The world’s next museum of ballooning will rise in the Emirates. The UAE Hot Air Balloon Team has signed an international partnership with Japan’s Saga Balloon Museum to build it. The project carries a name already: UAE Balloon Museum 7.
The 7 is literal.
Six specialized balloon museums exist worldwide today, two in the United States and one each in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Japan. This one makes seven, and it will be the first in the Middle East.
Why Saga holds the other end
The signing happened during the team’s delegation visit to Saga. The trip lined up with the 39th Pacific Cup and the Saga International Balloon Fiesta, the festival that fills the Kase River banks every autumn. More than a hundred balloons launch there, and the 2023 edition drew about 907,000 visitors.
Saga’s own museum opened in October 2016, the first permanent balloon museum in Japan. Indoor flight simulators there let visitors fly in any weather. The Icarus 5 basket hangs in the collection too, from the first successful manned balloon flight in Japan, back in 1969.
What the museum will show
Captain Abdulaziz Nasser Al Mansoori leads the Sharjah-based team, and Saga deputy director Kiyoshi Mori welcomed the collaboration at the signing.
The museum will trace the history of ballooning and show the technologies behind building and flying the envelopes. Emirati professionals will run it day to day. Displays will cover the craft from fabric to burner.
The team flies under the slogan “The world will never forget you, Zayed,” and its Arabic name has sat on Saga’s honour boards since 2006, the first ever inscribed there.
No site, opening date, or ticket prices have been announced yet. What’s confirmed is the partnership, the name, and the count: the Middle East gets its first balloon museum, and the world gets its seventh. For a museum type this rare, seventh is a headline all by itself.
