In the height of a competition flight, balloon pilot Nicola Scaife has to remind herself to take a moment to take it all in.
Below her basket, the canola fields of Northam, Western Australia, are coming into full bloom; paddocks of gold filling the landscape glimpsed in a rare view that feels like it could have fallen out of a timeless romantic era of flight.
There's a stillness, Ms Scaife explains, that you can miss in a competition flight, when the pressure is on; a kind of tranquility between the blasts from the burners.
The Hunter pilot has been flying balloons for nearly two decades and, when she's not competing, pilots commercial flights through the Hunter Valley with Balloon Aloft.
"You can't really explain what it feels like," Ms Scaife said, moments after landing a practice flight ahead of the World Hot Air Ballooning Championships in Western Australia, which will run from September 2 to 9. "I think when people realise it's quite still in the basket, drifting over the treetops in that beautiful morning dawn-time; it really blows people away.
"To be honest, when I'm flying along in a competition, I have to stop myself and take it in; stop for a moment, have a look at where you are - in the heat of the competition, there's just so much going on."
Competitive flight is a test of the pilot's skill to read the air, Ms Scaife explains. Without traditional steering apparatus, pilots are tested on their ability to navigate the changing winds to fly accurately through a series of tests.
"The most common task is a 10-metre cross that's put in a paddock somewhere," she said, "And the idea is that a pilot has to use the winds to navigate themselves to that cross and drop a marker down; the closest to the centre of the cross is the best."
Ms Scaife is a two-time world champion, after beating 16 nations and 38 pilots in 2014, and again in 2016, before returning from Poland in 2018 with bronze.
The titles will bring 30 of the best pilots from around the world to coincide wth the Northam Festival of Ballooning.
The international competition has run every two years since the early 1970s, where Australia holds third place in the international rankings behind the US and Great Britain.
