The Legacy of ‘Lawnchair Larry’
Larry Walters was a truck driver by trade, but history remembers him for the patio chair he drove erratically through the approach airspace to Los Angeles International Airport. Although his risky and illegal stunt turned him into a cult hero, it also cost “Lawnchair Larry” $1,500 in FAA fines and earned him plenty of ridicule. His voyage happened 37 years ago this month.
As recounted in a 1998 New Yorker article, the story began when a young Walters visited Disneyland and saw a lady with a large cluster of balloons. He imagined what it would be like to take flight underneath them. A few years later, Walters saw a weather balloon at a military supply store and concluded that a big bunch of those oversized balloons would be enough to lift him (and a chair) into the air.
He never stopped dreaming about that possibility, but another 20 years passed before Walters acted on the fantasy. While on the road at a Holiday Inn, he sketched a plan on placemats and convinced his long-skeptical girlfriend, Carol Van Deusen, to go along with it. Walters took off from her back yard on July 2, 1982, carried aloft by a batch of balloons that was 150 feet high.
The flight of Inspiration, the name of Walters’ amateur aircraft, didn’t go at all as planned. When the last tether that restrained his chair and 42 helium-filled weather balloons snapped, he soared faster and higher than expected. Rising at 800 feet per minute, he eventually climbed to about 16,500 feet, or nearly three miles high.
Although Walters took a pellet gun in order to pop balloons and stop his ascent, he dropped the gun after shooting seven balloons at about 15,000 feet. By the time he reached his peak height, he was laboring for breath because he had not taken oxygen, and his toes were numb. He thought about jumping and using the parachute he was wearing.
He’s lucky he lived. You’re encouraged to use oxygen above 10,000 feet and required to use it above 12,500 feet in a small plane. And Walters was stuck up there.
about “adventurous” people. (Image: Google)
Near the peak of Walters’ flight, airline pilots from Delta and Trans World Airlines spotted him and contacted approach control for the Los Angeles area. “We have a man in a chair attached to balloons in our 10 o’clock position, range five miles,” one of them said.
Approach control reported the incident to Long Beach Tower, the nearest airport. Walters was descending by that time as helium leaked from the remaining balloons.
“We were working in the tower, and we were getting a couple of phone calls from the approach control to see if we could visually see this bizarre thing,” said former air traffic controller Rolan Morel, who started his career at Long Beach tower in 1981.
A manager grabbed binoculars to search the sky. Morel couldn’t remember whether he spotted Walters but said the balloon flight did not affect airport traffic that morning.
Walters’ landing was as uncontrollable as the flight itself. He had planned to land in the Mojave Desert but never came close to that destination.
As he descended more rapidly than expected into a Long Beach neighborhood, Walters dumped the ballast he had taken with him — about 35 gallons of water in plastic bottles — in an attempt to slow his descent. His makeshift aircraft ended up snagged in the power lines, with Walters dangling a few feet above the ground.
That happened outside the home of a pilot who was reclining by his pool. “He sat there mesmerized, just looking at me,” Walters told George Plimpton, who wrote The New Yorker piece. “After about 15 seconds, he got out of his chair. He said, ‘Hey, do you need any help?’”
The police detained Walters long enough to check his record but let him go and told him to expect to hear from the FAA. “We know he broke some part of the Federal Aviation Act, and as soon as we decide which part it is, some type of charge will be filed,’’ regional safety inspector Neal Savoy told reporters.
In his interview with Plimpton, Walters recounted some of his interaction with the FAA. The agency told him the pellet gun he dropped from 15,000 feet could have killed somebody on the ground and estimated that the balloons could have taken Walters to 50,000 feet if he had not popped some of them.
On Dec. 17, 1982, the FAA initially fined Walters $4,000 for operating an aircraft without an airworthiness certificate, creating a collision danger to other aircraft, entering controlled airspace without staying in touch with air traffic control, and posing hazards to the life and property of others. The agency eventually agreed to a $1,500 fine for one charge — not communicating with air traffic control.
“The flight was potentially unsafe,” the agency concluded, “but Walters had not intended to endanger anyone.”
Walters embraced his 15 minutes of fame after the flight. He appeared on both “The Tonight Show” and “Late Night with David Letterman,” as well as on numerous radio and game shows. The popular television series “The A-Team” incorporated a lawn-chair flight into one 1983 episode, and in 1992 Timex featured Walters in a series of ads about “adventurous” people.
But Walters was mocked, too — most notably as an “at-risk survivor” in the Darwin Awards, which sarcastically recognize people “who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it.” Ironically, Walters’ life did indeed end prematurely and on a melancholy note. He committed suicide in 1993 at age 44.
“Lawnchair Larry” has gained more notoriety since his death than he did while he was alive. He has inspired songs, art, theatrical performances and even a 2003 Australian comedy called “Danny Deckchair.” Mark Barry, a licensed pilot, once had a website all about Walters, and filmmaker Nirvan Mullick is working on a documentary about him.
Walters’ name is about to become an official part of aviation history, too. The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum is acquiring the Sears patio chair from Jerry Fleck, who took ownership of it the day of Walters’ flight simply by asking if he could have it.
Tom Crouch, a senior curator at the museum, said the chair likely will be displayed at the museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va. He said he is interested in it because the story immediately clicks with people.
“It symbolizes the freedom of flight and the desire to achieve flight that’s embedded in all of us,” he said. “… Who hasn’t dreamed of doing something like that?”
(Photos: Jonathan Trappe)
Others clearly have shared the dream. Jean Piccard, the grand-uncle of current Solar Impulse pilot and balloonist Bertrand Piccard, invented “cluster ballooning” and took the first flight in 1937. Other pioneers went airborne in the 1950s and 1960s, and a small community of cluster balloonists has emerged since Walters’ death.
One of them, Kent Couch, was inspired by a television show about Walters’ flight. The agency fined him for multiple violations during a tandem flight with Fareed Lafta in 2012. But two other cluster balloonists — John Ninomiya and Jonathan Trappe — have flown with FAA permission and emphasize that fact.
Ninomiya, the publisher of Clusterballoon.org, started flying in 1997 and completed 82 flights by 2011, including trips in 47 states as part of his “States of Enlightenment” project. Trappe, who chronicles his journeys at Clusterballoon.com, has flown 14 times since 2008, including a trip over the English Channel and an unsuccessful attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean.
Trappe also worked with Disney/Pixar to promote the 2009 movie “Up.” The marketing tour included tethered “armchair” balloon flights for TV personalities in major cities. Trappe later flew that chair 160 miles from Alabama to Georgia — under a cluster of balloons certified by the Greensboro Flight Standards District Office.
“For the short flights he does, it’s a fairly safe operation,” said Timothy Haley, the principal safety inspector at the FSDO. Both the balloons and the cords attached to them are color-coded so that Trappe knows which ones he can pop or cut loose. “He’s got it down to a science where he can control the thing.”
One of Trappe’s most memorable flights took him into the airspace near Raleigh-Durham International Airport in North Carolina in 2010. It was the first-ever overnight flight for such an aircraft, and Trappe talked to Raleigh Tower controller John Dinkel via two-way radio. Trappe also periodically flashed the spotlight he was carrying so Dinkel could monitor him.
Now a controller at Chicago O’Hare Tower, Dinkel remembers that night well. He said it was about two hours from the time he first communicated with Trappe until he could no longer see his spotlight flashing. No other airplanes came into the airspace during that time.
“They wouldn’t have been able to accommodate it if he had come through in the day,” Dinkel said. “I was glad I was able to sit there and enjoy the experience and not have to work around it. … It’s something I will never forget. I still tell people about it today.”
Trappe is a big fan of the FAA. He said his interactions with people at the FSDO and in air traffic control have been “respectful, thorough and always professional.” The agency also has opened doors for him to civil aviation authorities in other countries, including Canada, France, Italy, Mexico and the United Kingdom.
But he’s not a fan of unlicensed pilots like Walters who take flight in uncertified aircraft and with little or no regard for safety. “As a safety-conscious pilot,” Trappe said, “I work to fly as a conscientious user of our shared national airspace system, respectful of the obligations for safe operation as I enjoy the privileges of my pilot certificate.”
While Trappe certainly appreciates the love of aviation that motivated Walters, he said Walters was irresponsible not to go through pilot training and fly according to FAA rules.
“It is clearly possible to take an aviation dreamer and turn him into a safe, legal, certificated pilot,” Trappe said. “… That is the route I put forward to the many aviation dreamers that ask me how to become a cluster balloonist.”
A version of this story originally appeared on the FAA’s internal website in 2015. It has been reprinted with permission.
