In order to promote his company, a Canadian man spends over $12,000 on helium and balloons, ties them to a plastic lawn chair and straps himself in for the advertisement campaign of the century.
Daniel Boria, 26, either believes that his start up company, All Clean Natural, is worth dying for, or that the MythBusters were wrong and you can carry a full grown man using only balloons. Either way, his "UP" style advertising stunt brought him soaring into restricted airspace.
Boria realized pretty quickly that there are a few things wrong with strapping yourself to lawn chair and letting 120 hellium ballons carry you upwards. Problem numero uno being: how do you steer?
Boria orriginally planed to parachute from the chair and land at the Calgary Stampede, a rodeo event happening that day, but the plan was abandoned pretty quick when Boria noticed he had no controll of his make-shift chairplane and was drifting higher than intended.
“I was sitting in a lawn chair looking down through the clouds at 747 airplanes and looking up to a cluster of helium balloons,” Boria said in an interview with The Toronto Star.
“I rose to a certain altitude and the winds got pretty intense. I was somersaulting out the chair and it felt like minus 30. I watched below as the Stampede and my dream drifted away,” Boria said.
Boria managed to drift so high that he was actually in airspace restricted for commercial airplanes only. Realizing he was screwed, Boria jumped from his chair and parachuted to the ground. Amazingly, he landed practically unharmed and missed his target by only 2 miles, which isn’t bad if you’re skydiving above 747s.
And did we mention he got his skydiving license just eight months before attempting this elaborate stunt? Seriosly who thinks "F*** it, I've jumped out of planes safley a couple times, im goingto strap myself to this chair, raise up a few 10,000 feet and hope for the best" — luckily for him, Pixar had already done all of the test runs.
— Pictured, the face of Canadian inginuity.
We are just amazed that he didn't have a back up plan to stop the balloons from rising. At least bring an M-16 so you can shoot at them if you start drfting too high, that's the American way to do things.
And for the lawn chair, it floated away and landed in a farmer’s field miles outside of Calgary.
Boria is facing charges of mischief causing danger to life for his stunt, but, on the bright side, his company is definitely getting some attention after all this.
-Ethan Desmond
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