The movies “Up” and “Danny Deckchair” are two great examples of art imitating life. While it doesn’t seem very conceivable that someone would fasten hundreds of balloons to patio furniture or, in the case of “Up,” a house and let the wind take them where it may, it has been done and by more than one person in the past four decades.
One of the first people to succeed in such an endeavor, and arguably the most famous, is Larry “Lawnchair” Walters. In 1982 Larry and his girlfriend bought 45 eight-foot weather balloons and enough tanks of helium to fill them. Larry had always wanted to join the Air Force to become a pilot, but because of his poor eyesight, he wasn’t able to see that dream through.
His plan was to take off from his home in San Pedro, California and simply float 30 feet above his backyard for a few hours. He packed a sandwich, a six-pack of beer, a CB radio, and a pellet gun to fire at the balloons when he decided to descend. However, his plan didn’t quite pan out that way. Instead of floating 30 feet up he ascended swiftly to a height of 16,000 feet as soon as he was cut loose. Now, if this wasn’t terrifying enough, he also drifted into LAX airspace. When he realized where he was, he used the radio to send a mayday call to the ground.
He stayed on the radio with emergency operators until he was able to muster his courage and shoot some of the balloons attached to his metal Sears lawn chair. On the way down though, some of the loose tethers from the popped balloons were caught in a power line and he caused a 20-minute blackout in a neighborhood in Long Beach. The result of his adventure? He was fined $1,500 and given the 1982 Darwin Award for At-Risk Survivor.
Larry was just the first of many to attempt a trip such as this though. In 1988 Mike Howard attempted to break the Guinness record for the Greatest Altitude Reached Using Helium Filled Party Balloons. He only soared to 3,000 feet on that occasion, but in 2001 he attempted to break the record again with a man named Steve Davis. They floated to 18,300 feet above Albuquerque, New Mexico using 1,400 helium-filled party balloons.
Kent Couch, a 47-year-old gas station owner from Oregon, made three attempts. His first occurred in 2006 where he found himself stranded in the air for six hours, eventually deciding to parachute out of his chair. In 2007 he flew 193 miles from Oregon to the Idaho border using 105 large helium balloons, and in 2008 he attempted the same trip again and traveled 240 miles, with a top height of almost 17,000 feet, to western Idaho.
Jonathan Trappe decided to travel over the English Channel in 2010. He used 54 oversized helium balloons and flew from the Kent Gliding Club in Ashford to a cabbage patch in France. It was a 22 mile trip that took him approximately four hours to make. Trappe holds the record for the longest free-floating cluster balloon flight at 14 hours.
Joe Barbera, a 60-year-old engineer, attempted to float in his lawn chair from Washington to Oregon, approximately a 200 mile trip, but wrecked his chair on a 40-foot tree in a national forest where he was eventually rescued. Barbera made it to 21,000 feet using 80 balloons.
In 2014 Eric Roner, a BASE jumper, went up 8,000 feet using 90 balloons and an old lawn chair. He parachuted off of his contraption once he reached a safe height. Roner isn’t the most recent person to attempt this though; in July of this year, Daniel Boria of Calgary strapped himself into a lawn chair to promote his line of cleaning products. The Calgary Police ended up charging him with “one count for mischief causing danger to life and one count of mischief to property under $5,000.”
For most people, tying as many helium balloons as you can to a wicker lawn chair so you can soar 16,000 feet into the air doesn’t rank high on the list of life experiences they’d like to have. That is, however, not the case for the seven men in this article. Perhaps they’ve given us something more to aspire to, or maybe they’ve just given us fodder for entertainment. Either way, unless you’re willing to parachute off a lawn chair at 8,000 feet, then this may not be the hobby for you.
– Leah Harrower, JETPUBS Inc.