It’s A Bird, It’s A Plane, It’s A Plastic Surgeon!

Watching the skies, the crew stopped by an open field. Then at a school yard. “He’s going to be walking across rooftops if he doesn’t land soon,” mumbled one team member as he scrambled back to the chase truck.

Promptly at sunrise on that crisp January day, Dr. Coy Foster ascended from Oak Grove Park in Plano in his hot-air balloon, drifting into North Dallas as his chase crew followed. Foster had run out of fuel, but in effect used the balloon as a parachute to stay aloft a while longer. That day he broke two more world records in ballooning: flying in the smallest hot-air balloon made, so small it can easily be stuffed into a gym bag, he had flown for eighty-six minutes and covered 10.1 miles, thus surpassing the previous duration record of seventy-six minutes and more than tripling the old distance record of almost three miles.

The Dallas plastic surgeon now holds twenty-one ballooning world records-more than any other balloon pilot in the world-and will shoot for another this winter in his endless quest to push ballooning to the outer limits.

On weekdays, forty-six-year-old Coy Foster is busy performing nose jobs, face lifts, or reconstructive surgery, on patients who want to improve their image or who have survived trauma that has left their bodies broken or scarred. Nights and weekends, he conspires with his ballooning teammates to break another record-without suffering trauma himself.

Foster and his backup team of ten volunteers-teachers, businessmen, electronics engineers-have set the majority of records in small hot-air or helium balloons-balloons that can’t lift as much weight or go as high as the brightly colored recreational balloons. The record attempts have produced some gut-wrenching moments for the crew members. Last February, Foster took a small balloon up to 29,500 feet-an altitude that jetliners fly-where the burner’s flame went out. The balloon plunged earthward at about 2,000 feet per minute.

“I knew I couldn’t relight it at that altitude,” says Foster. “You’re moving too fast. There’s next to no oxygen. I started using matches trying to relight it at about 15,000 feet.” He was scared, but he fought off panic. “Even as things are coming apart, you have to analyze the problem,” he says.

Foster’s next major goal is an altitude record of 34,000 feet- almost six miles. That’s an altitude that few balloonists have reached, and then only in larger balloons than Foster plans to use. At that height, the air thins, making oxygen a must for the pilot and creating the risk of flameout. A waiver from the FAA is required for the flight, which is planned for this winter, and constant communication with the FAA will ensure that Foster won’t encounter any airliners.

“While thousands of people fly at that elevation every day, they don’t fly with the windows open,” says Foster. “You are essentially going into the stratosphere. Once you go above 25,000 feet it gets very, very tricky- It gets sixty below at that altitude. It’s a very hostile environment.”