[1142] in Humor
CLASSIC HUMOR: Remember: Fly Sears!
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew A. Bennett)
Tue Oct 17 09:30:14 1995
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 17 Oct 1995 09:26:31 EDT
From: "Andrew A. Bennett" <abennett@MIT.EDU>
This happened quite a while ago...
-Drew
Date: Mon, 16 Oct 1995 18:42:59 -0400
From: Erik Nygren <nygren@MIT.EDU>
From: katyking@MIT.EDU
From: markst@mdhost.cse.TEK.COM
Date: 8/11/95 10:28 AM
(UPI) LONG BEACH, Calif. -- Look, up in the sky. Is it a bird, a plane,
the space shuttle? No, it's Larry Walters at 16,000 feet in his lawn
chair.
Walters, 33, a truck driver, spent nearly two hours in the air on
Friday in an aluminum lawn chair suspended from a 50-foot cable
attached to 45 helium-filled balloons.
Among other things, he threw a scare into a couple of airline pilots
who happened across the path of his weird flying contraption.
"I know it sounds strange but it's true," said a Long Beach police
officer.
"The guy just filled up some balloons with helium, strapped on a
parachute, grabbed a BB gun and took off."
But everything didn't go as planned and Walters had a few dicey moments
as
he started getting numb in the cold atmosphere at 16,000 feet and decided
to descend -- which he accomplished by popping some of the balloons with
the BB gun. As he neared the ground he saw power lines.
"That's when I got scared," he said. "Those things can fry you."
He didn't get fried, the balloons draped themselves across the wires,
leaving Walters dangling in his chair a few feet from the ground and he
dropped earth. The landing knocked out power in the neighborhood for 20
minutes.
"I have fulfilled my 20-year dream," said Walters, a truck driver for
a company that makes TV commercials. "I'm staying on the ground.
I've proved to myself that the thing works."
In addition to the BB gun and the parachute, Walter carried several
one-gallon water jugs for ballast, a life vest and a CB radio.
"But the best piece of equipment was the lawn chair," Walters said.
"It was a Sears. It was extremely comfortable."
Walters told authorities that he was trying to drift to the Mojave
Desert, site of Sunday's schedules space shuttle Columbia landing, but
the winds didn't cooperate.
"I wasn't trying to upstage the space shuttle," Walters said. "I
would have landed well away from there. I just wanted to lay back and
enjoy it all, but I had to do something when my toes started getting
numb."
Police said they probably would not file charges against Walters. But
the Federal Aviation Administration was investigating, mainly because
of the scare Walters gave the airline pilots who came across him at
16,000 feet in his flying lawn chair.
