Teaching Aaron Part 12. - Stupidity Gets You Nowhere

Larry Walters of Los Angeles states “I have fulfilled my twenty years dream.” Larry, a former truck driver for a company that makes TV commercials tells his true story. “I am staying on the ground. I’ve proved the thing works.”

Larry’s boyhood dream was to fly. But fate conspired to keep him from his dream. He joined the US Air Force, but his poor eyesight disqualified him from pilot status. After he was discharged from the US Forces he started truck driving for a TV commercial company. After years of driving and a well earned retirement, Larry sat in his backyard watching jets fly overhead. He hatched his weather balloon scheme while sitting outdoors in his extremely comfortable sears lawn chair. He purchased forty five weather balloons from an Army Navy surplus store, tied then to his lawn chair (Dubbed – Inspiration 1) and filled the four foot diameter balloons with helium. Then he strapped himself into his lawn chair with some sandwiches, Miller Lite Beer, and a pellet gun.

Larry’s plan was to sever the anchor and lazily float up to a height of about thirty feet above his backyard, where he would enjoy a few hours of flight before coming back down. He figured he would pop a few brews and then pop a few of the forty five weather balloons when it was time to descend, and gradually lose altitude. But things didn’t work out quiet as Larry planned.
When his friends cut the cord anchoring the lawn chair to his jeep, he did not float lazily up to the thirty feet. Instead, he streaked into the LA sky as if shot from a cannon, pulled by a lift of forty five balloons holding thirty three cubic feet of helium each. He didn’t level off at a hundred feet, nor did he level off at sixteen thousand feet.

At that height he felt he couldn’t risk shooting any of the balloons, lest he unbalance the load and really find himself in trouble. So he stayed there, drifting with his beer and sandwiches for several hours while he considered his options. At one point he crossed the primary approach corridor of LA’s LAX airspace, and Delta and Trans World airline pilots radioed in incredulous reports of a strange sight.

Eventually he gathered the nerve to shoot a few balloons, and slowly descended through the night sky. Hanging tethers tangled and caught in a power line, blacking out a Long Beach neighbourhood for twenty minuets. Larry climbed to safety, where he was arrested by waiting members of the LAPD. As he was led away in handcuffs, a reporter dispatched to cover the daring rescue asked him why he done it.

Larry replied nonchalantly, “A man can’t just sit around.” Larry’s efforts won him a $1,500 FAA fine, a prize from Bonehead club of Dallas, Texas and the altitude record for manned gas filled clustered balloon flight!