Updated: Hot Air Balloon Lands in Lawrence Township

After hovering low over the southern end of Lawrence Township, prompting a couple phone calls to township police from concerned observers, a hot air balloon landed in a field off Princeton Pike about 11:15 a.m. today, Thursday, Feb. 24.

But the balloon was never in distress and made a near perfect landing, according to Ron DiGiovanni, an Easton, Pa., balloon manufacturer who owns the balloon and was serving as its pilot today.

Lt. Charles Edgar, Lawrence Township police spokesman, said police were alerted at 11:05 a.m. that a hot air balloon was flying low and appeared to be trying to land at the Brunswick Traffic Circle.

Responding police officers observed the multi-colored balloon gain altitude and float northward along Princeton Pike, Edgar said. He said officers stopped following it once it became apparent the balloon was not in trouble.

A few minutes later, DiGiovanni and his copilot, Tom Robins of Frenchtown, N.J., spotted the large field off Princeton Pike, opposite Lenox Drive, near Interstate 95, and decided to set the balloon down, DiGiovanni said.

“We were contemplating going a little further, but the wind picked up,” he said, explaining the decision to land there.

“You have to understand that every balloon landing, by definition, is an emergency landing – wherever we land is where we emerge,” DiGiovanni said with a chuckle when he was told that some people who witnessed the balloon set down in the field had called it an “emergency landing.”

DiGiovanni said he and Robins took off from Cross Keys Airport in Gloucester County about 7:50 a.m. today. The purpose of the flight, he explained, was to promote PennScam.com, a “political/legal” website that DiGiovanni has operated for about a year.

With a 24-foot tall banner bearing the website’s URL wrapped around the 220-foot circumference of the balloon, the two men floated north through Pennsylvania and New Jersey, pausing for quite a while in Trenton.

To be sure people could read the website’s full address, DiGiovanni said he was sure to rotate the balloon as it flew past the Trenton Makes Bridge and hovered over the state buildings in New Jersey's capital city.

DiGiovanni said he had no real final destination in mind when he and Robins took off this morning.

“You can’t really come up with an exact course in ballooning. A lot of times the wind will shift directions in a period of just a few hours,” he said. He said the balloon was tracked throughout the flight by air traffic controllers at Philadelphia International Airport, then Northeast Philadelphia Airport, and finally Trenton-Mercer Airport.

His ground crew was also following along in two vehicles, he said.

DiGiovanni said he has been flying balloons since 1975 and manufacturing them since 1990 through his company, Custom Nine Designs. He also operates a balloon sightseeing company, Big Apple Balloons.

Robins, meanwhile, operates a hot air balloon repair station in Frenchtown.

The balloon that DiGiovanni and Robins flew in today was made by his company last year, DiGiovanni said.

The maximum height the balloon reached today was about 2,100 feet but it spent the majority of the flight between 500 and 1,000 feet, he said.

After the landing, the ground crew made quick work of deflating and packing up the balloon. They were so quick, in fact, that motorists traveling along Princeton Pike just minutes after the landing had no clue that anything out of the ordinary had happened.