It is said that 'Captain' Elkins has however many hundreds of hours of flying experience on gliders and balloons (of course the skills required for those two types of aircraft are utterly different) and so they just allowed him to take a balloon, plus passengers, totally unsupervised.
This simply would not happen! No matter how experienced a pilot claims to be, no aviation business would ever allow that person unsupervised command without at least one trial flight to demonstrate his/her fundamental competence. People have been known to 'borrow' or forge licences and log-books! In any case, their insurance would absolutely insist upon a proper programme of supervision before an aircraft is handed over to someone from outside the company.