Larry Walters was a truck driver, but his
lifelong dream was to fly. When he graduated from high school, he joined the
Air Force in hopes of becoming a pilot.
Unfortunately, poor eyesight disqualified
him. So when he finally left the service, he had to satisfy himself with
watching others fly the fighter jets that criss-crossed the skies over his
backyard. As he sat there in his lawn chair, he dreamed about the magic of
flying. Then one day, Larry Walters got an idea. He went down to the local
army-navy surplus store and bought a tank of helium and forty-five weather
balloons. These were not your brightly colored party balloons; these were
heave-duty spheres measuring more than four feet across when fully inflated.
Back in his yard, Larry used straps to attach the balloons to his lawn chair,
the kind you might have in your own back yard. He anchored the chair to the
bumper of his jeep and inflated the balloons with helium. Then he packed some
sandwiches and drinks and loaded a BB gun, figuring he could pop a few of those
balloons when it was time to return to earth. His preparations complete, Larry
Walters sat in his chair and cut the anchoring cord. His plan was to lazily
float back down to terra firma. But things didn't quite work out that way.
When Larry cut the cord, he didn't float
lazily up; he shot up as if fired from a cannon! Nor did he go up a couple
hundred feet. He climbed and climbed until he finally levelled off at eleven
thousand feet! At that height, he could hardly risk deflating any of the
balloons, lest he unbalance the load and really experience flying! So he stayed
up there, sailing around for fourteen hours, totally at a loss as to how to get
down. Eventually, Larry drifted into the approach corridor for Los Angeles International Airport .
A Pan Am pilot radioed the tower about passing a guy in a lawn chair at eleven
thousand feet with a gun in his lap. (Now there's a conversation I'd have
enjoyed hearing!) LAX is right on the ocean, and you may know that at
nightfall, the winds on the coast begin to change. So, as dusk fell, Larry
began drifting out to sea. At that point, the Navy dispatched a helicopter to
rescue him. But the rescue team had a hard time getting to him, because the
draft from their propeller kept pushing his homemade contraption farther and
farther away. Eventually they were able to hover over him and drop a rescue
line with which they gradually hauled him back to earth.
As soon as Larry hit
the ground, he was arrested. But as he was being led away in handcuffs, a
television reported called out, "Mr. Walters, why'd you do it?" Larry
stopped, eyed the man, and then replied nonchalantly, "A man can't just
sit around."
No comments:
Post a Comment