The Legend of "Lawnchair Larry"

I was perusing the Darwin Awards not long ago when I recalled having heard about a man who attached more than 40 weather balloons to a cheap lawn chair in order to fulfill his dreams of taking to the skies as a pilot.

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Larry Walters wanted to be a pilot his entire life. However, he was rejected by the US Air Force because of poor eyesight and instead settled for a career as a truck driver. After many years of dreaming, he decided it would be a good idea to purchase a bunch of eight-foot weather balloons and a bunch of helium, attach them to a $5 lawn chair, bring some supplies with him and float over the Mojave Desert.

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_{I don't trust these things on the ground, let alone thousands of feet in the sky}

Among the necessary supplies Larry thought to bring with him was sandwiches, a 2-way radio, a parachute (good thinking Larry,) a pellet gun to descend to the ground by destroying balloons, and of course, beer (he's a hero.)

Larry was not a scientist and he expected to slowly rise into the sky at the same rate that a child's balloon would rise to the ceiling. However, not realizing how physics works, when he cut the cable holding his chair to the ground, he very rapidly rose thousands of feet into the sky, eventually reaching the maximum altitude of 15,000 feet.

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I've been skydiving multiple times and this normally takes place at 13-15 thousand feet. It's terrifying and I can't imagine what it would be like to be sitting in a Wal-Mart lawn chair at that altitude. Because Larry is a super-hero of sorts, he kept his wits about him and managed to radio in to the local airport to explain his situation. By that point he had already been spotted by several commercial airliners.

Larry stuck to his ingenious plan of shooting out his balloons one-by-one to slowly descend to the ground but then somehow managed to fumble and he dropped the rifle (I wonder what happened to that?) He was therefore stuck in the sky for a lot longer than he had originally intended.

He finally landed in Long Beach, or actually got tangled in power lines and caused power outages in the local area.

It should be quite obvious that doing this, particularly in a populated area with a commercial airport, is a crime. However, there was no particular law on the books to charge Larry of because well, why would there be a law that says you can't attach a S**Tload of balloons to a chair and fly around because no one would be nuts enough to try that.... right?

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Unsurprisingly, there have been many imitators that have also illegally performed this act since that fated day in 1982. Most of them have used a slightly more intelligent game-plan, so to speak.

Larry got his 15 minutes of fame, but none of it lead to any sort of financial prosperity. The world quickly moved on and he was forgotten. In many ways it can be said that his fame was his undoing because for reasons unspecified Larry killed himself with a gunshot to the heart in 1993. He was 44.