time there were even more challenges to face. There were challenges such as the crowd of people that turned up, they were everywhere in the landing fields, the wind direction changed at different heights while not flying very high, and obstacles such as trees, other balloons, and the various hills.

Tony did amazingly with his training and completed a challenging flight under the instruction from Katie.

Sadly, the weather was as forecast for the rest of the weekend meaning we didn’t get any more flights. Even though we couldn’t do anymore flying we got to enjoy the country fair and the local town Bakewell!

Here’s to Chatsworth 2026 where hopefully the rest of the Molly Mae Ballooning team will be able to enjoy the beautiful flying experiences of Chatsworth house!