Cluster Ballooning: Latest Budget Travel Trend?

Posted by Mike Richard on July 13, 2007
Filed under: Odds + Ends, Sidelines

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Here’s a way to get around cheap:

Have you ever dreamed of being carried into the sky by a giant bouquet of colorful toy balloons?

That’s the idea behind cluster ballooning. The pilot wears a harness, to which a cluster of large, helium-filled balloons are attached. Control is achieved by releasing ballast to ascend, or by bursting balloons to descend.

Kent Couch of Oregon did just that in an attempt to travel from Oregon to Idaho:

[He] settled down in his lawn chair with some snacks — and a parachute. Attached to his lawn chair were 105 large helium balloons.

Destination: Idaho.

With instruments to measure his altitude and speed, a global positioning system device in his pocket, and about four plastic bags holding five gallons of water each to act as ballast — he could turn a spigot, release water and rise — Couch headed into the Oregon sky.

Nearly nine hours later, the 47-year-old gas station owner came back to earth in a farmer’s field near Union, short of Idaho but about 193 miles from home.

Via CBS News

The kicker:

Couch is the latest American to emulate Larry Walters — who in 1982 rose three miles above Los Angeles in a lawn chair lifted by balloons. Walters had surprised an airline pilot, who radioed the control tower that he had just passed a guy in a lawn chair. Walters paid a $1,500 penalty for violating air traffic rules.

I’d love to have been online for that conversation.

I’m not sure if this is two parts cool and one part stupid or the other way around. Either way, I’d sign up!

Perhaps the next budget airline won’t be plane-based at all?

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Vagabondish editor, Mike Richard, lives in Rhode Island - a spit of land in the northeastern U.S. He is a professional web designer and travel junkie with an unhealthy addiction to backpacking, camping, hiking and seeing the world. He enjoys knit hats, small, declarative sentences and speaking in the third person.



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