Help please! Sedona BiPlane or Hot Air Balloon??
 

Hello! I'm hoping I can get some advice here. We ahve been to Sedona many times and love it. This time we are taking my cousin and it is his Birthday during the trip (he'll be 28) I was thinking of sending him on a biplane trip but is he going to have to be smooshed in a plane with a stranger? He weighs 230 so will it but one other person in the same cubby with him?

What about on a hot air balloon? Is it close quarters again? He's really shy and I think if he had to stand shoulder to shoulder or have a stanger sitting with him on a plane he would freak. He was freaking on a helicopter trip once because he got stuck in the middle of the 4 seats and was with strangers. He hated it and I don't want to stress him out over a trip. Any ideas?

Thanks!

Seating in a biplane will be fore-and-aft, not side-by-side, so he will have a cockpit all his own. Still, the balloon ride would be my choice. The basket is about 6 feet on a side...hardly crowded.

We had several people in our basket so it wasn't roomy - that is, we couldn't just move from one side to the other. If I was going to do it again, I would wear a hat because it sure got hot on the head! When they started talking about the possibility of the basket tipping over upon landing, I was glad we didn't take my Mother along. Still, I think it's an interesting experience (mainly for what you can hear up there) and good to do once anyway.

Personally, I'd rather go in a biplane any day. While single passenger seating is common, we were in one biplane that had side-by-side passenger seating so you might want to check on that.

I dug back into an earlier thread on this subject and found my foot in my mouth. An operator out of Sedona uses Waco biplanes that have a bench seat in the front. My biplane experiences have been in Pitts Specials, Great Lakes, etc which are aerobatic and have two one-person cockpits.

I think that a 230 pound person would be a tad squeezy in a Waco. Heck, they are squeezy in a Cessna 172!

But it might not be bad if they could have the whole bench seat, do you think?

I will have to wait til we get there and look around and see what kind of planes they have. Thank you for responding and I appreciate everyone's advice.

Does anyone know weight limits on Bi planes?

Does anyone have any suggestions on which companies to use?

I know a company can make or break an activity. We opted for the Hummer trip once instead of the pink jeeps and it was a huge mistake.

The we are in our 30's and the driver was so crazy that my hub had to get massages for 4 days after the trip. AND after all that he finally stopped at a location that had high tension wires running back and forth so we couldn't even get a picture without all the wires in it. We were very disappointed. :(

Thanks for everyone's time!