Lawnchair Larry, the OG Balloon Man Who Flew Into Federal Airspace by Mistake

His feat, equal parts impressive and foolish, earned him worldwide fame. It also brought him worldwide mockery and ultimately ended his life. Not in the way you think, though.

Larry Walters worked as truck driver in North Hollywood, in Los Angeles, California. At 33-years-old, he’d already been dreaming for 20 years of the day he might take flight by simply holding onto a balloon or more. In March of 1982, Larry decided this would be the year when he’d carry out his dream.

On the floor of a motel room, with his then-girlfriend Carol, Larry drew a sketch of what he called “Inspiration I,” a home-made aircraft that was basically a child’s take on a balloon rig. The “pilot” of said aircraft would sit on a lawn chair, and large weather balloons filled with helium gas, arranged in several tiers, would pull the thing up into the sky.

Larry didn’t have any type of training, neither as a pilot nor as a balloon operator, but he did have a dream. And nothing stands in the way of a man with a dream, not even common sense.

On July 1st of that same year, “Inspiration I” became a reality: Carol had bought (“invested in,” Larry would say) balloons and helium from an Army supply store, and they were arranged in six tiers. Larry often said he had 43 balloons in the rig, but most reports mention just 42. Larry later estimated the investment at around $4,000: $3,000 on the balloons and the gas, and some $800 on a parachute, which would be his backup plan. The lawn chair was cheap: it was a common patio chair, of the kind that doesn’t fold, which Larry torture-tested in unspecified ways.

Carol and a friend would be Larry’s team on the ground for the next day’s flight. Armed with a couple of sandwiches, a bottle of Coke, a radio transmitter and a BB gun, Larry set out to launch into the air on July 2.

The plan, as per his own words, was to stay tethered to the ground for a couple of hours, just hovering around, before the cord was cut. Half an hour before launch, Larry’s teammates would call the FAA to let them know an unauthorized and illegal flight was taking place. Meanwhile, he would slowly drift into the Mojave Desert at only a few hundred feet off the ground, and he would just as slowly and swiftly land there.

Nothing about this now-historic flight went as it should have.

The tethering chord snapped before the expected time, with the rig of balloons pulling Larry into the air with speeds of up to 1,000 feet (304 meters) per minute. His glasses fell on the ground, prompting Carol to yell and nag him over radio to “get back here!” in a panic. Ascension was so quick and took him by such surprise, that he forgot to take photographs with the camera he had bought for the occasion.

Some 45 minutes into his flight, Larry realized a couple of very important things: first, he wasn’t flying towards the ocean, but towards LAX, back then still one of the busiest airports in the world. Number two, he was going into class A airspace, which meant that, in addition to breaking federal law, he wasn’t getting enough oxygen.

Too afraid to jump and parachute back to ground, Larry mustered the courage to start shooting out balloons with his BB gun. He shot out seven on them, on the outside layers, before fumbling and dropping the gun. Luckily, it was more than enough to begin the descent: Larry had reached by then an altitude of over 16,000 feet (4,877 meters) and his limbs had long gone numb.

To slow down his descent, he started dumping water ballast: he had brought some 35 gallons (132.4 liters) of water in plastic jugs tied to the arms of the chair. He was able to get close to the ground at a relatively safe speed, though he never came anywhere near the Mojave Desert. Instead, he flew above a Long Beach neighborhood and his rig became entangled in the power lines, causing a 20-minute blackout and ending a 2-hour flight that was never planned.

Larry didn’t receive as much as a scratch in the stunt, despite his landing (he was left dangling on the power lines, some feet above the ground) and despite the fact that he didn’t have a seatbelt. After he was rescued from his contraption and shook the hands of the people who had come to cheer on him, he was escorted into a waiting police cruiser. Asked by a reporter what had prompted such an incredible stunt, he simply said “A man can’t just sit around.”

From that day on, he became Lawnchair Larry.

Eventually, the FAA fined Larry $1,500 and he spent a couple of days in police custody. Larry quit his job as a truck driver and went on the lecture circuit, even making appearances on several of the time’s most popular talk shows. His stunt had broken the record for highest altitude for gas-filled clustered balloons, but Guinness never certified it because he wasn’t licensed and the flight hadn’t been sanctioned. People loved him for his display of American ingenuity and his humorous way of speaking.

But people also mocked him. As fame came too much too fast for a man who had never imagined himself in this position, and then suddenly went away, Larry was left struggling with how to cope. At just 44, in 1993, Larry drove himself to his favorite LA hiking trail and put a bullet in his heart.

He never said a word about what was troubling him or offered an indication about his dark thoughts. But he did say this: “So many people have dreams and they never follow through on them.” Larry was not one of them.