Why Lawn Chairs Are the Spiritual Ancestors of Good Drone Design

We all celebrate the Wright Brothers as brilliant visionaries but in our humble opinion we doubt that at the time the brothers were developing the original flyer their family and friends thought they were sane or particularly bright. 

Surely their mom was saying things like: “OK, so you make bikes out of a tiny store and you have very little money. And you are now trying to build a flying machine? I don’t think that is safe. You could get hurt. And lose all of your hard-earned money.” 

And their dad was saying: “No one is even sure if it is even possible. Your aunt thinks you're crazy and she doesn’t think God would approve. And your mother is beyond worried. Why don’t you take up backgammon?” 

But where would aviation be unless there were a few nut jobs out there willing to be the pioneers and try something new and different? 

And we think the ultimate “aviation pioneer” is Larry Walters, whose nickname was…“Lawnchair Larry.” 

Larry wasn’t the type of person to just sit around. In fact, he told everyone this in an interview back in 1982: “a man can’t just sit around.” We’re presuming that he was excluding lawn chairs from that statement because he did something extraordinary with a lawn chair. And he was in fact sitting in that lawn chair. At 16,000 feet. 

So perhaps if we were to rephrase for Larry, it would be: “a man can’t just sit around, except in a lawn chair at 16,000 feet.” 

You see, in July 1982 in San Pedro, California Larry purchased 42 weather balloons and a whole bunch of helium cylinders. He tied the lawn chair to the bumper of his jeep and then tied the weather balloons to the lawn chair and filled them up. 

Larry thought he would initially hover at 100 feet and then he would slowly unload ballast to climb to a few thousand feet.  But when the ropes were cut, Larry rocketed in a matter of minutes to 16,000 feet. 

It was enough to take Larry’s breath away. On the CB radio, his girlfriend and ground crew asked if he could see them and Larry replied, “Carol, I’m almost 16,000 feet over. I can’t see much of anything except for a lot of houses.” 

As this was happening, Larry was spotted by many commercial airliners who duly reported him to the Long Beach air traffic control tower, because, as Larry was soon to realize himself, he was slowly drifting into that airport’s airspace. But Larry had thought ahead on this and, using Channel 9 on his trusted CB radio, he gave the tower a heads up that he was…approaching…in a lawn chair… with balloons. And let’s just say the FAA was not amused. 

Yet Larry did have a strategy for this. He would slowly descend and land early to avoid the airport. 

How would he execute this task and get down, you ask? Well, Larry had brought a BB gun to selectively shoot one balloon at a time. 

The problem was, as it turns out, that at 16,000 feet it is quite cold. And apparently being from Southern California Larry did not plan for (or understand) cold temperatures. Because after shooting 7 weather balloons, Larry’s hands were so cold that he accidentally dropped the BB gun. 

And what were the first words out of Larry’s mouth? Well, it wasn’t recorded so we’ll never know but we think it was something a bit more profane than, “O fudge!” 

With 35 balloons remaining, Larry had, however, sufficiently reduced his buoyancy to start descending and he landed in the backyard of a house and into the waiting arms of Los Angeles’s police. 

And even though no damage was done, the FAA continued to remain un-amused and fined Larry $5,000, but there was a bright side here. As news spread of his adventure, Larry became something of a celebrity and he cruised the talk show circuit for a while. 

But Larry's story isn't just an adventure; it also showcases a lesson in engineering ingenuity. And we’re sure that at this point you are asking: “OK, so how does this story show that lawn chairs are ancestors of modern drones?”

Larry's ingenious, low-cost design, capable of lifting a heavy payload like himself, exemplifies the core principle of effective drone design: a lightweight structure with superior lift capacity. This principle is exactly what drives Modovolo’s product design. 

Now you are asking: “Is this just another shameless self-promotion of the Modovolo Lift?”

Yes. Yes, it is. Like Larry’s design, the Modovolo Lift is also super light and super inexpensive and can carry very large payloads. 

In fact, the payload area in the quad configuration Modovolo Lift is a whopping 10” x 10” x 10” (length by width by height) far greater than anything else on the market (such as, ahem, the DJI Matrice 400).