Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society » The Lawn Chair Balloonist

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February 15th, 2006

The Lawn Chair Balloonist

We recently came across a video of a group of intrepid and curious individuals who wanted to find out how many helium-filled balloons it would take to lift a human being off the ground. We were very impressed, despite the fact that the investigators seemed to have remained safely tethered to the ground the entire time.

This reminded us of the historic — and dramatically less safe — flight of Larry Walters, a hero of the Athanasius Kircher Society (Kircher himself once journeyed to the lip of a volcano to get a closer look).:

On July 2nd, 1982, Larry tied 42 helium-filled balloons to a Sears lawn chair in the backyard of his girlfriend’s house in San Pedro, California. With the help of his ground crew, Larry then secured himself into the lawn chair which was anchored to the bumper of a friend’s car by two nylon tethers. He took with him many supplies, including a BB gun to shoot out the balloons when he was ready to descend. His goal was to sail across the desert and hopefully make it to the Rocky Mountains in a few days. But things didn’t quite work out for Larry. After his crew purposely cut the first tether, the second one also snapped which shot Larry into the LA sky at over 1,000 feet per minute. So fast was his ascent that he lost his glasses. He then climbed to over 16,000 feet. For several hours he drifted in the cold air near the LA and Long Beach airports. A TWA pilot first spotted Larry and radioed the tower that he was passing a guy in a lawn chair at 16,000! Larry started shooting out a few balloons to start his descent but had accidentally dropped it. He eventually landed in a Long Beach neighborhood. Although he was entangled in some power lines, he was uninjured.

Mark Barry has set up a web page dedicated to that momentous flight.

Walters is also the subject of the title essay in a book we love, George Plimpton’s The Man in the Flying Lawnchair: And Other Excursions and Observations.

[acknowledgements to Make Magazine for the initial tipoff about the latter-day Walters]

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