Equipment page two

The first burner which was part of the package purchased with G-BOBH from Zebedee was a Cameron Mk3 Double Burner which had been retro-fitted with liquid fire (more commonly known as whisper) burners. Although the use of the whisper burner is extremely useful when flying over livestock as it does help prevent them from becoming too nervous or scared; the downside of the whispers on our Mk3 was that it also reduced the output from the main burner which therefore made it very under-powered. It was however fitted with true crossflow capabilities which helped to a certain degree.

We traded our Mk3 in with Zebedee in 1996 for a Cameron Mk4 Super Double (see below). Our Mk3 was then sold on by Zebedee in March of 1998, so it was still to see some life after we parted with it.

The early burners (up to the Mk4) were generally low in output and this in turn led to more incidents both in the air and on the ground. The earlier Cameron burners are quite easily recognised by the widely spaced round coils, rather than the now popular 'square' shape. We are only talking about Cameron burners here and not any other make which use round coils, so don't let this confuse you.

Our current burner which was purchased by us in 1996, is a Cameron Mk4 Super Double; it's far more powerful than the Mk3 and also has both crossflow and whisper as standard. These burners use standard Rego fittings (screw fitting, rather than bayonet as on the Tema connectors) for connecting the propane hoses, the same as was on the Mk3, so both burners were compatible in that respect and no alterations required. The Mk4 Super burners are widely used in the ballooning community by hundreds of pilots and have been thoroughly tested in every way. They were certainly Cameron's most trustworthy and reliable burner at the time and still retain their popularity with balloonists. The Mk4 burners have now been superceeded, but there are hundreds still in use on a virtual daily basis.