Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.
The dead silence of the living room is broken up only by the ticking of a clock. It’s been about 15 years since the incident and the clock is a stark reminder of how time never ends. Things only get further and further away.
Details are forgotten.
This is evident when one looks at Jim Lytle sitting in his living room, doing his best to remember them.
Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.
With the passage of time, more than memories are lost or forgotten. Sitting on the floor is a plastic box with its lid taken off for the first time in many years. The contents, a few hats—one from Mississippi State and a few from Thunder and Colt—an old pair of flight gloves, some old and out of date maps and sectionals dating back to 1993, some tickets for a free tether ride long since expired and other odds and ends are now spread out among couches and other chairs in the living room.
Something is missing though. Something Lytle was hoping to find. Something that every pilot has. Something that would help him remember details.
With the passage of time, physical items also tend to go missing.
In this case, Lytle is missing his pilot’s logbook.
Even without finding it, he still seems happy. With a smile on his face, he finds these relics of a bygone time and relives memories that had been buried so long ago, almost as if they too had been placed inside the plastic box with everything else.
Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.
Now, Lytle sits in his chair in silence. He wears a grey NCAA Basketball Tournament shirt from a time long passed when Mississippi State’s men’s basketball team was a formidable force. Oddly enough, it is from the same era when Air Bully once flew so many flights above Starkville, Mississippi, the home of Mississippi State University.
Resting on the shirt is a pair of glasses with dark frames, hanging there around his neck, ready to be used when he needs to read something. Light from a lamp reflects off the top of his head, balding from age, both physically and from stress. Lytle has had a rough life, but those are stories for another day. Today’s story comes from the late 90s when he was a pilot of Air Bully, the hot air balloon consisting of the colors and the logos of the school. Maroon and white, with an interlocked MSU on one side and a giant walking bulldog on the other.
In a voice that can be described as slightly higher pitched than what most men have and sounding scratchy, as if fresh from yelling and screaming at a game, Lytle slowly remembers details surrounding that day in his life that helped lead to the end of Air Bully.
“I mean, it was a slow, beautiful flight. It was just a beautiful afternoon.”
Lifting off from a field that now houses an apartment complex, Lytle and his passenger begin a flight that, unknown to them, will be key in setting into motion the end of Air Bully.
“As soon as we got in the air, no matter where you went, the wind was just, I mean, it was less than five knots,” recalls Jim Lytle. “I mean, it was a slow, beautiful flight. It was just a beautiful afternoon.”
The winds that day were taking them more southeast than the usual east to west.
“We were going straight at the airport, so I was going to try to land,” continues Jim Lytle. “Since we weren’t going anywhere, I didn’t want to get in the industrial park, so I was just going to come in low over the fence and set down just past the taxiway.”
Lytle was aiming for a field between the taxiway and the university’s flight labs. With the hangers being at the south end of the runway, his plan was to stay at the north end, get past the taxiway, and do what balloon pilots call pull the top.
“We were using aviation radio at the time,” says Lytle. “So I cleared traffic and everything and declared myself.”
That’s as far into the plan that he made it.
After declaring himself, he saw the university jet taxiing.
Then the winds died completely.
Jim Lytle was stranded.
The runway was blocked.
A new voice came over the radio telling him to get the balloon out of the way.
It was the pilot of the plane.
“And I was like, um, I’m doing the best I can,” says Lytle with a chuckle. “I was going anywhere from ground level at five feet to 100 feet up, trying to find any kind of wind I could, trying to get across the runway and out of the way.”
Lytle ended up blocking the runway for 30 minutes. His chase crew had had trouble getting onto airport property. Even though they knew the gate access code, it wouldn't work. Finally he had to tell them to leave the vehicle behind and come get him.
“It was a huge mess,” recalls Lytle. “And I was not panicked, but I was upset that I was blocking the university jet, knowing what that meant as a university employee at the time. Knowing there had been challenges between the athletic department and Air Bully. But what can you do? It was just one of those things, it was just an unfortunate timing of everything as it happened. It was another nail in the coffin. In their view, all I did was block the runway. You just feel helpless because you are doing everything you can and it’s just not enough.”
The athletic director thought the balloon crew should do whatever he asked, but Lytle and everyone else was not going to do something for free. Not when every bit of money for repairs and fuel was coming out of their own pockets.
Before they were able to get the balloon out of the way, the athletic director, who was on the plane, came on the radio.
“He said, I need to be at a meeting and I need you to get that thing out of my way now,” recalls Lytle. “I’m going to put this plane in the middle of the balloon if you don’t get that thing out of my way.”
Then about a month or two later, Air Bully received a cease and desist letter from the university. The balloon would never fly again.
“He was angry and frustrated because of the way they reacted.,” says Lisa Lytle, Jim’s wife. “It’s just one more thing that he felt like it was their way of putting a big squash on the whole thing.”
A friend, Ralph Olivieri, remembers seeing Jim in town and asking him about the balloon.
“He told me it looked like they were going to have to shut it down,” he remembers. “It hurt him. It was a mixture of anger and sadness. He and his friends had done everything that he thought they could do to keep it going. I think he was very frustrated by the whole thing. But he pressed on. That’s all I can say. He pressed on.”