Larry Walters, a.k.a., "Lawnchair Larry," once took a journey 16,000 feet into the air with nothing but a lawnchair and some weather balloons.
The SmithsonianOn a summer day in 1982, Larry Walters took a lawn chair into the sky.
The idea of someone flying high into the sky in a chair hoisted only by balloons is something you’d expect to find in a children’s story. But for a California man named Larry Walters, it was reality.
On July 2, 1982, the then 33-year-old Walters tied massive balloons to a lawn chair. — and took off into the sky. Planning on a short flight, he brought some beer, a sandwich, a radio, and a pellet gun.
But though Walters was supposed to ascend just a short distance, the cable meant to tether him to the ground quickly snapped. As a result, Walters shot 16,000 feet into the air before he entered a rocky descent by shooting some of his balloons. Ultimately, he landed totally unharmed.
This is the wild story of Lawnchair Larry Walters, and his surprising 1982 flight.
How Childhood Dreams Of Touching The Sky Became Reality
Born on April 19, 1949, in Los Angeles, California, Larry Walters long dreamed of touching the sky.
According to an interview he gave with the New Yorker in 1998, this dream was born when Walters visited Disneyland around the age of eight or nine. While there, he spotted a woman holding “a zillion” Mickey Mouse balloons. Something clicked in Walters” brain.
“I know that’s when the idea developed,” Walters told the magazine. “I mean, you get enough of those and they’re going to lift you up!”
By the time Walters was 13, he was already experimenting with making his own hydrogen generators. And when he saw a weather balloon in an Army-Navy-surplus store, he became convinced that such large balloons could easily lift a person.
Touring Club Italiano/Wikimedia CommonsTwo men with a weather balloon in the 1950s. When Larry Walters saw balloons like this, he became convinced that enough of them would be strong enough to lift a person.
He originally thought he might direct his curiosity about flying into becoming a pilot, but Walters’ poor eyesight meant that that path was closed to him. Instead, he worked as an Army cook during the Vietnam War.
But in 1972, Walters realized that if he wanted to fly, he would have to start putting his plan into action. So he did.
Over the next decade, Walters collected a “darn sturdy little chair,” 45 large balloons, and several water jugs to help with weight distribution. He dubbed his lawn chair contraption the Inspiration I.
And before long, Lawnchair Larry Walters would take to the sky.
The Infamous Flight Of Lawnchair Larry Walters
On July 2, 1982, Larry Walters got ready to take flight in his lawn chair contraption. He intended to fly above his San Pedro neighborhood for a while, enjoy the view, and then come back down. He had a parachute, a camera, a CB radio, a pellet gun to pop the balloons in order to descend, and a cooler that held a sandwich, soda, and beer.
But things didn’t go quite as he’d intended.
National Air and Space MuseumLarry Walters’ lawn chair.
Walters had used a rope to tether his chair to the ground. But as he began to ascend, the rope snapped. With nothing keeping him on the ground, Larry Walters began to climb higher and higher into the sky.
From the ground, his girlfriend begged him to abort the mission. But Walters was exactly where he wanted to be.
“I wasn’t going to hassle with her because no way in heck, you know, after all this — my life, the money we’d sunk into this thing — and just come down. No way in heck. I was just going to have — have a good time up there.”
And that’s exactly what Walters did. He sat in his chair and soaked up the view. He had brought a camera, but, completely immersed in the experience, Walters didn’t use it. As he ascended further, the sight was unreal.
“I could see the orange funnels of the Queen Mary. I could see that big seaplane of Howard Hughes’s, the Spruce Goose, with two commercial tugs alongside,” Walters recalled to the New Yorker. “Then, higher up, the oil tanks of the naval station, like little dots. Catalina Island in the distance… I had this camera, but I didn’t take any pictures. This was something personal. I wanted only the memory of it – that was vivid enough.”
But as Lawnchair Larry Walters soon found out, it was easier going up than going down.
The Rocky Landing Back To Earth
As Larry Walters reached 15,000 feet, the air around him began to chill and thin. He decided it was time to come back down. Walters used the pellet gun he’d brought to shoot several of his large balloons in hopes of initiating a controlled descent. But when Walters placed the pellet gun in his lap, a gust of wind came along. Walters jerked forward, and the gun fell from his lap.
“To this day, I can see it falling — getting smaller and smaller, down toward the houses, three miles down — and I thought, ‘I hope there’s no one standing down there,'” Walters remembered.
With no other way to pop the balloons, Walters was stuck. As he tried to decide if it was time to use the parachute he’d brought with him, however, some of the helium in his remaining balloons began to leak. After reaching 16,000 feet, his lawn chair started drifting back down to earth.
National Air and Space MuseumWalters used water jugs to help with weight distribution.
The danger wasn’t completely over; without the pellet gun, Larry Walters had no way to regulate his altitude. He used his radio to connect with a dumbstruck air traffic emergency responder, who couldn’t quite understand what sort of aircraft Walters was flying.
“The difficulty is, this is an unauthorized balloon launch,” Walters told them. “I know I am interfering with general airspace. I’m sure my ground crew has alerted the proper authorities, but could you just call them and tell them I’m O.K.?”
Walters continued to try to control his landing, even cutting open some of his water jugs with a pent knife. But he descended swiftly toward some power lines, and only narrowly avoided electrocution when his balloons got stuck in the wires.
“If I’d come in a little higher, the chair would have hit the wires, and I could have been electrocuted,” Lawnchair Larry Walters said. “I could have been dead, and Lord knows what!”
Larry Walters Was Back On Earth – And In Some Trouble
YouTubeAfter his flight, Walters got to appear on Late Night With David Letterman.
Larry Walters had safely landed his lawn chair contraption. But he was then met by the Long Beach Police Department, who let him know he’d soon be hearing from the Federal Aviation Administration.
“We know he broke some part of the Federal Aviation Act, and as soon as we decide which part it is, a charge will be filed,” F.A.A. Safety Inspector Neal Savoy stated, according to The New York Times. “If he had a pilot’s license, we’d suspend that, but he doesn’t.”
Walters, not really knowing what to do with the chair, gave it away to a kid in the neighborhood. Then he reunited with his girlfriend and headed home.
He was initially fined $4,000 ($13,000 today) for flying “without establishing and maintaining two-way communications with the control tower.” But Walters appealed, and the fine was later reduced to $1,500 ($5,000 today). Meanwhile, Walter’s strange flying contraption and his story made him something of a minor celebrity.
He earned the nickname “Lawnchair Larry” and was invited to appear on the Tonight Show and Late Night With David Letterman. In a less complimentary acknowledgement, he was also granted the 1982 honorable mention from the Darwin Awards and the first place award from The Bonehead Club of Dallas.
Lawnchair Larry tried to capitalize on his fame, and quit his job as a truck driver to become a motivational speaker. Unfortunately, he was never able to successfully get his speaking career off the ground, so to speak, and struggled in his later life to make money from the lecture circuit.
Wikimedia CommonsWalters inspired others to recreate his experiment, known as cluster ballooning.
Sadly, Lawnchair Larry died by suicide roughly a decade later, in October 1993. But his legacy lives on. Walters’ legendary flight gave rise to the extreme sport of cluster ballooning, in which participants are strapped in a harness and attached to rubber helium-filled balloons.
Inspired by Larry Walters, others have made similar flights, including Mike Howard and Steve Davis, the two men who now hold the Guinness World Record for the highest altitude ever reached while cluster ballooning. Another person who followed in Walters’ food steps is Jonathan Trappe, who attached 54 balloons to his office chair, soared to an altitude of 14,783 feet, and landed in a field 50 miles away.
As for Lawnchair Larry’s famous lawn chair? The neighbor kid, Jerry Fleck, had kept it all this time. He donated it to the National Air and Space Museum in 2019 where it can be seen to this day.
After reading about how Larry Walters became “Lawnchair Larry”, see these 33 images from the wild early days of human flight. Then check out these 24 fascinating Amelia Earhart facts.
