1Imagine as a child, you thought, if you could just get enough helium balloons, could you float away?
2And we're normally told, no, that's not possible.
3You're not going to be able to fly with the helium balloons.
4But I revisited that idea as an adult and...
5I argued if one balloon provides some unit of lift,
6why wouldn't we be able to scale that?
7And that's what we're doing.
8I'm flying my chair.
9My name is Trappe
10and I am a technical projects manager at a large IT consulting firm as a day job.
11But I have a unusual passion hobby,
12which is to take helium balloons, toy helium balloons, and assemble them in massive clusters for manned flight.
13These are balloons that were never intended to support manned flight,
14but that's what we've caused them to do.
15That passion has carried me aloft on more than a dozen flights across as many years.
16Sometimes it's just me, just my body in a tiny little harness,
17sometimes we're flying bigger things, I've flown houses.
18What a thing to say, I've flown houses, two of them.
19We were flying these toy helium balloons before the Disney Pixar film "Up."
20But I will say this, that the film "Up" also inspired us.
21Now, the idea of flying a house under toy helium balloons absolutely came from the Disney Pixar film.
22One of the things I love about flying these helium balloons is they have the capability for real expedition level flights.
23What I'm talking about is flights of 23,000 feet in an open gondola carried only by helium balloons.
24It varies from a small cluster, a couple dozen balloons
25to extraordinarily large towering clusters, 365 of these massive balloons.
26We've flown clusters for 10 hours, 12 hours, y'know, 14 hours.
27The longest we've ever flown in a single flight, 466 miles.
28When I take off, I don't know where I'm going to put down.
29I'll select a safe place to land in flight,
30but I'm flying hundreds of miles without knowing exactly where I'll land.
31So it's a mix of art and science.
32The art is the colorful cluster appealing balloons,
33but the science is, it is quite serious and I treat it seriously.
34There's human life at stake, my life and the lives of those I share the sky with
35and the lives of those under me.
36We work with Federal Aviation Administration in terms of getting the aircraft certified.
37Took me about a year to go to flight school, get a pilots license.
38And after about a year of tests and training and certifications, we made our first flight.
39I'm using my standard office chair as my gondola for that flight.
40When you're up there, it's not just leisure and relaxation. You're floating away. You have moments of that,
41but there's a lot more time spent thinking, okay, am I heading the right direction?
42Do I have any airspace or obstacles in front of me?
43If I'm climbing and I need to initiate a descent, I need to vent helium.
44The balloons are bio degradable.
45So we can also cut the balloons away, cut away individual balloons.
46So there's a whole calculation and it changes every flight, depending on what I'm flying.
47The feeling of launching is unparalleled, it's not like anything else.
48To fly an aircraft that's completely silent, makes no sound.
49We're approaching sunset.
50It's really beautiful out there.
51There's no rotor, there's no prop, there's no jet.
52There's no burner like a hot air balloon.
53There's no roar of wind like you get in a glider.
54It's completely silent like...
55There's no sound.
56So what's the whole point of this.
57Why do it?
58It's to lead an interesting life.
59That is the most beautiful moonrise I've seen in my entire life.
60It enriches my life to look back and reflect on what we've accomplished.
61I have all of those moments as prized memories to keep me warm in my old age.