A Man Tied 42 Helium Balloons To A Lawn Chair And Took Flight – But Disaster Struck At 16,000 Feet

For 20 years, Larry Walters has fantasized about taking flight through the skies over California. And now, everything is finally in place. Tying 42 weather balloons to his favorite lawn chair, he lifts off from the ground with ease. But this unintentional daredevil’s plan is actually far too effective, and soon he finds himself in peril thousands of feet above the Earth.

Armed with just a few essentials, Walters took off from his fiancé’s yard in Los Angeles, CA, in the hope of spending a few hours taking in the sights of the nearby Mojave Desert. But immediately after the launch, he realized that he’d be getting much more than he bargained for. And before long, his relatively modest plan had turned into a death-defying stunt.

For more than an hour and a half, Walters soared high above the city, wreaking havoc across the skies. And almost 30 years later, his story continues to inspire adrenalin junkies around the world. While cluster ballooning is now considered an extreme sport, few have taken it to the same lengths that this humble truck driver achieved back in the summer of 1982.

In a plot alarmingly similar to the Pixar hit Up, Walters used nothing more than helium balloons to power his record-breaking flight. But even though his unlikely adventure has influenced a number of movies and shows, the truth remains stranger than any fiction. This is the story of a man who dared to dream – and left a trail of disaster in his wake.

But what prompted Walters, who was in his early 30s at the time, to attempt a stunt so daring that it’s remembered with awe even today? Well, the seeds of this flight of fancy were apparently sown shortly after he reached his teens. It was the beginning of the 1960s, and the world was on the cusp of the laid-back hippie revolution that would come to characterize the rest of the decade. In Los Angeles, though, a young boy was dreaming of a different kind of freedom.

According to Carol van Duesen, who was engaged to Walters when he attempted his astonishing flight, her fiancé had always wanted to take a ride in a balloon. At the time, the Albany Democrat-Herald reported her as saying, “It was just something that hit him when he was 13, and he’s had a fascination on that for all these years.”

Later that decade, Walters’ dreams of flying developed into a more specific ambition. He decided that he’d become a member of the U.S. Air Force and pilot planes in the Vietnam War. Those hopes were soon crushed, though, when doctors deemed that he didn’t have the required eyesight to take on such a role.

At that point, many people would’ve put their childhood ambitions aside in favor of a more practical choice. But not Walters. He took things into his own hands instead – in a big way. If he couldn’t learn to pilot a plane, Walters reasoned, he’d simply improvise with a man-made flying machine.

Although that might seem like a bold move, there are actually many tales throughout history of similarly bizarre stunts. If the stories are to be believed, men have been taking off in homemade devices since at least 2000 B.C. Around that time a bureaucrat named Wan Hu, in what today is China, is said to have built a rocket-powered chair that propelled him high into the sky.

According to legend, Hu’s stab at space travel ended in failure – and a fiery explosion. But other attempts at amateur flight have fared a little better. In the 15th century, for example, the polymath Leonarado Da Vinci conceived a number of flying contraptions, including one resembling a modern hang glider. And while there’s no evidence to suggest that he ever actually constructed these machines, others have followed his blueprints to produce a functioning design.

Later, in the 18th century the Portuguese cleric Bartolomeu de Gusmão built an elaborate flying machine designed to be lighter than air. According to its inventor, the vessel was propelled by magnets contained within metallic spheres. But commentators have since speculated that gases, rather than magnetic fields, were responsible for the project’s apparent success.

Gases have played an important part in the efforts of many amateur flight enthusiasts. In 1783, for example, the Montgolfier brothers launched the world’s first hot air balloon in France. And although others before them had laid claim to the feat, they would go down in history as the first inventors to achieve flight.

By the time that the Wright brothers stormed onto the aerial scene in the early 1900s, hot air balloons had become a relatively common sight. But that didn’t stop inventors from striving to find new ways to propel man into the skies. And in the 1930s a new craze, known as cluster ballooning, began to capture imaginations around the world.

In 1937 the Swiss-American engineer Jean Piccard launched a flying machine dubbed The Pleiades. Essentially a basket attached to around 100 latex balloons, the device reportedly reached an altitude of almost two miles. But how did it come back down? According to reports, the aeronaut simply stabbed and shot away some of the inflatables until he began to descend.

Later, more dedicated cluster ballooners would attempt similar feats, gradually reaching greater and greater heights as they honed their techniques. And even today, this somewhat strange extreme sport remains popular. But few enthusiasts have ever reached the dizzying altitudes of Walters’ 1982 adventure, which would earn him a place in the history books.

By the spring of 1932 Walters was residing in North Hollywood, making his living as a truck driver shifting equipment for a production company. And by all accounts, he seemed to be a perfectly normal guy. But he then began gathering supplies for a project that was more than a little out-of-the-ordinary.

Like Piccard, Walters planned to achieve flight by attaching himself to a cluster of gas inflatables. And in order to do so, Walters spent months assembling the kit for his homemade flying machine. By July, he’d acquired helium and 42 weather balloons, along with a parachute – presumably in case things went wrong.

But how exactly did Walters plan on attaching himself to his airborne balloons? Well, he selected one of his favorite pieces of furniture, a Sears-Roebuck lawn chair. Equipped with water containers to act as ballast, this unassuming seat would, he hoped, bear him some 30 feet or so into the skies above Los Angeles.

There, Walters planned to spend some time enjoying the views of the nearby Mojave Desert before using a BB gun to burst some of the balloons. With this, he reasoned, his makeshift flying machine would return to Earth. But the amateur aviator never could’ve predicted just how differently things would turn out.

In total, Walters spent a few thousand dollars on supplies for his daring plan. And finally, on the first day of July 1982, he made the journey to his fiancé’s place in San Pedro, some 40 miles south of his North Hollywood home. There, he filled the balloons with helium and attached them to his lawn chair, which he gave the name Inspiration I.

The next day, Walters prepared for the launch. In order to stay in touch with his friends on the ground – and measure the height of his flight – he packed an altimeter and a CB radio. He also brought along a bottle of Coca-Cola and a sandwich, in case he felt the need for a mid-air snack. Now, all that stood between him and lift-off was a rope tethering him to a nearby vehicle.

According to Walters’ plan, van Duesen was to cut the rope, allowing him to rise gently into the air. But almost immediately, things began to go very wrong. That’s because the truck driver had vastly overestimated the amount of helium that was required to lift him to an altitude of 30 feet.

The force of the 42 balloons was so powerful that the rope snapped before van Duesen could sever it. And instead of floating slowly over the neighborhood, Walters was thrust upwards at an alarming rate. As the motion sent his glasses flying off, his fiancé urged him to abort what it was now clear was a dangerous stunt.

But cool as a cucumber, Walters simply replied that he had a spare pair – and that his vision was not impaired. So all van Duesen could do was watch in shock as her fiancé rose higher and higher into the air. She warned him that there were planes in the area, but Walters maintained that everything was fine.

Unsurprisingly, though, everything wasn’t fine. Within seconds, Walters had surpassed the 30 feet that he’d hoped to reach and was showing no signs of slowing down. But when van Duesen radioed him to tell him that he’d be passing over her house, he responded jauntily – despite the peril he was so obviously in.

“We can see your balloons,” van Duesen is reported to have said. “Maybe when you get over… you’re going to into some blue stuff. Can you see us down now? Can you see us?” But Walters replied, “Carol... I’m almost 6,000 feet over. I can’t see much of anything except for a lot of houses.”

As Walters continued to rise higher and higher, he realized that the plan to control his descent by bursting some of the balloons was too dangerous to attempt. After all, it could mess with the balance of the whole contraption and send him plummeting towards the ground. So instead he did the only thing that he could do: sit tight and hope for the best.

But with temperatures dropping to around 5 °F at such altitudes, that was easier said than done. And as Walters attempted to reassure van Deusen that everything was OK, he realized that more trouble was just around the corner. Instead of moving over the Mojave Desert as he’d hoped, his flying machine looked set to take him out over the sea instead. And this trajectory brought him into the airspace of LA International Airport, where he startled pilots coming in to land.

In the busy skies above LAX, Walters decided that enough was enough and used his CB radio to transmit an emergency message. By this point, his altimeter was reading somewhere around 16,000 feet. Quite unintentionally, the truck driver had broken the record for the greatest height achieved while cluster ballooning – although he probably wasn’t in the mood to celebrate.

Way down below, band radio operator Doug Dixon received Walters’ distress call. Speaking to the AP at the time, Dixon explained, “This guy broke into our channel with a mayday. He said he had shot up like an elevator to 16,000 feet and was getting numb… he sounded worried but he wasn’t panicked.”

As baffled operators attempted to establish the specifics of Walters’ bizarre flight, the flying machine crept closer and closer to the sea. Wanting to avoid a dip in the water at all costs, the aviator decided that it was now or never. With his BB gun, he began to shoot out the balloons holding his strange contraption aloft.

But yet again, things didn’t go as expected. Instead of descending towards the ground, Walters’ flying machine remained at a terrifying 16,000 feet. Beginning to get really worried now, he burst more balloons before disaster struck. Caught in a sudden breeze, the lawn chair pitched forwards, sending the BB gun hurtling into the beyond.

With his options running out, Walters began to consider deploying his parachute and abandoning ship. But then, miraculously, his strange craft started to make its way downwards. As helium ebbed out of the balloons, the makeshift ballast helped his machine on its way towards the ground.

But the adventure wasn’t over yet. By this time, Walters was somewhere over Long Beach, around seven miles east of where his journey had begun. And as the streets below grew closer and closer, he began to fear that he’d hit a live electricity cables. Later, he’d tell reporters that it was the only really frightening part of his ordeal.

Thankfully, Walters’ friends on the ground sprang into action, informing the authorities of the unfolding situation. And in response, the power supply across several blocks was turned off. Moments later, the flying machine crashed into cables not far above street level, a suitably dramatic ending to an almost unbelievable tale. In total, the aviator had been flying for an hour and a half, during which he’d traveled more than 20 miles across Los Angeles.

Thanks to his fortunate crash-landing – and the fact that the power cales were dead – Walters survived his ordeal in one piece. But as locals crowded around to congratulate him, the authorities were far less amused. The truck driver is reported to have said to the well-wishers, “By the grace of God I fulfilled my dream. But I wouldn’t do it again for anything.”

As soon as they knew he was unharmed, the Los Angeles Police Department took Walters into custody. At the time, the Federal Aviation Authority’s Neal Savoy explained to a reporter, “We know he broke some part of the Federal Aviation Act, and as soon as we decide which part it is, some type of charge will be filed… If he had a pilot’s license, we’d suspend that. But he doesn’t.”

Eventually, five months after his flight, Walters was handed a $4,000 bill for various aviation offences, although that was ultimately lowered to $1,500. So did the unlikely adventurer regret his terrifying escapades in the sky? Apparently not. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times back in 1982, he explained, “It was something I had to do. I had this dream for 20 years, and if I hadn’t done it, I would have ended up in the funny farm.”

To Walters’ apparent surprise, his bizarre stunt ended up catapulting him into the spotlight. But some of the attention clearly mocked his actions, such as accolades from institutions such as the Bonehead Club of Dallas. Still, he was also invited to take part in shows such as Late Night with David Letterman, an experience he enjoyed immensely.

The year after his death-defying stunt, Walters left his truck driving job and attempted to launch a career as a motivational speaker. But even though he enjoyed moderate success in this field, he still struggled to find a new path in his life. Then, in November 1993 his mom made a tragic announcement. A month earlier, her son had taken his own life in the forests above Los Angeles. Was it despair at being unable to match the precedent that his incredible adventure had set? Or frustration at being forced into the limelight for simply trying to achieve his childhood dream? Although the truth was buried with him, the man dubbed Lawn Chair Larry will go down in history for his courageous, if completely unconventional, plan.