Lawn Chair Larry: The Truck Driver Who Flew 16,000 Feet on a Garden Chair and 42 Balloons

Apr 20

9 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

Collage for Lawn Chair Larry showing Larry Walters in his garden chair beneath a cluster of weather balloons, a black and white shot of the balloons in flight and a TV interview still

On 2 July 1982, a 33-year-old Los Angeles truck driver called Larry Walters sat down in an aluminium Sears garden chair, tied it to 42 helium-filled weather balloons and let go of the ground. He'd planned to bob about 100 feet above San Pedro, enjoy the view, then drift gently out towards the Mojave Desert.

Instead he went up like a cork, hit roughly 16,000 feet, gave two airline crews the shock of their careers, wandered into the controlled airspace around Long Beach Airport and came back down tangled in a power line, blacking out a neighbourhood for 20 minutes. He didn't have a pilot's licence or any balloon training and, by the end of it, he didn't have his glasses either.

Here's the full story of Lawn Chair Larry, including a few bits that usually get left out.

Quick Answers

Who was Lawn Chair Larry? Larry Walters, a North Hollywood truck driver and Vietnam veteran who'd been rejected by the Air Force because of his eyesight.
When was the flight? Friday 2 July 1982, from a backyard in San Pedro to Long Beach, California.
How high did he go? About 16,000 feet, or roughly three miles up.
Where's the chair now? At the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, in the Thomas W. Haas We All Fly gallery.

A Dream Born in an Army Surplus Store

Lawrence Richard Walters was born in Los Angeles on 19 April 1949 and spent most of his life wanting to fly. He tried the proper route first, joining up in the hope of training as a pilot, but the Air Force turned him down because of poor eyesight. He served in the Army in Vietnam instead, then came home and drove trucks.

The idea that would make him famous had arrived years earlier. At 13 he'd wandered into a military surplus store and spotted big weather balloons hanging from the ceiling. If you filled enough of those with helium, he reckoned, they'd lift a man. It's the sort of thought most kids have and forget about. Larry carried it around for two decades.

He wasn't alone in that kind of stubbornness. Nearly 60 years earlier, Bessie Coleman had been knocked back by every American flying school and simply went to France to learn. Larry's workaround was a lot cheaper and a lot less sensible.

Black and white high school yearbook portrait of a young Larry Walters from 1966 — Walters' high school yearbook photo, 1966

Building Inspiration I

By 1982 Larry had decided he was really going to do it, and his girlfriend of many years, Carol Van Deusen, was on board. The pair bought 45 eight-foot weather balloons from a surplus store and sorted out the helium, reportedly with the help of a forged requisition from FilmFair Studios, where Larry worked, claiming it was for a TV commercial. That cover story came in handy again the night before launch, when police wandered over to ask why a backyard was filling up with giant balloons.

The aircraft itself was an aluminium Sears patio chair, which Larry christened Inspiration I. He strung the balloons above it in four tiers and hung plastic gallon jugs of water off the frame as ballast. The idea was that he could rise by dumping water and come down by shooting balloons.

His kit list was surprisingly thorough for something that's gone down in history as a drunken prank:

A pellet gun to pop balloons for the descent
A CB radio and an altimeter
A parachute and a life jacket
A camera, a torch, a pocketknife and a first aid kit
Sandwiches, beef jerky, a big bottle of soda and some beer

There was a ground crew too. A friend called Ron Richlin helped Carol hold things together in the backyard of her family's house in San Pedro. The plan was to rise slowly on a rope tied to Larry's Jeep, hang about for a bit while the authorities were told what was going on and only then cut loose.

Launch Day: Straight Up

None of that went to plan. When the tether let go early, Inspiration I shot upwards at somewhere around 1,000 feet a minute. The acceleration was so sudden it knocked Larry's glasses clean off his face. Carol later found them on the ground.

Within minutes he was miles above the harbour, half blind and freezing, sitting in a garden chair. He drifted over the approach routes into Long Beach, and the crews of a TWA flight and a Delta flight both radioed in to report a man in a chair floating where no man in a chair should be. You'll often see a word-for-word version of the TWA pilot's radio call quoted online. Nobody's ever produced a recording of it, so take it with a pinch of salt.

Black and white photo of Larry Walters in sunglasses sitting in his garden chair as it lifts off beneath balloons, with a rooftop behind him — Larry Walters lifting off from San Pedro

Larry was chatting away on his CB radio the whole time, admitting to monitors on the ground that he knew he was in federal airspace and asking them to tell everyone he was okay. At around 16,000 feet, with the air thin and bitterly cold, he started picking off balloons with his pellet gun. He'd popped a few when a gust tipped the chair and the gun slid out of his lap, falling three miles to the houses below.

That left him at the mercy of the wind and whatever helium leaked out on its own. As he finally began to sink, and then sink too quickly, he dumped water from the jugs to slow himself down. Inspiration I came in over Long Beach, where the dangling tethers snagged a power line. The line held, Larry dangled and a chunk of the neighbourhood lost electricity for about 20 minutes while he was got down safely.

Black and white photo of a large cluster of weather balloons in the sky with Walters' chair hanging beneath — Inspiration I in flight

How long was he up there? That depends who you ask. Most retellings say 45 minutes. The Los Angeles Times obituary put it at about two hours. And the Times managed to muddle things further in 2001, when a piece on a stage musical about him knocked a zero off and said he'd only got to 1,600 feet.

Larry also packed that camera, by the way. He never used it. Asked about it later, he told the Times, “I was so amazed by the view I didn't even take one picture.”

Arrested, Fined and Famous

Long Beach police were waiting for him when he reached the ground, and the Federal Aviation Administration was baffled about what to do with him next. You can't suspend the pilot's licence of a man who's never had one.

Larry Walters carrying his garden chair with water jugs attached past a police car on a sunny suburban street as officers and onlookers watch — Walters carrying Inspiration I away after landing in Long Beach

After a hearing, the FAA announced on 17 December 1982 that it was fining him $4,000 for breaking four regulations, including flying in controlled airspace without staying in radio contact with the tower. Larry said he couldn't possibly pay, having already sunk every penny he could save or borrow into the flight. One charge, flying a civil aircraft without an airworthiness certificate, was later dropped when the FAA accepted that a garden chair didn't need one. He settled for $1,500 in April 1983, with the agency concluding the flight was potentially unsafe but that he'd never meant to put anyone in danger.

Larry had his own view of the bureaucrats. He liked to point out that if the FAA had been around in 1903, the Wright brothers would never have got off the ground at Kitty Hawk.

The public loved him. He was flown to New York for Late Night with David Letterman on 12 July 1982, and later called it the most fun he'd ever had. He went on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. The Bonehead Club of Dallas gave him its top prize, and his climb was the unofficial altitude record for a gas-filled cluster balloon. It could never go in the record books because the flight was unlicensed and unsanctioned.

When a reporter asked him why he'd done it, Larry gave the answer that's followed him ever since: “A man can't just sit around.”

How the Chair Got Into the Smithsonian

Here's the bit that makes the story perfect. Straight after landing, Larry handed his chair to a neighbourhood kid called Jerry Fleck, who'd been watching the whole circus unfold. When the Smithsonian came asking for it a little later, Larry had to admit he'd given it away, and he regretted it for years.

Wide-eyed Larry Walters with a moustache gesturing as he talks to reporters outdoors while holding a bottle of soda, with a caption about his lawn chair balloon flight — Larry talking to the press after the flight

Jerry, to his enormous credit, never threw it out. He kept the chair for more than three decades, still rigged with its ropes and its plastic jugs. In the end he donated it to the National Air and Space Museum, where an objects conservator spent from March to May 2019 cleaning and stabilising it. It went on show at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia first.

Today it's at the museum's flagship building on the National Mall. The official collection record lists it as a craft of the balloon type, describes it as a garden chair with 13 plastic gallon water jugs and four ropes attached and credits Jerry as the neighbourhood kid Larry gave it to. It's displayed in the Thomas W. Haas We All Fly gallery, a few rooms from the Wright Flyer.

Larry Walters' aluminium garden chair with a woven seat and back and white plastic water jugs tied to its sides, photographed against a plain grey background — The chair as it's held in the Smithsonian collection

The Imitators: Kent Couch and the Ballooning Priest

Larry more or less invented the sport now known as cluster ballooning, and plenty followed him, some luckier than others.

The most persistent was Kent Couch, who ran a petrol station in Bend, Oregon. Couch said he'd got the idea from a TV show about Larry's flight. His first attempt in 2006 lasted 99 miles before too many balloons burst, forcing him to bail out by parachute. In 2007 he went up with 105 big helium balloons and managed 193 miles before landing in a farmer's field near Union, Oregon, short of the Idaho border. A gust of wind then blew his empty chair away. Ranchers found it the following spring.

Third time lucky. In July 2008 Couch lifted off from his petrol station beneath more than 150 party balloons and covered about 235 miles in roughly nine hours, touching down in a pasture in Cambridge, Idaho. Each balloon gave around four pounds of lift, and he brought himself down Larry style, by shooting balloons with a BB gun. In 2012 he went up again alongside Iraqi adventurer Fareed Lafta in a pair of chairs, as a warm-up for a planned flight over Baghdad.

Not everyone came home. In April 2008 a Brazilian priest, Adelir Antonio de Carli, set off from the port city of Paranaguá strapped to around 1,000 helium balloons. In a grim echo of Larry's story, he was trying to raise money for a rest stop and worship centre for truckers. Winds carried him out over the Atlantic, the balloons were found in the sea the next day and tugboat workers recovered his body off the coast of Rio de Janeiro state that July.

Larry's flight has also turned up in all sorts of places. It inspired the 2003 Australian comedy Danny Deckchair, a Hal Prince-directed musical called The Flight of the Lawnchair Man and a MythBusters segment. It belongs on the same shelf as other gloriously daft unauthorised flights, like the bar bets of Thomas Fitzpatrick, who twice landed a stolen plane on a New York street.

Later Life and Death

Fame didn't pay. Larry quit trucking and tried the motivational speaking circuit, where he was only ever sporadically in demand. He turned up in a Timex print campaign in 1992 featuring adventurous people, but never made much money from the flight. He and Carol split up after around 15 years together, and he picked up work here and there as a security guard.

Older Larry Walters with a grey moustache in a Timex watch print advert — Larry in his Timex advert

He found some peace outdoors, hiking the San Gabriel Mountains and volunteering for the US Forest Service. He told the Times in 1988 that he and nature got along very well.

On 6 October 1993, aged 44, Larry hiked to a remote spot in Angeles National Forest and took his own life. Hardly anyone noticed at first. His death only became public in late November, when his mother, Hazel Dunham, told reporters. The family said they knew of no reason for it. He'd never married and had no children. He was survived by his mother and two sisters, and he's buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills.

If you've been affected by this story, the Samaritans are available 24 hours a day on 116 123 in the UK and Ireland. In the US, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Why Lawn Chair Larry Still Matters

It'd be easy to file Larry under idiots who got lucky, and plenty of people have. The Darwin Awards gave him an honourable mention. But he wasn't a drunk messing about with party balloons. He was a working man who'd wanted to fly since he was a boy, got told no and spent years saving up the means to do it anyway. He made his list, bought his chair and went.

It went brilliantly and catastrophically wrong at the same time, and he pulled it off regardless. The chair now sits a short walk from the machines that made aviation history. Given the dream it carried, that's exactly where it belongs.