May the muffins be forever in your favour."Grannies Gone Wild" Afterthoughts: Hot-air Balloons and the Cloud Cities of Equestria · 11:40pm Apr 17th, 2018
I rewatched this episode today and my mind got caught on one interesting detail:
How Cherry Berry was bringing Rainbow Dash, Granny Smith and the other grandmares to Las Pegasus in her hot-air balloon.
Back in Season 3, when I saw Cherry Berry with her balloon for the first time, I got the impression that balloons and offering balloon rides are just a hobby of her. But in this episode, we saw her not just offering a balloon ride, but bringing passengers to an official balloon airport in Las Pegasus!
Here on Earth, one might privately own an airplane and use it for private purposes. But if you want to fly an airplane that actually brings passengers into other countries and all around the globe, you need to work as pilot for an airline.
Considering that there is no reason why that would be different for balloon rides in Equestria, this means Cherry Berry is not just doing this as her hobby, but that this is her actual job and that she has a license that allows her to make passenger flights for non-pegasus ponies who want to visit Las Pegasus. It also means that Ponyville has, although smaller, an official balloon airport just like Las Pegasus has.
And this brought me on an interesting question: Does the fact Ponyville has such an official balloon airport mean that there are other pegasi cities in Equestria's skies we didn't hear about yet?
Equestria has an excellently developed railroad network, that has connections to pretty much every place in the kingdom, even to such remote corners like Starlight Glimmer's former village or Pinkie Pie's rockfarm. It even has a train riding as far as Griffonstone. With this, it isn't really necessary to use any other means of public transportation for long-distance travels in Equestria unless you want to reach a cloud city. And we know since Season 1 already that Cloudsdale isn't designed for ponies that aren't pegasi, hence why Twilight could only go there with all of her friends by using a cloud-walking spell, so ponies who aren't pegasi don't visit Cloudsdale very often and this doesn't make it necessary for Cloudsdale to be an official hot-air ballon destination.
So, if Cloudsdale and Las Pegasus are the only two pegasi cloud cities in Equestria, it begs the question if it's really worth it for Ponyville (or, really, any town or city in Equestria other than Las Pegasus) to have an official balloon airport.
As tiny as it might be, building this balloon airport must have cost money that the local Ponyville government had to invest and surely Cherry Berry isn't working as a pilot for free either and will receive a monthly salary. In addition to this there will be costs to maintain the balloon, to repair it, ect.
Paying for all of these things, this just doesn't sound very economic if there's only one major destination that hot-air balloons approach regularly, so because of this, I'm now thinking that Equestria has indeed more cloud cities other than Cloudsdale and Las Pegasus.
Maybe it was a Hobby at first, which turned into this?
4842391
I was thinking of this possibility, as well, already! Now I want to go back and analyze older episodes for signs and indications that can shed more light on that. It's going to be a while until I can go and do that, but I wanna figure this out eventually.
4842496
Then good Luck!
Thanks.^^