When our British dealer Doug Hoddinott approached us and said we needed to increase our offering in small balloon sizes and the following rules needed to be applied to them and we rose to the challenge.
Doug’s criteria:
- It needed to be extremely lightweight, using lighter load tapes, pulleys and combining them with Kubíček Polyester Light,
- it needed to be a fairly smooth shape in design to suit artwork for clients and customers,
- it needs to suit existing Hopper, Cloud Hopper, Duo Systems and small basket bottom ends already on the market and future designs which will come into the market in the future.
The Answer was the EF-Type. The EF Type is a smooth 12 Gore design similar to our E-Type which has many of the same characteristics however unlike the E-Type which below 1 800 m3 only has 8 gores the EF retains the 12 Gore design but made with a slightly modified smoother profile.
Within 2.5 months, we were able to obtain EASA certification for this type. The EF Type comes in 3 sizes 900 m3 (31 ft3), 1 200 m3 (42 ft3), 1 600 m3 (57 ft3) and is perfect as a one man hopper, small travelling balloon or a small corporate advertising balloon.
We are glad to have partners and clients who help us move our products forward.