>>Jonathan Trappe: my name is Jonathan, Jonathan Trappe. And I'm going to talk about a dream
that I think you had when you were a little girl, when you were a little boy.
Do you remember hold -- and I don't mean this as a rhetorical technique. I mean, do you
have this memory of holding onto an individual toy balloon and thinking, "If I can just get
enough of these, can I float away?" And it's something that exists across generations,
this fantasy form of flight. And unless your parents were exceptional, they told you that
it was impossible. Yet, the idea persists across generations.
Here, Audrey Hepburn in the 1950s, and here a Dior ad from two years ago.
The concept exists in cinema. Do you guys remember this film? 1957, The Red Balloon,
some of you saw it three decades ago, four decades ago, and remember this film. The little
boy, Pascal, meets a sentient red balloon in the streets of Paris, and he has adventures
with this balloon. And at the end of the film, the cell is taken from him, and it's destroyed.
And it destroys Pascal. And at that time, all the balloons in Paris
come through the streets, and they hold on to him and he holds on to them, and he floats
out over the cityscape of Paris, this classic moment of celluloid joy, with the Eiffel Tower
in the background. The concept exists in literature. And if you
don't consider Winnie the Pooh literature, perhaps we cannot be friends.
[ Applause ] >>Jonathan Trappe: Winnie the Pooh wanted
to get to the honey. Do you guys remember this? Did you read it to your children? Did
you have it read to you? Winnie the Pooh wanted to get to the honey, and he floated himself
up to get to the honey. And he's getting stung by the bees, and he determines that it's the
wrong sort of bees, and therefore probably the wrong sort of honey. And he wants to -- importantly,
he has to figure out how to get back down. And then our current generation of dreamers,
saying, "If we could just get enough of these." So I started with one balloon, my backyard.
I said, this has got to scale. If one balloon gives some unit of lift, can we just get enough
of these to float away, just like that childhood dream, the dream form of flight.
I'm a technical products manager at Accenture, big I.T. consulting firm. And I'm responsible
for execution and delivery, much more so than dreaming, frankly. But I'm sitting in my office,
and I'm thinking, after having done that experiment with one balloon, could we really do this?
You know, this idea that we had, so many of us had as a child, could we hold on, could
I hold on to toy balloons and float away? And I'm thinking, you know, I'm going to have
muscle failure. That's not going to work. We need something to do this in.
And I'm in my office, and I said, we could do it in this, in this chair that I'm sitting
in right now, steel case Uno, could we cause it to fly? The steel case Uno.
So we tried that. That didn't work. But we had backups. We had additional cells. Added
additional cells, made a small cluster, and caused just the gondola to float. If you were
in my office building that day and looked out the fifth-floor window, that's what you
would have seen. [ Laughter. ]
>>Jonathan Trappe: And we caused just the gondola to fly.
Okay. But if we're really going to do this, first do no harm; right? Am I going to put
anybody else at risk? This is not acceptable -- if you're going to do something like this,
first do no harm. How would we do that? I went to flight school, the mecca of ballooning,
which is Albuquerque, New Mexico. And I pursued flight school, a pilot's license. Hot air
balloon, fire going into the informal. A hot air balloon. After getting my check ride with
the FAA examiner, I got this magic plastic card from the federal aviation administration.
It says here, lighter than air, free balloon. There's a problem, limited to hot air balloons
with airborne heater. Only if it has an airborne heater, a way of making fire in the sky. Now,
if I'm going to fly my office chair, I'm not going to have a way of making fire in the
sky. There will be no airborne heater. So I get this. This is the oldest form of
flight. The last time an aircraft like this -- this is a gas balloon -- had flown in my
state was 20 years prior, last time one had launched.
We did that big, large helium balloon and take some of these individual cells that I
argue we can fly in manned flight, and we get helium. How much helium does it take?
Banks and banks and banks. It takes a truckload, in fact, of helium to get off the ground.
And with this additional training in a very, very, very unusual aircraft, but not unique,
I approach the FAA again, and notice the limitation is gone. The FAA says you can fly any balloon,
and they were silent as to what that could be, with that limitation gone.
Technical projects manager, what do you expect? We've got the altimeter, the variometer, the
emergency locator beacon, should I need it, aircraft radio, crew radio, ballast, balloons,
passport -- you never know. [ Laughter ]
>>Jonathan Trappe: Took about a year to get to this point on the airfield, where we're
rigging that chair, steel case Uno. And hours through the night inflating the balloons when
the winds are calm in the night, all night long.
My girlfriend reads me a gas balloon checklist. She has my full attention. She argues this
was the last time she had my full attention. [ Laughter ]
>>Jonathan Trappe: Read me a gas balloon checklist, honey. It will work.
And I'm positively buoyant here, literally positively buoyant. And emotionally positively
buoyant to be off the ground. Three feet there. Ten. Twenty. Thirty-five feet. I turn around,
and I say to my crew, "See you on the other side," which wasn't the best thing to have
said. It had a tone of finality to it. "See you in an hour," this would be good. "See
you on the other side," not so much. I didn't use that line again.
Floated away, up, 50, 100, 150 feet, in this instance, into the sunrise. My friend on the
far right of that photo turned to my girlfriend in the center just after this was taken and
said, "We'll get him back." [ Laughter ]
>>Jonathan Trappe: I can show you one of the happiest moments of my life.
And it's right there on the airfield as my friend is checking the carabiner to make sure
that's locked, the crew that was there all night long inflating those balloons looks
on, and my girlfriend tells me to come back to her.
Is this about flying an office chair? It's not. It's about dreams and inspiration
and accomplishing what we set out to do, whatever that is. In this instance, 15,000 feet over
North Carolina. You can see the wheels of the chair off the
ground here. I think the Herman Miller people should have me -- (indiscernible) in the steel-cased
Uno, but that's what it was. Send me a Herman Miller, and I'll see if I can fly it.
And what more could be done? If we're really going to execute on this idea, what more can
be done? Can we fly it higher? Can we take this little harness system with just toy balloons
-- these were never intended to be used in manned flight -- and go higher. 18,000 feet.
17,930 feet if the FAA asks, but 18,000 feet on a ten-hour flight under these toy helium
balloons. And what more can be done? If we're going
to fly this, can we take it further? If we're going to execute on this idea that so many
of us have had, could we survive the night? A guy did this in 1937, but nobody had ever
survived the night, nobody had ever launched in the daytime and then greeted the sunrise
from the sky the following morning. And that's what we wanted to do. After having
done this a couple times, I wanted to do. And there, this is not a portrait, I'm shooting
back, I'm talking to myself, doing a ballast count, telling myself how much fuel, water
that I can drop if I don't want to come down. How much fuel I have left so I can record
it. And the sun has set now, and I am not confident that I will survive the night. Because
it hadn't been done before. And I wasn't sure what the outcome would be.
And the -- one of the outcomes is this right here. That's Air & Space Smithsonian, our
country's national museum. And you can tell, I'm very proud of that. And I own that moment,
and I own that image. And it's on my wall at home. And it will be there for my entire
life when I look back at my life and say the Smithsonian, our country's national museum.
And we did survive the night on that flight. What more can be done. Flying here in Mexico,
I'd like to show you a little bit about what the flight experience is like. It's unlike
anything else. Floating 10,000 feet above the high mountain
deserts of Mexico. My feet are kicking free. It was very, very cold. I took off my jacket
for the sponsors so they could see their shirt on there, and then I quickly put it back on.
The camera pointing down at the semi arid deserts of Mexico. I was supposed to fly for
ten hours. And after eight hours I took small arms fire
from the surface and blew out multiple cells in rapid succession. I didn't have time to
call May day. I started emergency ballasting, I entered immediately a very sharp descent
and I struck the Earth in a huge cactus field. And I could hear the gunmen coming through
the underbrush. And I fired my EPIRB, which goes up to the U.S. Air Force, which reached
out to the Mexican authorities and initiated a military response, men with Kevlar helmets
and black masks and turret-mounted machine guns. I'm just about the most peaceful thing
in the sky. I could cause harm to no one. The most dangerous thing is me, if I fall
on somebody. But any manned aircraft is going to have somebody that could fall on somebody.
This is inherent to a manned aircraft. And there is a great challenge that dates
back for centuries. Note the sharp white cliffs here and the balloon. Could this be done?
[ Music ] >>Audio: Yesterday, 36-year-old Jonathan Trappe
of Raleigh, North Carolina, floated across the English Channel, powered only by a colorful
cluster of helium-filled balloons, the kind of cluster you might see a clown hold.
>>Jonathan Trappe: Thanks. >>Audio: Well, most refreshingly, Mr. Trappe
didn't float through the sky to call attention to any good cause. He did it for fun. "Didn't
you have this dream?" he asked reporters, "Grabbing on to a bunch of toy balloons and
floating off? I think it's something that's shared across cultures and across borders,
just this wonderful fantasy of grabbing on to toy balloons and floating into open space."
[ Music ] >>Audio: You're listening to NPR news.
[ Video concludes. ] >>Jonathan Trappe: And we want now, oh, yes,
the FAA. So we approached the FAA, and argued that
we should be able to certificate this as an aircraft. And after about a year, what they
came back with was, they said, well, the best we can figure out, it was a failure of the
imagination when we wrote the regulations. Because there's nothing that should stop you
from flying, as I demonstrate having flown it multiple times under a certain part of
the rules. So we got it registered as an aircraft, November 878 Uniform Papa. You can look it
up on the FAA Web site. That registration and that magic little pink piece of paper,
special airworthiness certificate, experimental manned free balloon. Model: CF flying chair.
[ Laughter ] [ Applause ]
>>Jonathan Trappe: But to fly the English Channel, we had to approach the civil aviation
authority in U.K. and France. We said we'd like to do this. Here's our documents. They
said your pilot license is fine. Your airworthiness certificate is sub-IKO. You cannot fly on
the airworthiness certificate. You would need a special exemption to even get off the ground.
You need an exemption to fly here whatsoever. And I said, "Can I have an exemption?"
And they said, "Okay." And they issued me the exemption. And that's it right there.
I love this. "Air navigation order: Jonathan Trappe's flying chair."
[ Laughter ] >>Jonathan Trappe: And then there's these
guys. I made the assertion, we could do this. I
made this assertion. What if we took hundreds of these cells in the desert of Southern California,
hundreds of these balloons inflated by more than about 100 people all night long, 14 hours,
and attach it to that tiny little house there. Could we cause it to fly in manned flight?
If you look out through the chimney, up at the balloons, this is what you would see,
layer after layer after layer of toy helium balloons. And the airworthiness certificate
that the FAA gave us, it is experimental and it's required to have that word on the aircraft
next to the mailbox. And we are off the ground here.
What is this, ten, ten feet, as I'm waving good-bye. And then we float away. 10,500 feet.
Yeah. [ Applause ]
>>Jonathan Trappe: That was neat. This is the National -- this was done for
National Geographic. The National Geographic Society has sponsored some of the greatest
human expeditions of all time. I'm not sure if this qualifies, but it will be on the Nat
Geo Channel this Sunday. You can watch it with your family and say, "Hey, I know the
balloon guy." CFOs of billion-dollar corporations impressing their kids by knowing the balloon
guy. The irony is not lost on me. We want realistic challenges. It is funny
to have said that after I just showed you we flew a house.
Realistic challenges. Somebody said: Why don't you fly the Alps? My answer was: Have you
seen the Alps? [ Laughter ]
That was my answer. We want realistic challenges. So I went to
the Alps. Southeast corner of France in Gap-Tallard, that little place there, trying to get over
the largest mountain range in Europe into the soft pocket of Italy, launching from this
tiny air field. You see the rolling hills there, in the foothills.
These balloons, by the way, not ones like it but these balloons, are out in the courtyard.
I would encourage you to go grab on to one and feel the lift. There is three sizes. Pull
on the different ones that are out there. These balloons are out there.
Launching in this instance at night under the full moon. See the control tower in the
back left. We float up, up, up, up and into the night. A 12-hour flight across the Alps
and into Italy. We have a DVD segment.
[ Video ] >>Video: Hello, Zeitgeist Minds. I told you
I would try to explain a little of what it feels like to fly this system, and now is
a perfect time to do it. I am high in the sky dropping down through
13,500 feet down from 15,000 as I crossed the Alps.
Yesterday I departed in France. I crossed the Alps over the night, the French Alps to
the Italian Alps. It was bitter cold. And 3:00 in the morning, 4:00 in the morning and
I was asking if it was worth it. And when the sunrise came this morning, it was instantly
apparent that it was worth every moment. You can see what we're flying is the balloon
system I have been telling you about, November 878 Uniform Papa, that gas cluster. This is
what it is like. Listen. There is no sound. There is no rotor. There is no prop. There
is no jet. There is nothing between me and the sky.
>>Jonathan Trappe: And what more can be done? If we are really going to execute on this?
What more can be done? There is an epic challenge that has called to aviators --
[ Laughter ] -- for generations. And I won't stand here
at Zeitgeist and tell you that I can do it. Instead, I put it to you: Can it be done?
I'd like very much to know. And I'd like it very much if this conversation didn't end
when I leave this stage because I would like it very much if you were there when I find
out that it can be done. And I would like it very much if you were there if I found
out that it can't be done. Do you understand? I understand.
[ Laughter ] And, yet, that dream persists.
I'm going to close the session on this. I said at the beginning of this segment that
unless your parents were exceptional, they told you that it couldn't be done. This audience,
Zeitgeist Minds -- I know who you are, you know who you are -- this audience is exceptional.
And I don't think this audience will tell their children that it's impossible.
And knowing who this audience is, I very much appreciate the opportunity to have come and
talked about something that I love. And you know that I love it. So with that, I'm going
to close. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you. Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]