The lorry driver who took to the skies in a lawn chair suspended from 42 helium balloons, armed with a compass, sandwiches and litres of Coke – and ended up buzzing an airport and causing a blackout

It was probably a good thing that truck driver Larry Walters did not inform authorities of his travel plans. After all, aviation officials tend to take a dim view of unlicensed pilots flying thousands of feet up in the path of passenger planes while sitting in a lawn chair suspended from 42 helium balloons.

And so, after setting out from his fiancée’s small backyard in the Los Angeles suburb of San Pedro one morning in July 1982, he quickly disappeared from view.

Lawnchair Larry, as he became known, was then spotted by airline pilots at 16,500 feet, preparing to shoot down his weather balloons with an air gun so he could gradually descend to the ground. Or at least that was the plan.

The 33-year-old Vietnam War veteran had longed to become an Air Force pilot but was unable to do so because of his poor eyesight. However, when he saw a weather balloon hanging from a military supply store at the age of 13, he got an idea how to find another way to fly.

The enterprising or – depending on your point of view – completely insane Walters had hoped to reach the Mojave Desert, 250 miles northeast of LA, but traveled “only” 20 miles before landing in Long Beach, hitting power lines and causing a power outage . .

Now the great pilot and his terrifying flying machine are being celebrated in a new musical, 42 Balloons, which has premiered at the Lowry theater in Salford, Greater Manchester. Producer Andy Barnes calls the musical ‘a very human story about dreams’.

He adds: ‘It contains elements that we have all experienced, coupled with the most special ideas that we as humans come up with.’ Or as Walters put it more succinctly at the time: “A man can’t just sit around.”

His mother, he admitted, was less charitable and “thought maybe I was possessed by the devil, or maybe post-Vietnam stress syndrome.” She wanted me to see a psychiatrist.’

His unorthodox craft consisted of an outdoor aluminum chair purchased at a department store for $109, 13 plastic gallon jugs of water for ballast, a parachute, a life jacket, an altimeter, a Timex watch, a walkie-talkie, two liters of Coke, two flares for headlights, a air pistol, sandwiches, a road map of California, a compass and the 42 weather balloons, each 7 feet in diameter and 33 cubic feet in volume.

He had no trouble with a seat belt because the seat tilted back 10 degrees, so he didn’t think he would be thrown out.

His fiancée, Carol Van Deusen, financed most of the operation and suggested starting from her backyard since there was a hospital down the street.

The pair, helped by some friends – the other members of what Walters called his “ground crew” – blew up the balloons overnight and told suspicious police officers who inquired about the device, which grew up to 150 feet (45 meters) high, that they were making a TV ad. .

The chair, which Walters called Inspiration, was tied to the bumper of a friend’s car outside the house with a nylon guy line. The balloons, attached to the chair with four ropes, were arranged in four layers above the chair. Walters thought he would ascend majestically to just 100 feet, have a leisurely sandwich and, if all went well, carry on.

However, he had misjudged himself; his vessel was overloaded. When his ground crew released it, it shot up at a speed of 800 feet per minute, the force breaking the retaining rope and knocking off his goggles. His girlfriend begged him to come down, but there was “no way,” he said, so he ended it now.

At first, the experience of going up and down on garden furniture was something to enjoy. “The higher I went, the more I could see, and it was amazing,” he recalled. “Sitting in this little chair and, you know man, surreal… I could look at the coast forever.”

At one point he spotted a private plane – it was below him. But after passing 10,000 feet, at which point he should have started breathing with the aid of an oxygen tank (he didn’t have one), he drifted aimlessly into controlled airspace above LA.

A TWA airline pilot radioed that he had seen a man in a lawn chair with a gun in his hands. A Delta airline pilot reported seeing the Walters flight crossing the primary approach corridor to LAX airport. “We have a man in a chair strapped to balloons in our 10 o’clock position, range five miles,” he told air traffic control.

Numbed by the cold and struggling to breathe, Walters realized it was time to come downstairs. He had calculated that he would have to shoot seven balloons to ensure a controlled descent to the ground, and after popping them, he placed the gun on his lap while he read the altimeter.

The chair shot forward in a gust of wind and the air pistol was knocked into the air. To his horror, the craft began to rise again. Walters considered using his parachute, but he had only made one jump and he wasn’t very confident.

A subsequent official hearing was told he would have been carried to 50,000 feet and – as he put it – “turned into a popsicle”.

But Providence intervened. Walters began to hear the hiss of slowly escaping gas – the balloons began to leak helium and he descended again. At about 13,000 feet, he turned on his CB radio to talk to an emergency rescue unit operator. “Did you say you have a cluster of 35 balloons?” the operator asked, his voice sounding shocked. “Tell Carol I love her and I’m fine,” Walters replied.

When the chair came down, the dangling cables became tangled in an electrical line. Fortunately, the non-conductive plastic cables prevented Walters from being electrocuted, even though the Long Beach area had a 20-minute power outage.

By bizarre coincidence, Walters scraped the roof of an off-duty pilot, who was stunned as he watched the event at his pool. Lawn Chair Larry landed unharmed about 45 minutes after takeoff and was arrested by police.

“We know he violated a portion of the Federal Aviation Act and once we determine which part that is, charges will be filed,” a security official said. He was fined $4,000 – later reduced to $1,500 – for violations including flying a “civil aircraft for which no airworthiness certificate exists” and entering an airport traffic area without communicating with the control tower.

Walters became a national celebrity and was paid to appear in advertisements for Timex watches, but fought the ridicule that came his way. “I call it American ingenuity,” he boasted to skeptical host David Letterman. ‘I had confidence in myself and the profession. I really knew what I was doing.’

However, his moment in the spotlight was short-lived. After quitting his job as a truck driver, he struggled to make money as a motivational speaker. After breaking up with his girlfriend after fifteen years, he never married or had children.

Tragically, in 1993, Walters, who had complained that his life had felt empty, walked to his favorite spot in a forest and shot himself.

To most people, his flight must have been a nightmarish warning to the curious. For some, however, it was – just like the name of his profession – inspiring.

Although Walters wasn’t the first to attempt to take to the skies with helium balloons, he was the first to reach as high as he did. Apart from the fact that cluster ballooning became an extreme sport in the 2009 animated film Up.

In 2007, a gas station owner in Oregon “flew” 240 miles in a lawn chair powered by balloons. In 2010, American Jonathan Trappe crossed the English Channel hanging from balloons. However, in 1992, a Japanese adventurer set sail across the Pacific Ocean and was never seen again. A Brazilian priest who went up in 2008 tied to a thousand helium balloons drowned in the Atlantic Ocean.

Stunt magician David Blaine reached an altitude of 7,000 meters in 2020, but he had oxygen, satellite positioning, remote control ballast and miniature explosives that could pop balloons. So no trace of the man whose flying chair is preserved in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.

“It wasn’t a death wish,” Walters said. “But you couldn’t pay me to do it again.”