Flying Lawn Chairs and Helicopter Gold Mining: Adventures in the Sky

Hey guys, welcome to Overcrest.

I'm Jake and Chris is out on vacation.

So we don't have him to interrupt me during what is going to be hopefully a very fun history

episode that I'm presenting.

But I did want to have someone to add some color, some commentary and some expertise.

So I have with us our great friend, RJ, who amongst being a dear friend, one of the inner

core of Overcrest, he also happens to be a helicopter pilot.

And I don't even know if there's additional criteria or what is your title?

My title.

Well, helicopter pilot, commercial helicopter pilot.

That works.

Yeah, it's not just like a home built, you know, thing you built in your backyard.

But, you know, we will get to those RJ, just you wait.

I can't wait.

Oh, yes.

So a lot of guys who are pilots, I feel like, then have their hobby plane or their hobby.

Like what, how have you ever thought about, or is it, I guess I'm trying to reconcile

like if I could fly a helicopter RJ, that is all I would want to do.

Screw driving an old 911, I'm going to go rip around in my helicopter.

So how do you come back to like driving cars as a fun hobby?

And have you ever like, did you ever want to do like more of a hobby or fly for fun?

I think I probably thought about it over the years.

I think owning my own helicopter would just be cost prohibitive.

I'm not I thought about maybe getting my fixed wing license

because I don't have a fixed wing license.

I don't fly airplanes and maybe getting an airplane.

And then I kind of thought, you know what, I'm 52 now.

It's probably a good idea to stay in my lane of aviation

rather than accept a whole new level of risk that I'm probably not familiar with.

I mean, you know, if I encounter weather in the helicopter,

I can just stop and turn around.

Whereas in an airplane, it's a little more difficult to do that.

Yeah, you can't stop mid, mid flight, I guess.

Is it I would assume or I guess just my maybe a misunderstanding

do a lot of helicopter pilots start with fixed wing aircraft usually?

Or I guess I had assumed that's like that you graduate up to helicopters.

Is that not the case?

The school that I went to, that used to be their criteria.

You had to have a fixed wing license first in Canada now.

Well, I think in any private sort of training facility where you

because you don't have to go through the military.

Obviously, you can you can find a school because you did not.

Did you ever serve in the military?

OK, no, I looked into it and I was.

I was not I was already older than 18.

I already had some college education and things like that.

And I wasn't particularly the candidate.

The US military was, pardon, I think not the US military,

the military was looking for.

I think they want 18 year old who are malleable.

Right. They want a university degree

because you're joining an officer training program, essentially,

right, to be an aviator.

And the pay was really low.

And at that point, I was already married and I just thought I'm not doing this.

You know, I was 26 when I got into it.

So it was already kind of too old for them, I think.

Sure. Yeah.

So, yeah, I mean, you can just you can just go to a private training school

and you can get your license.

And then the issue is that anybody with enough money can get their license.

I haven't really looked into it that specifically.

It's very expensive now.

I mean, it was expensive then, too.

But but the thing is, you know, you graduate like every other junior pilot

with your 100 hours of your helicopter pilot or 250 hours of your

fixed wing pilot and you have no experience.

And it's an entirely experienced base industry.

So the the the problem or the the conundrum is, is, you know,

how do you gain that experience?

How do you find a company that has the type of work that a junior pilot can do

where they won't, you know, get into trouble or exceed their skill level

or have problems, you know, and and then build that experience level

and eventually become the type of pilot that they can put on any job they might have.

Right. So how many hours do you have now, RJ?

Because I know you log as a pilot, you log everything, right?

Do you have a running total in mind?

Because it's yeah, I'm you're required by Transport Canada to keep

a personal log of your flight time.

I think the FAA probably has a similar rule.

I have somewhere around 11,000 hours, maybe a little over 11,000 hours now.

And about 7,000 hours of that is on doing external load work.

My career arc has been very, I've been very fortunate, very specialized.

And it's worked out really, really well for me.

So I mean, you know, I'm really grateful for that because a lot of guys,

you know, they'll get their license.

And I'd heard of guys struggling on the ground to get into a flying

position for up to 10 years.

And I can't even imagine, you know, if my goal was to be flying by the time

I turned 30, you know, because you get your license and you've got to

toil around a little bit on the ground doing support work or whatever.

And I was fortunate to get into a situation through a series of convoluted

events that that got me flying before I was 30.

And because I guess I felt if I didn't have a good

experience base by the time I got to that age, that I would be

in a greater risk of being behind the eight ball when it comes to learning

curves and age and all those sorts of things.

Wow. Okay.

I should have just structured this entire episode about interviewing you

because I think it's fascinating what you do, but we had to have some,

some fun and comedy in there.

Um, I have to imagine a super specialized having literally lifting

because what you lift is a primarily like, um, like pipeline oil

industry equipment into remote places is what I'm picturing.

Uh, I started out doing, uh, I started out doing, uh, something

called seismic exploration.

So it's sort of the grassroots or base level of looking for oil and gas.

Okay.

So, uh, yeah.

So that was, um, you know, they, they have bags of equipment, essentially

at the time they weighed like 234 pounds each or something.

And, uh, I was flying a 500, uh, the time and a listener's

going to look up what that is, but it's, uh, basically the

little scout helicopter they used in Vietnam.

That sort of thing, right?

Oh yeah.

The little egg shaped one.

Yeah.

An updated version of that.

And, um, so we, that thing could lift four bags at that rate.

And what it is, is you had a GPS coordinate system on board and

you had to dial up the, the bags were in line, put them at

specific GPS points on the ground in a grid pattern.

And, uh, you'd put the gear out and then the guys would

walk out along the ground and spread all the gear out.

And then they'd fire off dynamite or they'd put

vibrations into the ground and, uh, they would, from that

they would get seismic data or a picture of what was underneath

the ground.

Uh, so that was oil and gas.

Yeah.

And then, uh, and then I, I sort of got into heli logging for a

bit, uh, on the coast, uh, that was flying a Vertol, uh, which

is the sea night, I think the Marines use them.

It's like the baby Chinook.

Okay.

Yeah.

I only did that for about eight months because I kind of

discovered that wasn't my area of interest.

Um, but the logging part of it or the logging part.

Yeah.

The log, I was getting air sick.

So it's a twin pilot operation.

So that was a complete change there's normally you're by

yourself, right?

So, um, so you got one guy who's flying and one guy

operating throttles and, uh, um, you know, limiting for

weight and power and that sorts of stuff, right?

So is that the case with it being a twin rotor craft?

Is that that's like standard for those or just because

of that type of work?

Uh, no, that's the class of the aircraft.

So depending on how the aircraft was certified and the

complexity of the systems that are on board, it'll

either be a single pilot or double or two pilot

operation, right?

Uh, or in some cases three, uh, you know, for guys

who are flying the sky crane and they're doing

external load work, there's a pilot co-pilot and

there's a load master who faces backwards.

And yeah, that's, it's quite interesting.

Yeah.

I hope you don't get, yeah, air sick when that.

Yeah.

Facing backwards and flying is not a lot of fun.

And, uh, so yeah, I only did that for eight months.

Um, and then I, uh, and then I got into a company that

had a bunch of drill work.

So, uh, exploration for mining, you know, copper,

molybdenum, gold, silver and that kind of stuff.

Sure.

And what they do is they, uh, they have these

heliportable drill rigs that, uh, they drill

into the ground and take core samples to see if

they can find the gold veins or whatever other veins

and to make a map of what the resource is underground.

So essentially these drills all come apart depending

on what's going on there, 30, 30, well, 20, anywhere

from 20 to 40 lifts, depending on what the drill is

and how, oh, wow.

Yeah.

So, and you have to assemble the drill, um, because

the helicopter, the class that we use can't

lift the whole thing at once.

Right.

So it, it all comes apart into little pieces and

you assemble it like Lego out on the hill.

So, you know, there's some precision

alonglining involved with that.

And, uh, you're working in mountainous areas

with slopes and weather and coastal weather and

all that sort of thing.

And there's guys at the bottom of the line.

So you got to be careful.

You don't squish anybody, right?

Like that would be a bad day.

Yeah.

I imagine.

Yeah.

Um, and then I, uh, actually somewhere in that

mix too, I also did some power line work where

I was stringing sock line for, uh, they would

then use that to pull, uh, conductors through

the towers and that sort of thing.

That was a lot of fun, actually, but, um, it

was a high, high, high energy sort of a thing,

right?

Cause you're.

Ha, ha pun intended.

We were side pulling this offline off of 500 and

you have to thread it through the little pulleys

and through the towers and everything.

Oh, and so you're doing that in the helicopter

trying to get it threaded through.

That's cool.

Yeah.

And then when you do the center phase, there's

like, there's something called needle work where

you have, you basically have this thing made of

rebar and it's got hooks and you pull it and

then you hook it on the tower and then you

go over the other side of the tower and you

pull it through and.

Wow.

Yeah.

It was a lot of fun, but pretty, you know,

well, I elevated high focus, I will say high

focus elevated risk and there were some things

about that that I didn't care for things that

went wrong and I just thought this is, this is

not, this is way too risky, you know, for a

guy with three kids and a wife, not doing this.

Yeah.

So with your job, are you on location for a

few days at a time?

Is it like an on and off thing?

Or are you able to fly out to these

locations and then you just fly back home?

So depending on what company you're working

for and how they run things, you know, it

can be, well, you can do 42 days max and

then you need a five day break and then

you could go and do 32 days again, but

you're limited by the number of, now we're

limited by the number of hours per day

we can work, the number of hours we can

be on duty and the number of flight

hours that we can fly.

Under the regulations that we have

currently in the type of work that we

do, we do a 14 days on, 14 days off

and I travel on my days.

So I fly out, I'll fly out, well I'll

drive to the airport, then I'll fly out to

the airport about four and a half hours

so south of where we're working, then we

get in the rental car, we drive four

and a half hours north, and then my

cross-shift will fly out to the remote

airstrip that we're working near,

you know, and then we'll swap, I'll

jump in the helicopter and fly out to

the job site.

So, and it takes about a day, you

know, to travel those distances and

get into work and then, you know, and

then we start our 14 days shifts.

Again, if I could fly a helicopter, I

would just put a landing pad on my

roof of my house and then just commute

via helicopter. I think that would be

the move.

I guess that would be good if the work

was local, you know.

Yeah, no.

That would work.

Oh man.

In the span of my career and the

companies that I've worked with,

I've had two jobs where I could

come home every night.

Yeah.

One was the seismic job and the other

one was the power line work that we

were doing.

I suppose any other mining stuff, you're

you're out in the middle of nowhere.

Yeah, well, you're where the gold is,

right, so.

If there was gold under my house.

Did you, so like if they find gold,

do you ever get like a little

souvenir being like, you're like,

oh yeah, just took some on my line

right there, no.

No, I would never do that.

Yeah, no, we actually interestingly,

I started working for this one company

and then I took an absence and I went

contract work and worked for a bunch

of other companies and I started

working for the company I'm at

currently and they had taken over

this job that we had started on.

So through a series of these

companies, basically we've seen a

job go from a tent camp all the

way up to it's a fully functioning

mine now and there's it's heavily

garnered.

There's security because I mean

that's, you know, I don't even

know what the numbers are, but you

know, 18 million dollars in gold

a day is being poured type of

thing.

Wow.

Yeah, like I that might be an

exaggeration.

I don't know.

I wouldn't know because they don't

they don't know the size that

ever.

Yeah, I suppose they don't tell you.

Yeah, yeah, we did really well today.

Look at all this gold.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, so that's crazy.

Like nobody really knows what's

going on, but you know, it's

profitable enough.

I had heard a number about, you

know, just the operating costs of

that place.

And this is, I don't know, eight,

10 years ago was a million dollars a

day, right?

So, you know, that's between all the

equipment that's operating on site

and all the people working on site

and the cost of the aircraft and

all that stuff, right?

So are you flying the gold out,

for example?

So they were.

Wow.

They were flying it out.

It was contracted by a different

company than ours.

They were flying it again.

They wouldn't, you know, they weren't

publishing the stats on when they

were flying the gold out or

anything like that.

They're heavily guarded

security always there, right?

And then a security company hired

to fly in the helicopter with

the gold and undisclosed location

of where they're flying it to

or from, right?

So, but yeah, they were flying

the gold out.

This seems like a great script for

like a heist movie that I

haven't ever thought of or seen

before.

That conversation has come up so

many times, you know, we all

worked in Hollywood.

It would be like, this is a

fantastic, this would be a

fantastic story.

That seems so cool.

Yeah, the complexity of it.

Somebody rocket launchers.

Okay, I wasn't going that crazy.

I was saying, oh no, RJ has a

mechanical failure and has to

ditch his load, but they don't

know where it was because the

transponder beacon isn't working

except it was because you were

the one that actually just

sabotaged it and then you come

in at night with your other

crew and we all get away with

the gold.

That's right.

But then you double cross us

because that's, you know, that's

at the end of the movie, there's

always got to be the twist.

Great, okay.

With that, I'm going to go write

a screenplay.

Maybe a storyboard.

No, that is super cool, super

fascinating.

Again, I should have just spent

this whole hour talking to

you and your experiences because

I think it's fascinating and

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So I think without further

ado, I'm going to bury

the lead a little bit here

and this is a story RJU

probably will recognize

or would have heard of

in the back of your mind.

So I'm going to get into it

and then we'll get into the

really fun and crazy stuff

that I'm definitely going to

lean on you to say,

well, that's a terrible idea

or yes, I also

have jumped off a barn in my

youth attached to a lawnmower

trying to fly.

Okay, so and that really

gets to the core of what

this is, you know,

we tend to think of flight

as this modern polished

miracle.

But for most of human

history, flight belonged to

kind of the weirdos and the

dreamers, the tinkers,

the backyard engineers.

I mean, look at, you know,

Orville and Wilbur Wright,

you know, they literally

were just bicycle mechanics

that kind of stumbled upon

and made something happen.

These are the kind of people

that looked at gravity

and said, yeah, but like,

maybe not, maybe,

maybe it doesn't need to be

that way.

And every generation

has these people amateur

aviator with a garage full

of tubing and canvas

convinced they can build a

plane that lands on a roof

or the guy who buys a surplus

parachute at a flea market

and jumps off a barn.

Then there was ballooness,

people who voluntarily

attached themselves to bags

of floating gas

and floated into the sky

with no idea where they're

landing.

So really humanity

has had a long history

of looking at the sky

and doing the most

irresponsible thing possible

in pursuit of just being

up there.

And if you zoom in on

American in the mid 20th

century, the golden age

of backyard projects,

you'll find an entire

subculture of people who

didn't just dream

of flight.

They believed it was the right

to attempt it.

The era of popular mechanics

covers with guys wearing

goggles, smoking pipes

and presenting

the home-built helicopter

you can make for 62 dollars.

This is Air Progress Magazine,

home-built aircraft,

float-equipped home-built

helicopter.

Wow.

Amazing.

This was the environment,

the cultural soup

that produced today's

I don't want to say hero,

but today's subject.

The guy we're talking about,

a man who saw airplanes

fly over his backyard

every day,

who'd always wanted to join

them,

believed down to his bones

that flying

didn't necessarily

require an airplane at all.

And technically,

he wasn't wrong.

Today's story is about a man

named Larry Walters.

Larry Walters was not

an adventurer,

not a test pilot,

not an engineer.

He was just a normal,

painfully normally guy.

He was born in 1949,

raised in North Hollywood,

California.

He was the kind of kid

who glued together airplane

models on a kitchen table,

as I'm sure sounds familiar

to many of us.

He watched military jets

from the right bases

and imagined himself

in a cockpit someday.

That part of him

never went away,

as we'll find.

He wanted to be a pilot

badly.

Not in the,

yeah, I think I want to do

that someday,

but in like,

my entire identity

depends on this working out.

But that didn't really work out

for him at all.

When Larry applied to join

the Air Force,

they failed him instantly.

His eyesight was atrocious.

Not like you need glasses bad,

but flight disqualifyingly bad.

And just like that,

his dreams evaporated.

Which RJ, you,

I should,

I should first of all

state that you're a canook.

So I don't know if like FAA

regulations are different

per Canada.

But what are,

and is it military

specifically when they

because I've heard that before,

like, oh,

you have glasses

or you have bad eyesight.

Yep.

Can't fly.

What,

what is the,

what is that?

Is that a thing?

Are there rules for that

in commercial space?

There, well,

commercial space is quite a bit

more lax.

We have Transport Canada up here.

It's not FAA,

but it's very similar regulations.

They intertwine with one another.

Some differences

for commercial aviation

with we were at eyesight.

Basically,

you know,

you can have glasses.

You can have had

laser eye surgery.

That sort of thing.

For the military,

absolutely not.

You have to have had

perfect eyesight.

If by the time you go through,

this was told to be

by one of the recruiters

in the Canadian military was

if by the time

you go through

all the training

and they've invested

the millions of dollars

to get you up to,

you know,

a pilot status.

If you then require

corrective lenses

or corrective eye surgery,

it will,

they won't allow that.

That's right.

They will allow that,

but you can't,

they won't,

they will not take you in

as far as I know anyway,

with poor eyesight to begin with.

So.

Yeah.

Well, this guy probably showed up

at the recruiter office

with Coke bottle glasses.

So, you know,

it didn't work out.

And so he became

a truck driver.

He worked out jobs.

He lived quietly

with his girlfriend,

just a regular guy

with an irregular dream,

just constantly

festering inside him.

One story says

that when Larry was 13,

he bought a weather balloon

at a military surplus store

and tied it

to a lawn chair

and sat in it

expecting something to happen.

But, you know,

nothing did.

But that idea,

that image,

that might be the easiest way

to fly.

That kind of stuck with him.

And Larry,

Larry never really outgrew that.

He just waited for the right

moment to try again.

Now,

as we know with

all of my stories,

I like to go down tangents

and all these sidebars.

So,

before we go further,

let's,

let's

take a look at how

this was not,

you know,

the first attempt

or in any way,

Larry was not alone

in the pantheon

of utterly questionable

aviation attempts.

In 1901,

a guy in Connecticut

happened to strap wings

to his arms

and jumped off his barn

and broke both legs.

In 1920,

a Minnesota man,

one of my own,

he built a propeller-driven

bicycle

with wings.

It did not fly.

It just dragged him

across a field

until the frame snapped.

In the 50s,

popular mechanics

ran articles

encouraging men

to construct

thrown helicopters

at home,

which is so unsafe

it barely qualifies

as a suggestion.

And in the 70s,

we talked about

hang gliders

becoming the

every man's flight option,

resulting in

oh, oh,

so many hospital visits

nationwide

and probably

much worse than that as well

because,

you know,

if your hang glider

fails,

you're not just going to the hospital

judging by the altitude you're at.

So yeah,

it's,

the backyard mechanic

has produced some incredible things.

Airplane,

personal computer electric starter,

it has also produced

a staggering number

of failures.

And

our man Larry

he stands proudly among them.

So

let's talk about

weather balloons

quickly before we move on

because

this is

paramount to our story

and how Larry

did try that once.

Weather balloons

are massive.

You don't buy one at Party City.

These are made of

tough latex

designed to expand

to the size of a small house

at altitude

when filled with helium,

each one can lift

several pounds.

Several pounds?

That might be wrong.

A typical weather balloon

bursts somewhere

in your 100,000 feet

due to expansion.

And up there,

the latex gets thin,

fragile and eventually

does pop.

The payload falls back to earth

under a parachute.

And that's

how they get their data

or used to at least.

I don't think they use

weather balloons anymore.

Maybe they do.

Anyways,

our man Larry,

he bought 45 of these.

And this is the part

where an engineer

would usually step and say,

oh, that is a terrible idea,

Mr. Larry.

He didn't actually have

any engineering friends

or background.

He asked the army surplus

store how many he could buy.

And they said,

as many as you want.

And so Larry bought

a lot.

So these giant rubber bags

are about five feet in diameter.

You fill it with helium

and it expands as it rises.

It can reach the size

of basically like

25, 35 feet

before it bursts

in diameter.

There's helium

is generally what there's used.

Hydrogen can be used,

but that gets spicy.

As we know,

our man Larry used helium,

which is, I guess,

probably the only sensible

decision he made,

opting instead of hydrogen.

And he,

he apparently helium

was not in short supply

like it is today,

which I believe is a thing.

So Larry's 45 balloons

would theoretically lift

600 pounds.

And he weighed 150 pounds.

His lawn chair

that he tied them to

weighed 15 pounds.

He added water jugs as a ballast,

which he fully expected control

his altitude with,

which we will talk about

in a minute.

He did not.

And with enough lift,

enough optimism

and not nearly enough rope,

Larry was about to get

airborne for real.

So he had a plan

or some semblance of a plan.

He didn't stumble upon this.

He had the simple goal.

Float above Los Angeles

in a lawn chair,

taking the view,

maybe drift around a little bit

and come down gently

like a picnic,

you know, in your lawn chair,

but

very high up as we'll find.

So he has 45 weather balloons.

He got his helium tanks

from a welding supply shop.

A Sears aluminum lawn chair

with the classic woven vinyl

straps, you know,

like that's your,

your classic grandma's lawn chair.

He did have a CB radio,

which I like,

a parachute,

which he didn't wear.

He just brought along,

I guess,

and like tied it to the lawn chair.

And a pellet gun.

A pellet gun to pop the balloons

in order to descend.

He also brought sandwiches,

you know,

if you need your rations

and a six pack of beer.

Literally you,

of you,

of course need a six pack of beer.

So Larry called his craft

the inspiration one,

which implies

the intent of an inspiration two,

which was in retrospect optimistic.

His girlfriend, Carol,

was not thrilled,

but she didn't stop him either.

She knew Larry,

and she knew this was

going to happen regardless.

So in their backyard,

their small home

in San Pedro, California,

Larry and a small

ground crew

began inflating

weather balloons,

tying them carefully

to the frame of his lawn chair

and flowed to the rig,

transformed from a normal

piece of patio furniture

into something

that looked like it belonged

maybe in a children's parade.

I don't know.

The neighbors watched

from their porches,

apparently,

eyebrows raised.

I don't know

if anyone called the cops

at this point,

but they were all wondering

what the hell they were going to be doing.

Larry's friend then helped

tether the chair

to a jeep

with a sturdy rope.

The plan was,

once they're ready,

Larry would get in,

settle down,

and they would

generally release the rope

so Larry would float upwards

at a manageable rate

and maybe test it out first

a few feet off the ground.

And like so many great

American plans,

this one fall apart immediately.

So

you might be thinking,

first of all,

is this legal?

And technically,

at first, yes.

Amateur balloon rigs

fall into a very strange

part of FAA regulation.

Up to a point,

unmanned free balloons

aren't heavily regulated

unless they exceed

a certain size,

weight,

or altitude threshold.

And manned ballooning,

traditional hot air ballooning,

is entirely legal.

But there is no rule book

for a guy tying

45 military surplus

weather balloons

to a lawn chair

with a BB gun.

So

Larry's plan

was definitely a gray area.

You said that's true

about ballooning

or amateur balloon rigs.

Do you have any experience

or know anything about that?

So there's something

called right of way

in aviation,

where aircraft,

depending on their class,

have to give right of way

based on whatever they are.

And balloons

basically are the only

lighter than aircraft

that don't have

to give right of way

to anything.

So every other aircraft

in the sky

has to give right of way

to it.

Now, having said that,

as you stated,

there are altitude restrictions

with which they have to operate

within so that they don't

interfere with

controlled airspace

and low level air routes

and things like that, right?

And so

by the sound,

I've heard this story.

So by the sounds of your story,

I know where this is going.

Larry is definitely going to

exceed those altitude ceilings.

Yeah, it reminds me

of so the right of way rule

that reminds me of

nautical and sailing

and when you're out on the water

navigating, right?

It's like, okay,

if you have a sailboat

or an unpowered craft,

you have to give way to them

and they have right of way.

Same thing, I suppose,

in the sky.

Yes.

So here we are

on the morning of July 2nd, 1982.

It's early afternoon.

Southern California,

the sun is bright,

air shimmering over rooftops

and Larry climbs into

the chair.

His feet dangle.

He straps in.

So apparently there was some

seatbelt, I guess.

Then the crucial detail,

someone releases the tether

rope early.

Not intentionally,

not ceremoniously,

just accidentally.

And the moment the rope

slipped free, physics took over.

Now, I don't know if I should

show the news article now

or wait till the end

because I do have then like

details here.

I think it's worth for the sake

of just showing.

Mr. Larry Walters,

there's a news story,

but then also he was on

The Late Show

with David Letterman.

Accomplishment right now.

The voices you're going to

hear are of my next guest

in the air

and his girlfriend on the ground.

Have you seen this,

Marjane?

Mr. Larry Walters.

This is one of my longs here.

Real footage.

I think the weight there

is very fine.

It's just about it.

Yep.

All right, Mr. Center,

it's great you're eating me over.

But what, Larry?

I can hear you.

I'll see if I have enough of my glasses.

Come on, come on, come on down.

You've got to come down

if you can't see.

Come on down.

I've got my other glasses.

I can see perfectly.

Don't worry.

Is everything okay?

Everything's A-OK.

Notify all the proper authorities, etc.

I'm headed towards the

I can see Marine Land right now.

You can see Marine Land there.

Oh my God, you're going to a fusionary.

Okay, here.

Have you caught up?

Have you?

Okay, have you?

Have you armed?

If you get to the ocean,

land on the Marine Land.

Wait, I'm just going.

Are you okay?

I'm making a turn.

I'm going inland.

Notify LAX over.

Sounds just like NASA, doesn't it?

Well, we're delighted to have this

gentleman with us tonight.

Please welcome Larry Walters.

Okay, we can come back to that,

but I just love that they had that.

Yeah, he lived, yeah.

Notify the FAA.

Notify LAX.

So, when that rope just,

I read somewhere it snapped

and I read somewhere else that

like it just, they let go of it,

whoever his quote, ground crew was.

Regardless, as soon as that happened,

his ascent was violent, nearly vertical,

and actually much quicker than he ever thought.

He rocketed Skyward at roughly 800 feet per minute.

Now, being a rotary craft pilot,

how fast is that?

When you're taking off in an airliner,

what does that ascent rate

or what do you usually ascend at?

800 feet per minute in a balloon

sounds, in a lawn chair, sounds fast.

In the helicopter, I wouldn't say that

that's outside of the normal parameters of operation.

You know, you want to take into account

your passengers and your altitude

that you're tending to go to

because people, pressure in their ears

needs some time to adjust.

So, if you start going faster

than 800 feet a minute,

things can get uncomfortable for people,

especially if they have a cold

or something like that.

Interesting.

Yeah, I didn't even think about that

because Larry clearly did not have

a pressurized cockpit or any other.

I mean, he had beer.

He had beer, so he's fine, right?

Within minutes, he was above the hillside.

He cleared the clouds moments after that

and Larry had planned and expected

to rise maybe a couple on our feet,

enough to see the neighborhood from above,

maybe snap a few photos with a camera I brought.

Instead, he climbed past 2000 feet,

then 6000, then 10,000,

then 16,000 feet and beyond

were commercial airliners roam at the time.

His glasses fogged with cold.

His breath was becoming difficult

because at that altitude, I mean,

16,000 feet.

Like I've been skiing at the top of,

what was it?

It's Big Sky, Montana, whatever that mountain is.

That's 13,000 feet.

And that's like, yeah,

you have a hard time catching your breath.

Yeah, there's regulations and aviation.

Anything over 10,000 feet,

up to 13,000 feet for more than 30 minutes

and the air crew has to have oxygen,

this is an unpressurized aircraft.

And then anything over 13,500,

I think it is, everybody's got to have oxygen, basically.

So at 16,000 feet,

depending on his lung health,

he could be in some trouble there.

Yeah, I do have a little sidebar

about the physiology of what happens at altitude

and really above 16,000 feet,

like oxygen levels are roughly half

what they are at sea level.

Hypoxia can set in.

You just don't get enough oxygen to your brain.

You can become confused, euphoric, unconscious.

The temperature, of course, drops dramatically.

And you basically just become very disoriented.

And if he sticks beers at this point too, right?

Well, I mean, yeah, good point.

Yeah, I mean, that's all part of it, right?

That's not going to help.

So in the clinical phrasing of the FAA report

that came out later,

he was quote at significant risk of incapacitation,

which I think is perfectly reasonable and accurate to say.

Also, he had absolutely no control over where he was going.

He's in a lawn chair.

Commercial airline pilots

are used to strange things in the sky.

You know, sometimes they see weather and birds

or odd reflections,

but they're not used to seeing a man

in a lawn chair floating at their altitude.

But that's exactly what happened.

Multiple commercial airline pilots

radioed air traffic control

to report an unidentified flying object.

One of them came close enough to confirm, quote,

it appears to be a man in a lawn chair.

Imagine being that pilot.

Imagine having to convey that to Tower and be like,

um, did I actually see that?

I don't even think I want to say that.

Yeah.

So, meanwhile, Larry drifted quietly over Long Beach.

The wind carried him gently westward then north.

He held his pellet gun,

but was too afraid to shoot the balloons,

worried the entire rig would tip over and send him tumbling.

Again, remember, he planned on being a couple hundred feet up

and maybe still connected to a rope.

And now he's at 16,000 feet,

freezing confused with hypoxia,

where the airliners are passing by.

Um, his CB radio suddenly burst to life at that moment.

A trucker, quote,

What in the hell are you doing up there?

Larry answered calm, but clipped.

Well, sort of flying was the official recorded response.

Air traffic control, now aware of his existence,

began monitoring his altitude and drift.

The FAA activated emergency procedures,

unsure of how to classify the event.

There are stories that the U.S. Air Force

was potentially alerted and scrambled,

but no one confirmed this.

Again, no one really doubts that they were called.

Larry Walters had, without clearance,

created an airspace violation so bizarre

that the FAA had no pre-written category for it.

He named the first and last recorded case

of a Class A airspace incursion by lawn furniture.

So, at this point, Larry had been drifting for hours.

Up there in the cold blue quiet above Los Angeles,

he finally realized he couldn't sail off forever,

and the helium was not going anywhere.

So, because he was heavy in the way that these helium balloons work,

they didn't get to the altitude where they would normally pop.

So, either he stays up there for a really long time

and still starts to just dissipate,

or he needs to take action.

And so this is where his pellet gun came in.

Shoot a balloon, lose a little lift,

descend solely, gently.

Just like an elevator made of hopes and rope and bad decisions.

But the moment he lifted the gun and fired,

the recoil shocked him.

Not because of the power of a pellet gun,

but because he was balancing so precariously

that the lawn chair lurched,

and the whole setup was balanced like a stack of cards.

And if you popped too many balloons on one side,

he'd begin cartwheeling downward,

like an aluminum wind chime.

But there was no choice.

So he had to aim carefully and shoot out one balloon at a time.

And this was not like a rifle.

I saw a photo of it.

It's like a little handheld pellet gun.

So imagine, and you saw how long that rope was.

Like, I hope I get one and not hit 10 in a row at the same time.

So, miraculously, the chair began to descend,

very slowly up first, drifting sideways,

wobbling under its shrinking bouquet of latex and lift.

He was coming down,

but the wind was blowing him toward an urban part of Long Beach.

Well, with houses, trees, and power lines.

And electricity famously does not get along

with large objects descending from the sky.

There have been numerous reports of that.

I feel like, Archie, you might actually have some experience

or at least know of protocols when working,

because you do,

I didn't even get into what you specifically do,

but you do a lot of lifting work with aircraft.

And I'm assuming when you're not in the middle of the bush

and you're coming around power lines,

you have to be very careful with that sort of thing.

Absolutely, yeah.

Not only, I mean, I've done some power line work as well,

but with the type of work I do with external load work,

of course, I've got a line under the machine

and I'm placing things on the ground.

So, if you get too close to a power line,

you get something called arching.

Because, I mean, it's live power down the power lines.

And if you get enough static precipitation

or whatever in the air,

you can cause an arching across it

because it's going to seek the ground point, right?

Generally speaking, you want to try and stay 200 feet

or more away from a live power line

if you're doing that sort of work, right?

So, fun fact, speaking of arching,

so we have dedicated service up to our house,

400 amp service.

So we have our own transformer on our property.

We're the only house served by this transformer.

And the power goes out frequently

because squirrels decide to jump from the tree

to the power line and the transformer

and 30,000 volts in mid-air arcs them

and it just cooks them.

And I find the power goes out,

I go out to the transformer

and I find literally fried smoking squirrels on the ground.

It's been two in the last month.

I need to trim that tree

and also just sit out there with Larry's pellet gun,

probably is the best solution there.

Is that good eating or what?

I haven't tried it.

However, when I come back the next day,

the carcassism are actually gone.

So something likes them.

Yeah, coyotes or eagles or something, who knows?

All right, so back to Larry

and hopefully not becoming a fried squirrel.

He saw the wires coming toward him

or I suppose he was coming towards the wires in that case,

but of course had no control.

His scent speed increased as the helium volume decreased,

because as you get lower in altitude,

now the air is compressing it,

so you actually are getting less lift lower you go.

That's the nature of how lighter-than-aircraft work,

which is bizarre.

I actually want to do a whole episode on the heyday

of lighter-than-air ships,

like airships from back in the day,

like the Hindenburg and the Zeppelin

and how that was a whole industry for a while there

where it was like instead of going on a cruise ship,

you wanted an airship.

There's super cool history with it.

Anyways, where'd I get to?

Yes, so the balloons did actually get snagged

on a cluster of power lines.

The tension snapped several balloons at once.

The remaining lift vanished instantly.

Larry dropped into the lines

and the whole setup arced with a violent crack.

Incredibly, he did not get electrocuted.

A 20-minute power outage, of course,

did hit the Long Beach neighborhood,

affecting thousands of residents.

Now, what I did know that isn't mentioned here,

but from my squirrel fiascos,

because the power crew has to come out

and they tell us that it sounds like a shotgun going off.

What you're hearing, I thought it was literally

like the squirrel's intestines exploding

from being heated up,

but there's actually inline fuses in the power lines

and they are these capsules and when they go out,

when they have too much voltage going through them

or too much amperage,

they will pop and it's very loud.

So I imagine what happened there is he arched it,

it blew one of these fuses or breakers

and then they lost power and he didn't die somehow.

However, firefighters did arrive momentarily

and then the police and then the utility workers

and then a crowd of onlookers in the middle of it all,

strapped into his lawn chair still,

completely uninjured,

wearing an altimeter around his neck

and holding a pellet gun was Larry Walters.

One firefighter reportedly shouted to him,

you okay?

Larry added, yep.

And then he climbed down from the utility pole,

dusted himself off and walked towards the officers

waiting to arrest him.

So it turns out you cannot do something like this,

at least not in America,

without becoming well famous for five minutes

and then also getting arrested subsequently.

So I want to go back to this letter minute interview

because I think it goes into a little bit of the aftermath

and what happened next.

Just comes on the teacher.

This is a phenomenal thing.

Where did you get the idea to do this?

When did it hit you?

You said it was a 20 year dream?

Yes, sir.

It hit me when I was a young boy about 13 years old,

I was in an Army Navy surplus store,

saw a weather balloon dangling from the ceiling

and I just got the idea to inflate these balloons

and I figured if I had enough of them, it'd lift me.

That it was just, you know, the float.

And I was fascinated by it and I fulfilled 20 year dream.

Have you done anything else in attempting to

make your dream come true between before now?

Well, the main thing I did

at the Urgene of the Sochi at Ron Richland

who also at Tape you saw, he's the man responsible for it.

I'm sorry both he and my fiance, Carol Van Dusen,

put up the money for the entire project.

Could not be here.

But at his Urgene, I took a parachute course

and I had a very good parachute on, very reliable

and I was prepared at one time,

I was thinking of actually using it at 16,000 feet.

What kind of planning goes into this?

Because when you say you hook balloons to a launch area,

it doesn't sound, you know, like Neil Armstrong

probably wouldn't be involved there.

The thing is, I call it American ingenuity.

Yeah.

That's what I call it.

And you heard the ideal tapes.

I was, I had confidence myself in the craft

and I knew what I was doing.

Yeah.

I really knew what I was doing.

Now, when you took off there,

you actually lifted off prematurely, didn't you?

Yes, yes, sir.

The idea was to be tethered at a 100 feet

for approximately an hour

and about a half hour before launch,

we were going to notify FAA and a few airports

and let them know this line shareer was going up

with all these balloons, right?

But unfortunately, which is on a tape,

the tether line broke prematurely

and that's when my whole ground crew panicked.

And now how did the, why did it break?

There was no one to take the slack up on it.

It was a 550 pound test dial-in line

and the wind was blowing rather strong over the...

It's just paracord.

550 test.

Maybe the first couple hundred feet.

And it just took that cluster up in me in it

and snapped that line.

And we have it on tape and film

and it's sound like a gunshot on that line snapped.

How many balloons did you have?

Approximately 43, sir.

And they were filled with?

Helium gas.

Helium.

Did you, was that an estimate?

Were you just guessing that 43 would get you up?

Oh, no, no.

We had done much prior testing prior to this.

We had test inflations.

We knew that each balloon would lift

approximately 14 to 15 pounds.

And so we just multiply that and...

Now is it expensive to get that much helium?

Well, like I say, Carol,

she financed it, she bought all the gas

and...

It's girl friend Carol.

Anyway, the gas and the balloons

came to $3,000

and she bought my parachute for me.

Thank God bless her.

And that was another $800.

And she went heavily into debt to see my dream come true.

I read a figure this afternoon

that said the whole project cost around 15,000.

That is correct

because we were gonna originally go from the Mojave Desert.

And it was Carol's idea to launch from her backyard.

Why?

Only because there was a hospital

about a half mile down the road.

Oh, really?

Yes, sir.

Now, what was your...

Once you went up,

what was your means of controlling the lift

or descending or...

Okay, I had complete control of the craft

and we have tapes, audio tapes.

Yes, I did.

I had complete control of my craft.

And I mean, even when the line snapped

and you know, I even...

I didn't expect that.

But I had completely controlled the craft.

I had an altimeter right under my chin

and it was showing me my rate of ascent.

And I had several hundred pounds of water ballast.

And so what happened was

I was trying to catch an easterly wind current.

And when I went up to 16,000 feet,

I knew I couldn't go up much higher.

I'd be a dead man.

So I got my BB pistol,

which I was gonna tether.

I was gonna strap that on

at my last hour of preparation

with a few other instruments.

And anyway, I got my BB pistol,

shut out about 10 or 12 of the balloons.

Slow by rate of ascent.

That seems aggressive.

About a thousand feet per minute.

10 to 12.

That was much too fast.

And you just shot the balloons out

and that caused you to come down?

Well, it was carefully.

I shot the outer balloons out first.

I knew what I was doing.

Complete control.

Uh-huh.

No, but there's so many questions

I could ask you about this

because as you said,

you really had most of the variables controlled.

But why a lawn chair?

What, I mean...

American ingenuity.

Why not a lawn chair?

Yeah.

I mean, it was the bet.

Believe me, I looked at baskets

and I looked at gondolas, sir.

And lawn chair was the best suited means.

Yeah.

Was it just one of those folding kind

that you...

No, and I'm not going to mention

the department store where I got it at anymore.

You've gotten too much pre-publicity.

Yeah.

But, uh...

What am I doing?

It's my own torture test.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, it went through a Larry torture test.

Yeah.

And it survived that.

And I knew it could fulfill my dream.

What happened when you contacted

the Los Angeles International Airport

or your friend on the ground contacted you?

First of all, when he told me,

he said, you're not going to believe this.

But there's a guy up there

in a lawn chair with 43 balloons.

And...

Oh, really?

And, uh...

We got this on tape and audio.

But he said you're not going to believe this.

He just...

Everyone was panicking

because this was totally unexpected.

The cable snapping.

You were actually also seen by other aircraft?

I was spotted evidently by Delta

and a TWA flight at 16,000 feet.

16,000 feet.

This is truly amazing.

And we're going to pause

and Larry will be back here with us

and we'll continue discussing.

This man's out to see you right after this.

We'll take another look.

It's just bizarre.

I don't know.

I didn't watch the rest of this

to see if Larry would come back.

I loved it.

He's just...

He's so confident.

Like, I was in complete control.

Welcome back to the show.

If you're just joining us,

this gentleman is Larry Walters.

He recently went up about 16,000 feet

with the helium balloons

and a lawn chair.

And was this...

Were you frightened?

No, sir.

Well, couldn't you fall out of the chair?

No, impossible.

Well, I was falling out of lawn chairs

in my backyard.

You wouldn't have fallen out of my chair.

I guarantee it.

You would not have fallen out of my chair.

You were pretty well strapped in.

I wasn't strapped in at all.

I didn't have a safety belt or a seat belt.

You're just sitting in the chair.

I was sitting in the chair.

What the hell, Larry?

Believe me, I knew what I was doing.

But now what...

What a principle.

What guarantee do you have

when the chair lifts

that you won't be pitched forward

or left or right or what kind of...

In fact, I had a chair pitched.

We had this on videotape.

We had it pitched back

in about a 45-degree angle, a 40-degree angle.

And it was pitched back intentionally.

And when I was strapped in,

even if I had to jump out,

it would have been a little difficult

to get out of that chair.

No, there was no need for a seat belt.

What about a problem with other aircraft?

You mentioned that you were spotted

by two commercial airline planes.

Now, did you actually see any of them?

That's an honor.

No, I did not see or hear

the roar of any jet engines.

But at least they confirmed my altitude,

which was 16,000 feet.

Yeah.

Did you have any...

Were you going to do anything

to let people know ahead of time

that there might be a guy

in a lawn chair in the area?

Yes.

That's when I was going to be tethered for an hour.

And then prior, a half hour before,

I was going to cut myself loose

because nobody else would do it for me.

My ground crew were going to notify the proper authorities.

We were going to give them a half-hour notice.

Now, what I did was wrong.

I'm not making excuses,

but we were going to give the FAA

and all the local airports

a half-hour notice.

And it's by the grace of God that, you know,

it did hit a plane or...

Now, why was this wrong?

How were you different from any other balloonist?

First of all, most balloonists

don't go from clusters of weather balloons,

and they're very fragile, too.

I mean, you could poke your finger

through one of them, they're so fragile.

Or a pin.

They could be popped with a pin.

That's how fragile they are.

So you did...

There is a law against this?

There's a law against taking up a balloon

or balloons without a license.

And the FAA already said,

if I had a license,

they would have revoked it.

But since I don't have a license,

they can't revoke it.

So...

Now, would you do this again?

No, this was the fulfillment

of a 20-year dream.

Yeah.

And I accomplished my dream.

Yeah.

Now, how does that feel,

having succeeded in achieving

what you all wanted to do?

I achieved inter-peace.

I've achieved inter-peace.

I'm like...

Inter-peace.

Oh, boy.

That's good.

Okay, Larry.

Okay, I just wanted to finish that

because that was amazing.

Yeah, he went on The Tonight Show

he went on Johnny Carson

radio shows, magazines.

He became kind of a folk hero

or a symbol of absurd American

adventurous and people loved him.

But he kind of didn't do well

with the fame.

He never wanted any of this.

It gets into a sad story

that I won't go into.

He eventually took his own life later.

It wasn't immediately after.

Yeah.

But we will get to the fact

that the FAA had no trouble

handling his attention.

They held hearings.

They conducted interviews.

They analyzed the flight path,

the altitude, the airspace he violated.

And eventually they find Larry $1,500 for

operating aircraft without a license,

operating an unauthorized balloon craft,

entering controlled airspace

and creating a hazard.

Larry initially planned to contest the charges,

but later said, quote,

if the FAA was mad at you,

would you want to argue?

So he paid the fine,

which apparently was only 10%

of the total cost.

How do you spend 15 grand

on weather balloons?

I didn't understand that.

In 1982.

That's ridiculous.

So it's an absolutely crazy story.

I think, you know,

I had heard of it before,

but I didn't realize just how crazy it was

that he got up to 16,000 feet.

And honestly, that he was able to just

land the thing as he had planned.

Like, I can't imagine how it's just,

it's absurd.

So.

Well, I don't plan to go into power lines.

Well, okay, not according to plan.

Good point.

But like the fact that he said,

you know, he had the parachute on.

And yeah, when you're at 16,000 feet

and the thing isn't descending,

like I feel like that maybe

would have even been the safer route

if it was actually like a correct parachute.

I don't know.

Have you ever jumped out of an aircraft, RJ?

No, I never jumped out of a perfectly functioning aircraft.

No, okay.

I agree with that.

And I suppose with, you know,

a rotorcraft, you can just kind of,

you know, what do they call it?

Auto-rotor down or non-powered down?

Yeah, there's no jumping out for me.

Yeah, we auto-rotate, I guess.

I guess you get, yeah.

I mean, on the scale of emergencies

and things that can go wrong,

you know, an engine failure is pretty rare,

but we do training for that every year.

Yeah.

Have you ever had any close calls or anything?

Yeah.

I had a near engine failure, a bearing,

well, when I thought it was a bearing start,

letting go in a 407 actually one time,

I started to hear just like a feedback

in my headset, in my helmet.

It just started as a really sort of background wine.

Was it actually like you're hearing the interference,

electronic interference because of the frequency?

Or was it like you took your headset off

and you could hear like a wheel bearing type of deal?

Well, I wear a helmet,

so there was no taking that off inside.

Oh, okay, yeah.

It was, I had a full load of skiers on board

and we actually had a pasture in the front,

which we, after that, we never did that again

because just, you know,

there's no point having guests in the front of the machine.

But he was talking away and I heard this

and I thought, is that coming through the radio?

So I had that.

I said, you know, hey, Robert,

can you stop talking for a second here?

I need to hear this.

And it was slowly getting louder and louder

and I tried turning the radios off

and I'm like, well, it's not the radio.

And I looked back at my lead guide

who was in the back of the machine

and his eyes are like this

and he's like pointing up and pointing down

and pointing sideways and pointing everywhere.

And his headset, unfortunately, was the one next to the door

and he could hear me, but he couldn't talk

because it had been dropped on the floor

so many times throughout the day by the ski.

Those headsets live a hard life back there.

And finally, you know, I'm like, you know what?

We're going to land.

So I did a, you know, a gentle sort of left hand

descending turn and put it on the ground

and shut it down

and everybody went back to the lodge in the van.

And later that night, the engineers came out

and they're like, okay, well, start it up for us

and we'll see what's going on.

And I started up and it's dark out, of course.

And all I see is this headlight, you know,

like one of those things you put on your helmet

comes running around the front of the machine

and the guy's doing this and shut it down, shut it down.

And eventually there's a, it's a much longer story.

Anyway, that helicopter got slung onto a trailer

and driven out of the bush.

And eventually what happened was the compressor case

had split in half and part of the N1 wheels

had started shedding blades and things.

So we were seconds away from engine failure.

And that same airframe, I had a fire in flight

in the console, a fan seized or something.

You know, I had the fortunate circumstance

of being really, really familiar with that particular aircraft.

I'd flown it pretty much exclusively for three years in a row.

So even that, you know, the engine noise,

I'm like, well, that's not normal.

It hasn't been making that noise before

so let's do something for that.

Right away when I smelt the smoke in the cockpit,

I shut off the component that I suspected

was the problem that it was.

I had a hydraulic shaft shear in that aircraft,

again, fortunately on the ground,

just as I was shutting it down.

I've had, I had a main road of gearbox start coming apart.

Again, you know, there's warning systems in the aircraft.

So when things go wrong, at the altitudes

that I usually work at, I'm not at an airliner,

you know, up at like 300 feet and below most of the time.

So I'm just, just find somewhere to land

and figure it out on the ground, right?

And, but I mean, you're, from what I've heard,

you work extremely remote out in the bush most of the time.

I do, yeah.

Like what happens if you put it down?

And it's, I mean, you don't have help coming.

I suppose they bring another, another aircraft out

to service it or take a look,

or has that ever had to happen?

Or have you always been

luckily kind of near some type of civilization?

Usually I'm not too far away from what we'd call the staging site

where the engineer is, you know.

So depending on the nature of the emergency,

also, you know, for example, this summer,

very, very few places for me to land

considered to be like what the client would call

class one hostile terrain, you know.

So basically you got to go back to where the staging is

or find a spot, you know, next to a river

or wherever where you could put the aircraft down.

I mean, now I fly an aircraft type

that's extremely reliable and, you know, knock on wood.

There haven't been a lot of issues with it.

So, but I mean, it's the nature of what we do.

You know, I've been, I've been flying for 25 years

and over that span of that career,

you're bound to have some, some things, you know, go wrong.

Right. Yeah.

It's just a question of recognizing them

and having enough mechanical sympathy

to understand like this is not normal.

We should probably put it on the ground

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Do you, I'm just really interested

because know how much you work on all your own cars

and have restored awesome Volkswagen's.

You have a 911.

You now have a Barracuda,

which I think is a whole story in itself

that we should get to at some point.

Do you think-

That's probably a whole podcast.

Exactly.

Do you think having the experience of wrenching

and working on things and machines

and that know-how has helped you to diagnose

and understand some of the systems on the aircraft?

I know it's completely different systems

and completely different ways that things work.

But when you're talking about like,

oh, I recognize that as a bearing noise.

Does any of that, do you think it's been helpful

being able to work on cars

and that mechanical background?

Oh, absolutely.

I mean, let me make it clear.

There's an engineer with the aircraft

and he's responsible for the maintenance.

I'm not the guy diagnosing anything.

Oh, come on.

You can get out there and wrench on it

and we just-

No.

We work as a team.

We'll discuss things.

I'll be like, hey, there's something going on here.

Maybe can you have a look at it?

Because they're the experts on the aircraft.

But sure, absolutely.

Having a mechanical knowledge is very helpful.

I was a mechanical designer before I was a pilot.

And I've had a director of maintenance say to me one time,

you know too much about mechanics

to be operating these aircraft.

So yeah.

I guess there's probably a file like,

how do I put this?

I'm not scared of it.

I'm not scared of things going wrong.

I just have the faith that, you know,

hopefully I'll be able to recognize it soon enough,

you know, if something does go wrong.

That's the thing, right?

So, I mean, if we were constantly living in fear,

we wouldn't be able to do these things.

Like aviation aside, anything that humans do,

you know, if we were constantly living in fear

of something going wrong, you just,

you wouldn't be able to do them, right?

So you manage risk.

That's what you do.

Yeah.

Thank you, RJ, for joining us.

We will be back next week with Chris.

And I think I'm out next week, actually,

and might be getting a car as well.

But we'll talk about that later.

I haven't even talked about the last car I bought.

I bought a 924 too.

They just come and go.

All right, RJ, they come and go.

All right.

Thank you guys.

We will see you next week.

Take care.

Flying Lawn Chairs and Helicopter Gold Mining: Adventures in the Sky

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Porsche 911

Overcrest

Surpass AS01

high performance all season tire

performance tire

Nokian

engine failure

bearing

Plymouth Barracuda

Porsche 924

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