The "tumbling" rule

Jeremy Thomas

The "tumbling" rule

Experience shows that any non perfectly spherical balloon in fly, in real conditions, will tumble. The physical arguments explaining that are very simple and are exactly the same used to explain why any tether in a balloon in fly in real conditions will always have an oscillating/undulating motion: No air current is perfectly uniform, there are always small irregularities in it, that means that the air current action or effect on the non perfectly symmetric surface will be different in different sections creating a disequilibrium that lead to tumbling.

Then if we observe a non perfectly spherical balloon that consistently is keeping exactly the same "position" without any tumbling then that object is behaving in an anomalous form.