A hot air balloon museum is coming to the UAE

UAE Balloon Museum 7 will be the Middle East’s first hot air balloon museum

Hot air ballooning is already a bucket list UAE experience, and drifting serenely above the desert at sunrise is perhaps one of the most magical ways to start your morning as a UAE resident or visitor.

And now the UAE is set to give the pastime a permanent home on the ground, with the opening of the Middle East’s first hot air balloon museum. Announced this week by state news agency wam, the UAE Hot Air Balloon Team has signed an international partnership with the Saga Balloon Museum in Japan to open UAE Balloon Museum 7, marking the 7th global edition of the museum.

The museum is planned as an international platform for the history of hot air balloons and the technology used to build and fly them.

So what can we expect? If the Japanese partner is anything to go by, quite a lot. Saga calls itself “The City of Hot Air Balloons”. It hosts the Saga International Balloon Fiesta, which started in 1980 and now fills the autumn sky with more than 100 balloons. The city’s museum opened in October 2016 as Japan’s first permanent hot air balloon museum, and you can try balloon flight indoors, whatever the weather. Budding pilots get a flight simulator, a high-definition theatre shows festival footage, and on display is the real Icarus No.5, which made Japan’s first manned hot air balloon flight in Hokkaido in 1969.

The Sharjah-based UAE team is headed by Captain Pilot Abdulaziz Nasser Al Mansouri. It has spent years flying the flag at festivals around the world, and this summer it announced it would be the first Arab team to fly at a balloon festival in Saga.

There’s no word yet on where the museum will be, what it will look like or when it will open, but we’ll be keeping a close eye on this one.

Lead image: Unsplash

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