Sky divers live while balloon pilot dies

ATLANTA -- As a fierce thunderstorm that seemed to come out of nowhere closed in, hot-air balloon pilot Edward Ristaino spotted an open field 4,000 feet below and tersely, but calmly, warned the five sky divers aboard the craft, "You need to get out now."

He may have saved their lives, but he lost his own.

With the wind rocking their parachutes, the sky divers floated safely to the ground, while the balloon was sucked up into the clouds, then sent crashing to earth.

Ristaino's body wasn't found until yesterday, nearly three days later.

"If we would have left a minute later, we would have been sucked into the storm," said sky diver Dan Eaton.

The group had taken off Friday evening, ascending into a blue sky from a festival in Fitzgerald, Ga., about 175 miles south of Atlanta. From the air, they could see only a haze that soon turned menacing.

"It started off as just a red dot on the radar, and then it mushroomed very quickly into a big storm," Ben Hill County Sheriff Bobby McLemore said.

Ristaino, 65, sighting a 15-acre clearing, told the sky divers to get out, uttering the words with remarkable calm.

Sky diver Dennis Valdez said he regrets not strapping the pilot in with him when he jumped, but he didn't realize how dire the situation was.

"It was only apparent to me post facto that he was definitely very nervous about the weather, rushing to get us out of there," Valdez said.

An updraft took Ristaino into the clouds, 17,000 or 18,000 feet up, he told his ground crew via walkie-talkie. Then the storm apparently collapsed the balloon and twisted it into a streamer.

Ristaino's body was found in the gondola of his twisted-up craft, about eight miles from where the sky divers landed.