Please, Pennsylvania, can you help?

An appeal is going out to the Keystone state after a London high school class found out weather balloons can get away on you.

Theirs — part of a high-flying experiment they thought would travel about 100 kilometres, 150 km tops — drifted twice as far, crossing the Canada-U.S. border and coming down in a mountain valley in Pennsylvania, 300 kilometres away.

“We did not think it would go that far,” said Dung Tiet, the teacher behind the Grade 9 class project at H.B. Beal secondary school.

“All of this was a teaching moment for the students,” Tiet said Thursday.

The balloon, carrying Tiet’s GoPro camera, a weather computer and GPS tracker, was launched Monday from the downtown London school’s football field .

All told, the experiment cost about $400.

The class has the GPS co-ordinates of the balloon’s last known location and wants to recover the payload.

Now, what began as a science experiment is becoming a social one, as students search for a kind Pennsylvanian willing to step up and fetch the balloon.

“Students talked about using social media to see if we can get some interest in the area of Pennsylvania that it’s in,” said Tiet.



Beal students and teachers launched a styrofoam cooler loaded with a goPro camera, altimeter, and GPS with the help of a weather balloon. They were expecting a flight that would come down about 100 kilometres from London, but instead strong winds pushed their school project all the way to the interior of Pennsylvania. From left, teacher Dung Tiet, Makela Dew, Evan Pratten, Mohamed El Dogdog, teacher Seneca Sanford, Nathan Desjardins and Maya Bansal. Photograph taken on Thursday November 9, 2017. (Mike Hensen/The London Free Press)

“We contacted local media from Pennsylvania. . . . There are a couple of people that said that they are willing to go this weekend to see if they can retrieve it for us.”

The balloon landed in a wooded area bounded by the triangle formed by the communities of Austin, Wharton and Emporium in Cameron County, a “very rural” area in the words of one resident.

“It’s pretty uneven hills,” so uneven, there isn’t even much farming, said David Gray, a reporter for the Endeavor News website.

“It tends to be windy because we’re in the valley between the hills,” Gray said of the area’s weather, noting it’s a sparsely-populated county of about 4,600.

If their appeal for help falls flat and the class doesn’t get the balloon back in a month or so, Tiet said he’ll probably make the trek himself but hopes he won’t have to do the 866-km, round-trip drive.

The class, dubbed the Beal Innovative Learning Program, combines science, math, geography and English in one project-based course.

In some ways, the weather balloon misadventure is the best scenario for which Tiet could have hoped.

“Not only is it a science project, about weather and all that, but it also has that English component, about media. It’s integrated,” he said.

As for why the balloon wandered, the physics teacher blamed the cool November weather. The chilly air made the helium-filled balloon rise slowly, helping the wind to carry it farther than they imagined.

Still, Tiet has no regrets.

“It’s really neat just to see the students get excited about a school project,” he said.

“It’s all part of the lesson now.”

With files by Dan Brown, The London Free Press



Where the balloon is now