"Lawnchair Larry" takes flight in a homemade airship - July 2nd, 1982

On this day in 1982, amateur pilot Larry Walters launched himself skyward using a lawn chair and several dozen weather balloons.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show that gives you a bird's eye view of history
every day of the week. I'm Gabe Lucier, and today
we're looking at the story of Lawnchair Larry, an intrepid

(00:21):
balloonist who refused to let his lack of training or
a pilot's license keep him grounded. The day was July second,
nineteen eighty two. Amateur pilot Larry Walters launched himself skyward
using a lawn chair and several dozen weather balloons. The

(00:45):
thirty three year old Vietnam veteran and truck driver had
always dreamed of flying, but because of his poor eyesight,
he wasn't able to join the Air Force as a
pilot or obtain a commercial license. Still, he was determined
to fly somehow so in the summer of eighty two,
with the help of his long suffering girlfriend Carol, Walters

(01:07):
built a homemade flying machine and took to the sky
above San Pedro, California. Walter's aircraft, so to speak, was
an aluminum lawn chair from Sears, which he later described
as extremely comfortable. Sourcing the chair was as easy as
you'd expect, but the heavy duty balloons that gave it

(01:27):
lift were a little tougher to acquire. Weather balloons aren't
typically available to the public, so to get their hands
on some, Larry and his girlfriend forged a requisition slip
from his employer and pretended the balloons were to be
used in a commercial. The scheme worked perfectly, and after
plunking down about four thousand dollars, Larry and Carol became

(01:50):
the proud owners of some forty odd weather balloons. When
fully inflated, each balloon contained roughly thirty three cubic feet
of helium and was about eight feet in diameter. That's
a total volume of about fifteen hundred cubic feet, more
than enough to get a few hundred pounds airborne. On

(02:11):
the morning of the launch, Larry, Carol, and a few
friends set to work inflating and attaching the balloons to
Larry's patio chair. Then they loaded up the rig, which
Larry christened the inspiration Ie, with some basic equipment and supplies.
This included a parachute, a camera, a cbee radio, a

(02:32):
couple of sandwiches, and a few beers, as well as
water jugs for ballast, and a pellet gun to pop
the balloons and casey went too high. At eleven a
m on July second, nineteen eighty two, Larry Walters strapped
himself into his lawn chair and released the ties to
the anchors that kept him grounded. The plan was to

(02:54):
ascend about thirty feet into the air, at which point
a tethering rope attached to a nearby jeep would prevent
the inspiration from rising any higher. Walters hoped to spend
a few hours floating lazily over the Mojave desert and
then descend gently back to Earth by shooting out a
few balloons. Walters even thought of a failsafe measure in

(03:16):
case he started descending too quickly. All he had to
do was jettison the water jugs that he carried his ballast,
and the lawnchair would descend much more slowly. It was
a fool proof plan, or so he thought, But when
the inspiration was set loose that morning, it shot into
the sky much faster than expected, clearing a distance of

(03:37):
eight hundred feet per minute. The device quickly reached the
limit of the tethering rope and snapped it. The flying
lawn chair continued climbing and eventually reached a maximum altitude
of sixteen thousand feet, a full three miles off the ground.
So Walter's horror, the balloon began drifting into controlled airspace

(04:00):
Los Angeles, where he was quickly spotted and reported by
several commercial airline pilots. One of them was said to
have radioed air traffic control saying quote, this is TWA
two thirty one level at sixteen thousand feet. We have
a man in a chair attached to balloons in our
ten o'clock position range five miles. Up to that point,

(04:23):
Walters had refrained from popping any balloons because he worried
that he might become unbalanced and fall out of the chair,
But after enduring forty five minutes of freezing temperatures and
low oxygen levels, he decided to take his chances. Mustering
all his courage, Walters used his BB gun to pop
a few balloons, and, to his relief, the inspiration stayed steady.

(04:47):
He was just about to shoot out a few more
when a sudden gust of wind rocked the chair and
sent his gun plunging overboard. Caught by the wind and
not sure what to do next. Walters can continued drifting
toward Long Beach. He soon realized he was descending too quickly,
so he dumped his ballast and wound up drifting into

(05:07):
some power lines. The collision caused a twenty minute blackout
in Long Beach, and Walters had to be rescued by
the LAPD, at which point he was promptly arrested. By
the time he was back on the ground, a crowd
of reporters and local residents had gathered to watch the scene.
One reporter asked Walters why he had undertaken such a

(05:29):
risky endeavor, when the handcuffed balloonist replied, matter of factly, quote,
A guy has to do something. He can't just sit
around in his backyard all day. The press dubbed Walter's
lawn chair Larry, and he spent the next several months
basking in his new found fame. He appeared on both
The David Letterman Show and The Late Show, and he

(05:51):
spent a short while after touring as a motivational speaker
and encouraging others to pursue their dreams just as he had.
Of course, not everyone was a fan of lawnchair Larry.
The Federal Aviation Administration charged him with violating controlled airspace,
flying without a pilot's license, and operating a non airworthy aircraft.

(06:14):
He was fined four thousand dollars for the offenses, but
it was later reduced to fifteen hundred on appeal. Walter's
legendary flight inspired many other copycat balloonists, including Jonathan Trapp,
who flew fifty miles in an unmodified desk chair. These
daredevil flights later gave rise to a new extreme sport

(06:36):
known as cluster ballooning. Participants strapped themselves into a harness
rather than a lawnchair, and then take to the skies
with a cluster of rubber helium filled balloons. As for
the lawn chair that started at all the inspiration one,
it sad a rather unusual journey of its own. Before

(06:56):
Walters was hauled to the police station in nineteen eighty two,
he gifted his now famous lawn chair to Jerry Fleck,
a kid from the Long Beach neighborhood in which Walters
had quote unquote landed. Fleck held on to the bizarre
memento for the next three decades before finally donating the
lawn chair to the National Air and Space Museum. It's

(07:18):
now on display at the museum's companion facility, the Stephen f.
Oodvar Hazy Center, near the Dulles International Airport in Virginia.
Larry Walters never got the chance to fly planes like
he wanted, but because of his reckless, daring and ingenuity,
he still earned a special place in aeronautical history. I'm gay,

(07:44):
Blues Gay, and hopefully you now know a little more
about history today than you did yesterday. If you'd like
to keep up with the show, you can follow us
on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at TDI HC Show, and
if you have any comments or suggest es Jans feel
free to send him my way by writing to this
day at iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks to kazb Bias for

(08:08):
producing the show, and thanks to you for listening. I'll
see you back here again tomorrow for another day in
History Class