How One Man Flies Hundreds of Miles Using Balloons

Imagine as a child, you thought, if you could just get enough helium balloons, could you float away?

And we're normally told, no, that's not possible.

You're not going to be able to fly with the helium balloons.

But I revisited that idea as an adult and...

I argued if one balloon provides some unit of lift,

why wouldn't we be able to scale that?

And that's what we're doing.

I'm flying my chair.

My name is Trappe

and I am a technical projects manager at a large IT consulting firm as a day job.

But I have a unusual passion hobby,

which is to take helium balloons, toy helium balloons, and assemble them in massive clusters for manned flight.

These are balloons that were never intended to support manned flight,

but that's what we've caused them to do.

That passion has carried me aloft on more than a dozen flights across as many years.

Sometimes it's just me, just my body in a tiny little harness,

sometimes we're flying bigger things, I've flown houses.

What a thing to say, I've flown houses, two of them.

We were flying these toy helium balloons before the Disney Pixar film "Up."

But I will say this, that the film "Up" also inspired us.

Now, the idea of flying a house under toy helium balloons absolutely came from the Disney Pixar film.

One of the things I love about flying these helium balloons is they have the capability for real expedition level flights.

What I'm talking about is flights of 23,000 feet in an open gondola carried only by helium balloons.

It varies from a small cluster, a couple dozen balloons

to extraordinarily large towering clusters, 365 of these massive balloons.

We've flown clusters for 10 hours, 12 hours, y'know, 14 hours.

The longest we've ever flown in a single flight, 466 miles.

When I take off, I don't know where I'm going to put down.

I'll select a safe place to land in flight,

but I'm flying hundreds of miles without knowing exactly where I'll land.

So it's a mix of art and science.

The art is the colorful cluster appealing balloons,

but the science is, it is quite serious and I treat it seriously.

There's human life at stake, my life and the lives of those I share the sky with

and the lives of those under me.

We work with Federal Aviation Administration in terms of getting the aircraft certified.

Took me about a year to go to flight school, get a pilots license.

And after about a year of tests and training and certifications, we made our first flight.

I'm using my standard office chair as my gondola for that flight.

When you're up there, it's not just leisure and relaxation. You're floating away. You have moments of that,

but there's a lot more time spent thinking, okay, am I heading the right direction?

Do I have any airspace or obstacles in front of me?

If I'm climbing and I need to initiate a descent, I need to vent helium.

The balloons are bio degradable.

So we can also cut the balloons away, cut away individual balloons.

So there's a whole calculation and it changes every flight, depending on what I'm flying.

The feeling of launching is unparalleled, it's not like anything else.

To fly an aircraft that's completely silent, makes no sound.

We're approaching sunset.

It's really beautiful out there.

There's no rotor, there's no prop, there's no jet.

There's no burner like a hot air balloon.

There's no roar of wind like you get in a glider.

It's completely silent like...

There's no sound.

So what's the whole point of this.

Why do it?

It's to lead an interesting life.

That is the most beautiful moonrise I've seen in my entire life.

It enriches my life to look back and reflect on what we've accomplished.

I have all of those moments as prized memories to keep me warm in my old age.