Balloons offer cheaper, greener parachute jumps

PARIS (Reuters) - Among the polluting jet planes and expensive attack helicopters at the Paris Air Show this week one technology appealed to both environmental concerns and budget constraints: the balloon.

French company Aerophile SA, which operates tethered helium balloons for Florida's Disney World and other leisure parks, wants to sell its services to armies looking to cut the cost of parachute training.

The firm's Aero30Para is tied to the ground by a metal cable and can lift 30 passengers 300 meters (1,000 feet) into the air. It has been used by the Yemeni army in the past months.

"A parachute jump from a tethered balloon costs up to 50 times less than a jump from a helicopter or plane," Aerophile President Jerome Giacomoni told Reuters.

The Aero30Para has a fixed cost of 2.3 million euros ($3.20 million) and operating costs of 180,000 euros per year, he said. It allows 120 parachute jumps per hour at a cost of just 500 euros. Giacomoni said a plane carrying some 60 parachutists costs about 15,000 euros per hour to operate.

When the Yemeni army saw the company's balloons in a theme park in Dubai, they decided to switch to using them instead of their Hercules C-130 transport planes, Giacomoni said.

"The Yemeni army doesn't have a lot of money," he said.

He added that the French army was studying the balloons and that the firm was negotiating with several other armies.

"This is a convincing system, especially when costs are considered," Lieutenant-Colonel Eric Chasboeuf, of the French land forces command, told Reuters.

But budget constraints might get in the way.

"The army budget is already defined, and if we were to adopt this system, it would be at the expense of something else," Chasboeuf said.

The French armed forces include 14,000 paratroopers, trained in a school in the southwestern town of Pau where about 120,000 jumps take place every year, he added.