Montgolfiades de Marmande

Marmande sits on a wide plain in the southwest of France that is used for competition flying because it has room to be wrong in: a task that goes badly still ends in a field rather than in a town. The week is a championship with a festival around it rather than the other way round. The calendar has the ones built for spectators first.

Finding it by name is genuinely difficult, and that is a fact about the event rather than about search engines. The organisers brand each edition by the competition it is hosting, so the same festival appears under a different name every few years, and the name people search for is not the name on the poster.

Competition flying looks like very little from the ground until you know what to watch. Pilots are given tasks at a briefing before dawn — a target to drop a marker on, a distance to maximise, a shape to fly — and the skill on display is the choice of altitude, because altitude is the only steering a balloon has.

Two national championships on the same field in the same week is unusual, and it changes what the sky looks like: more crews, more nationalities, and a briefing schedule that has to serve two sets of rules. It also makes the week harder to book than a normal edition.

The festival sells passenger flights of its own, which is not the norm for a competition meeting, and the price is published. Mid-August in Lot-et-Garonne is hot enough that the evening window is the pleasant one and the dawn window is the reliable one.

It is a volunteer event with a national fixture bolted onto it. The association that runs it is small, the plain it flies from is farmland borrowed for the week, and hosting a championship means feeding, briefing and retrieving dozens of crews with people who do it for nothing. That is worth knowing when the programme slips: the constraint is rarely money and almost always hands.