How Hard Can It Be (2011) s01e01 Episode Script
Flying House
I'm Vin Marshall.
I've spent the last ten years building crazy machines and cool inventions.
Good job! With my buddies Paul and Eric, we're attempting our toughest ever engineering tasks.
We're using materials and know-how that anyone can get their hands on.
This hardly looks like a deathtrap.
And we're starting big.
Our first task is to find out how hard can it be to fly a housewith balloons.
No-one's done anything like this.
I don't know that anyone has even tried it! I'm an electrical engineer and the mastermind behind the whole operation.
This is go time.
Paul is a mechanical engineer.
I've known him since high school.
This is actually really hard.
Eric Gocke runs his own construction company.
We go way back.
It's got to go real fast now and have nothing go wrong.
So how hard can it be to fly a house with balloons? Here in Hollywood, California, studio executives spend all day dreaming up crazy ideas, trying harder and harder to amuse and entertain us.
But often it's the simple ideas that work best.
One of them is in the animated film Up.
A crotchety old man ties thousands of party balloons to his house.
It was a great movie moment, kind of magical, totally unforgettable.
So we got to thinking, how hard can it really be to fly a house with balloons? It might sound completely nuts, but perhaps it really can be done.
After all, it's just balloons tied to a house, right? How hard can it be? We have just two weeks to see if we can try to fly a house, and the journey begins right here.
What do you think, like, ten? Eight? Before we can fly a house, we need to figure out what kind of weight we're dealing with.
Step one is to weigh an old house, and this one is perfect.
Well, it's almost perfect.
It's the only house we can actually weigh, because it's already standing up on blocks.
But it should give us a ball-park figure to estimate the weight of the house in the movie.
The house sits on 16 blocks.
If we add up the weight bearing down on each of the blocks, then we have the total weight of the house.
We're using this load cell.
It's like a set of kitchen scales, but it goes up to 300,000 pounds.
We have to jack up the house just enough to get the load cell underneath.
Now we're moving houses! Then lower the jacks so all the weight rests on the load cell.
It sounds easy, right? It's OK.
Do we really wanna be underneath while we pick this up? Yes, I do.
The house is not gonna collapse.
I stake your life on it.
Let's just assess what happened there.
It's just his board just snapped.
One of the beams supporting the jacks has snapped.
This feels dangerous, and I'm starting to think that weighing a house with a load cell and a couple of bottle jacks might not be such a great idea.
Time for Plan B.
This house is about 50 feet long.
It's about 30 feet wide.
Turns out there's a formula we can use to guesstimate the weight.
A house like this one weighs approximately 100 pounds per square foot.
Measure the square footage of the house and we can calculate its total weight.
Our house is 30 by 50.
That's 1,500 square feet.
Times two floors.
That's 3,000 square feet.
So what's your estimation? - Almost 300,000 pounds for this house.
- Wow.
But I mean, this house is also a lot bigger than the one in the movie.
This is easily three times the size.
It's still a 100,000-pound house we're trying to lift.
That's a lot of balloons.
Yeah, we'll see.
Right, I've got these party balloons and helium.
We know that the house weighs 100,000 pounds.
Why not start with something that weighs one pound, see how many balloons that takes to lift and go from there? Sounds like a plan.
This camera weighs about a pound.
Let's see how much it actually weighs.
Just shy of a pound here.
Let's see what else we have.
- Oh, there you have it.
- This wrench is about a pound.
- Looks like it.
- Call it a pound.
Jeez! We'll use the balloon getter-downer.
What is the weight right now, Gocke? About half a pound! This is gonna be one stupid pile of balloons.
So how many balloons does it take to lift one pound? 32 37 What are you guys up to? 51? No, wait.
52.
If it takes 52 party balloons to lift one pound, then lifting 100,000 pounds will take a ridiculously huge number.
- We did 52 here? - Yep.
That's enough for er For 100,000, that's er 5.
2 million balloons.
It would appear that way.
A cluster of 5.
2 million will stand as tall as a 50-storey building.
It's going to take over 246,000 miles of string to tie all the balloons to the house.
We're gonna have a 500-foot tall column of balloons.
That means the average length of string is gonna be about 250 feet.
I don't think a balloon's gonna be able to carry 250 feet of string.
Let's test it.
We'll measure out 250 feet of string.
One.
Two.
23 24 32 33 37 38 Ohh! All right, one balloon's not gonna even carry the string it needs to pull up the house.
So how many balloons does it take to lift 250 feet of string? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11 balloons.
So what you're telling me is, it took 11 balloons to negate the weight of string length.
- That is correct.
- So it's 11 times 5.
2 million plus 5.
2 million.
So, 10 million balloons? - No, 55 million.
- Oh, OK.
I was afraid it was gonna be a lot.
Actually, Vin, it's 62.
4 million.
More balloons require more string, and more string requires even more balloons.
It's the balloon version of a vicious circle.
So what you're saying is that if we ever find the solution to this problem, not only the balloons, but the universe itself will cease to exist.
Lifting a house with party balloons? Impossible.
So it's day two on the project and we've concluded that you just cannot fly a 100,000-pound house with party balloons.
There may be some way to fly a house, but not with balloons.
So, going forward, we're going to have to get creative about how to do this.
Good news, buddy.
I got good news.
Gocke has been shopping for bigger balloons.
Five-foot diameter.
It's huge.
This balloon might just be the thing that keeps our dream alive.
- We'll take the same camera and wrench.
- I'll start filling up.
May take a minute.
I'm not gonna believe you're not making that noise on purpose.
- I can't not make it.
- I don't believe it for a second.
Is it going to float away? - All right.
- That's not a problem for it! One five-foot balloon easily does the work of 52 party balloons.
It uses much less string and it's a more efficient way of using the helium.
And that's not the only piece of good news.
The producers somehow got their hands on 80,000 cubic feet of helium.
That's nearly 300 tanks of helium.
We've gotta be able to lift something with that.
So how much can one tank of helium lift? To find out, we need an even bigger balloon.
This balloon is gonna take an entire tank of helium, just for itself.
We almost there? It's really hard to hold! This is really gonna hurt if it goes off, isn't it? This eight-foot monster is the biggest that we can find and is used by weather forecasters to carry data recording equipment high into the atmosphere.
So how much weight can it lift? So we've got our trusty one-pound camera set up and this bearing is good for another 14 pounds.
- Wow! - Is it? It's really pulling.
It's flying around at head level! There's 291 cubic feet of helium in this balloon.
Now we're getting somewhere.
Let's go take this in and measure it all out.
All right So even with the balloon as well, it's 17½ pounds of mass it took up with one tank.
Time to do the math.
So 291 cubic feet, 17½ pounds.
Paul, what does 80,000 cubic feet get us? 4,827 pounds.
Actually, it's 4,810.
Can we build a house within that weight? Well, it's not 100,000 pounds.
- So we'll have to make a really small house.
- No, I don't want a really small house.
I want to build a big house, but a really light house.
We'll make it with the lightest materials we can and we'll make it as big as possible.
We're the first people ever to attempt the impossible - to fly a house with balloons.
Our flying house will sit on a lightweight base.
This base is just like the gondola beneath a hot-air balloon and it's Paul's job to design it.
It looks something like this.
It's a flat platform.
There are beams underneath it, two running this way, two running this way.
The balloons are attached via ropes.
They pull up on the beams and lift our gondola and our house.
While Paul's figuring out the gondola, I'm figuring out how to build the house.
I'm gonna have weight restrictions and I'm also gonna have to figure out how to make it on time.
We've got just ten days left to complete this challenge.
We have eight-foot balloons, a design for a lightweight house and a truckload of helium.
But we're missing a key ingredient.
To fly a house like they did in the film, we need people on board to pilot it.
I've made some calls and there are two balloon pilots who might be crazy enough to help us out.
This is Jonathan Trappe.
In May of 2010, he strapped himself to a cluster of helium balloons and flew across the white cliffs of Dover and the English Channel.
I'm hoping he'll agree to our crazy scheme.
Hello! How are you? Nice cliffs you have here! And Troy Bradley has held over 58 world records, flying every type of balloon known to man.
It's an excellent idea.
It's gonna be a lot of fun.
Our gondola design, as it stands now, is about 16-feet square.
- The ropes, basket - an area 12-feet square.
- OK.
Then we'll put a house on the top of it, with a hole in the roof for the balloons.
I think it sounds like a very reasonable design and sturdier than some balloon baskets.
I think you've thought it all out.
With our final ingredient in place, we're ready for a record.
This is a huge, huge project and definitely the biggest cluster balloon to ever fly.
- You'll make cluster-ballooning history.
- There you go! Troy's seal of approval means I can go out and buy the materials for the house.
I've bought lightweight aluminium for the frame and plywood to cover the roof and walls.
What I have here is a sample of pretty much the lightest building materials I could possibly find, so we can actually make this thing still fly and look like a house.
- All right, Gocs.
He's been here all night.
- Wow! - What's up? - When did you get here? - Earlier.
- So is this one of the walls? It's one of many.
As I put these walls together, I'm starting to have doubts about the strength of the materials.
These aluminium studs are really light, but if you flick them too hard, they'll just bend in half.
The plywood's great because you can cut it with a knife.
But it's also so flimsy you can put your thumb right through it if you wanted to.
This is not very heavy at all.
I'm hoping that by gluing and screwing these two materials together, they will become much, much stronger than they are on their own.
You think how scary it is to put two people's lives in the hands of such wimpy materials.
With five days left, Paul's gondola parts are ready for assembly.
- Nice work, Paul.
- Thank you.
These are our gondola makings.
- That's all your hard work right there, all set up.
- Sure is.
I guess now we're done with planning, it's just time to pop some rivets, about what 2,000 of them? Yeah, on that order Let's do it.
We're setting up these rivets right now.
We're gonna be doing this a lot.
This is one of just six beams, with approximately 500 rivets per beam.
This is gonna be a long day of riveting.
How you feeling, Paul? Are you happy? - Excited to see this come together.
- Looking pretty darn neat.
- All right, man.
- Let's stand in the middle.
All right, Paul, hop down.
Let's do this again ten more times.
The machines at the shop have done their job.
The rivet holes line up perfectly.
But here's where we make our first really stupid mistake.
If we are really going to make aviation history and fly a house with balloons, then we need everything to go to plan.
Three days to launch and we've made our first mistake.
And it's a doozy.
Our house is designed to sit on four 16-foot beams.
Each one is made up of shorter pieces joined together using these metal joining plates and nuts and bolts.
These plates have to be installed before the beams are riveted together.
And guess what? On the first beam we forgot.
The problem is, we got a little overzealous and we forgot to put the plate in before we built the beams.
So we can get the first one in, but the second one's gonna be kinda hard unless you have an eight-foot-long arm to pick up those bolts.
So we're gonna have to figure out a solution for that.
We'll have to improvise something.
Paul had no time to write the instruction manual for this build, so boxing ourselves in is an everyday hazard.
A smarter bunch of guys would have put these plates in before they riveted the beams together, but anyway - We're not them.
here we are! Our solution is to glue the bolts to the plate so we can tighten them from just the outside.
Right now everyone's watching us and thinking, "Those idiots!" The glue holding some of the bolts has failed, so we need to tighten them from the inside of the beam.
It looks like we'll need those eight-foot arms after all.
You really are going to tape a wrench to a stick? - Absolutely.
- Let's see how this goes.
Paul, I'm not questioning your dexterity, but I'm questioning your dexterity.
Bottom most, bottom right as you look at the It's actually really hard.
That's the understatement of the week.
If these beams were to fail during the flight, our pilots would plummet to the ground.
Get ready.
We have to get this right.
There's one.
Wait for it.
Uh! Fishing with Paul! Fishing with Paul! There, I got it! Fifth one down.
Yeah! - Yeah! Good fishing, Paul.
- On it.
Crisis averted.
With the all-important beams joined together, we should finish the gondola, our house base, before the end of the day.
This is looking good.
It's looking like the frame of a flying house.
They're not gonna be able to complain that they don't have enough space.
That's for sure! This really beats a stupid wicker basket.
I guess we'll find out about that.
My only concern now is with the floor.
It's kinda bouncy, it's like a wrestling ring or a trampoline.
Our balloonist Troy has come back to check on progress.
This time he's brought co-pilot Jonathan Trappe and ground crew chief Nidia Ramirez with him.
- Hey, guys.
- Hey, looks like a floor! - Wow! - Can we get on it? It's gonna be a hell of a view! It's an excellent design.
You guys did a fantastic job.
And it's substantial.
It's gonna take a lot more than this.
I'm holding my breath that the flexibility of the base isn't a problem.
For landing that's actually a good thing, because it'll have a bit of give.
It turns out I needn't have worried.
- We appreciate you built that in.
Outstanding.
- We thought of that, that's for sure.
We're a considerate bunch of guys.
OK, so are there sides to this structure? - Do you wanna get one out? - That there is.
I see them.
OK.
It's a basic framed house, just with the lightest materials that we could get.
That's all there is to it.
Jonathan and Troy are considering flying as high as 10,000 feet.
To do that, they need a licence from the Federal Aviation Authority.
Luckily, Jonathan is good buddies with them.
Actually, a lot of these guys are in the FAA cos they love things that fly.
And they love interesting things that fly.
And we're right up their alley.
Troy's main concern is the landing.
It's the most dangerous part of the flight.
My hope is to have a landing that this structure actually survives and we come through unscathed as well.
That film, the Disney Pixar film Up, is a delightful movie.
I mean, for a lighter-than-air guy, this is a dream, and recreating that film in the real world um is an unparalleled experience.
That's the thumbs up, we're pulling out now.
OK, copy.
Pull out.
After 12 days of hard work, we're finally heading to our launch site in the desert to try and fly our house with balloons.
The weather forecast dictates that we must fly first thing tomorrow morning.
We've got only one shot.
This is gonna be fun, this is the pay-off.
We build the toys, we do all that hard work and now we get to go to the desert and play with them.
There's no two ways around it.
If we fly a house out of an airstrip in the desert and they land it and step out the front door totally unharmed, that is a feat.
No-one's done anything like this.
I don't know that anyone's even tried anything like this.
A number of things could go wrong.
We could lose our balloonists, our rigging could fail, our balloons could leak, the gondola could fail In my heart of hearts, I fear that most, since it was my design.
The thing that scares the bejeezus out of me is that all my houses that I've built, none of them have actually flown.
They're all just static things.
I've never built a dynamic house before.
The fact that it's going to be coming in for a landing is the thing I don't know how to prepare for.
My God, look at that pile of helium.
So, this is the desert.
I've never been to one before.
We've got 40 or so volunteers turning up later to help.
For now, we're on our own and there's a million and one things to do.
- They certainly aren't heavy.
- That is the truth.
We have to finish the painting, assemble the base or gondola, build the house, inflate 300 balloons and rig everything together.
But first Jonathan and Troy have to prepare the helium.
First we just have to get the helium bottles spread out over the airfield.
Then we can clip the balloons on to each individual tank and have the balloons moving around, without bapping into each other, causing them to fail.
We just got our gondola flipped over, right side up.
We're gonna put our ropes on, put our corner pieces on, put our house on, and then pick it up with some balloons.
How hard can it be? Right now, the weather is the big unknown.
We can only fly the house if the wind speeds are less than 7 mph for take-off.
Anything more is just too dangerous.
Right now the pilots are about to call the Weather Service.
We're gonna get the big go or no-go for inflation tonight.
So what I'm hearing from you is, we're expecting 5, 8, 10, up to 10, until perhaps 10pm local? That's miles per hour in weather forecaster speak.
Then falling off down to 5s and 3s and 2s and 1 s by dawn? - Yes.
- OK, that's what we're planning for.
That's why we Yeah.
OK.
Outstanding.
Well, with that, that's our go for inflation.
- Awesome.
- Don.
Thanks.
The weather system that allows us the launch window is actually pretty narrow.
And that means that come six o'clock tomorrow morning, at 6:18, this has gotta be ready to fly, there's no two ways about it.
If it's not, it's not gonna fly tomorrow.
We can't put the helium back in the bottles.
Once we start filling balloons, we are committed to the launch.
We've got just over 17 hours to get everything ready.
It's going to be a long day and an even longer night.
It's gonna be a little tight.
I think we'll get it.
We just gotta go real fast now and have nothing go wrong, which won't happen.
Set this end on it and then flip it over.
The first piece of house to be added to the gondola is a central chimney made of wood.
Help me get it down.
We've attached it to the base of the house with screws.
Jonathan will have to climb to the very top during the flight, so it must be stable.
I'm not sure how I feel about the chimney yet, because it's not done.
Right now it doesn't seem very solid.
I'm very confident about the sub floor.
It is solid, we've jumped around.
I feel good about it.
The centre structure, I'm seeing two-by-fours that aren't reinforced or braced, so I'm gonna see what they're doing with it.
Right now, I'm a little I'm cautious.
We'll see when it comes together what they've built for us.
You wanted a really high house and this is what you got.
I'm not saying you shouldn't worry.
Wow, that's big.
I know.
I know.
It's gonna be massive.
I mean, really, it's serious.
The base has always been serious, but when you start seeing it go up - You can see the vertical end of this too.
- I know.
- It's crazy.
- Well, we're gonna fly it.
Yeah.
Where's the bathroom? It seems like we've hardly got started and the sun is already setting.
I think you're expecting me to say something kind of upbeat, you know, "Everything is great!" But I do have concerns.
The sun is going down and the structure's not built, so it's a little bit different than I expected.
I thought we'd be rigging an hour ago or more.
So, yeah, I have some concerns that we'll be ready in time.
Sorry for not playing along, but I'd really rather let 'em work! I've got faith in our design.
Although the individual components look flimsy, joining them together should make a really strong house.
It's exciting to see it come together.
It's like a house, except it flies.
It's outrageous.
Look at that.
That's gonna be the chimney there.
Already it's fully eight feet above the roof of the house.
That in itself is already big.
This is a really big toy.
It's 12 hours until launch time.
While we scramble to complete the house, Jonathan instructs the 40 volunteers on how to inflate the balloons without damaging them.
So a two to three-person team works well, one person running the valve, one person doing this initially.
In a second, it will be light enough to lift itself.
If you open it too much, it will rip the balloon.
It becomes easier as the balloon gets bigger.
There we go.
A little more fluid.
I think I can just flip it open now.
Slowly, slowly.
I'll see.
By 6pm, the walls are going up fast.
Can you guys tell me when I get flush over here? - Kick it out there.
- Out here? Yes.
One, two, three.
One, two, three.
One, two, three.
- Are you getting to where you need? - OK, I guess that's good.
Now the walls are in place, I need to strengthen the chimney so it's strong enough for Jonathan to climb up during the flight.
We're fixing these gussets on to make this more rigid this way, cos right now it's really shaky and kinda scary.
Huh! This is taking a lot longer to get this done than we thought.
If you put a screw into that part too, it'll help hold it in place.
Let me know when I'm there.
About five hours later than we planned, we've finally got the first roof panel on.
But it doesn't fit.
I can't believe I forgot.
It should be right.
It might just be a problem with the Is our opening 7x7 now or 7x6? What did we end up making it? Huh, you know what? - If I this up, I will kill myself.
- We'll double-check.
With just eight hours left before our 6am launch, we're struggling to get our flying house built in time.
To make matters worse, we've been trying to put the roof on the wrong way round.
The gable's on the wrong side.
I can't believe I let that happen.
We changed plans midway through on how the chimney was going to work, and we forgot to update our notes, so we ended up with the gable 90 degrees off from where it should be - it's over the front door.
It should have been over the side windows.
So quickly we're gonna undo that and put the gable here.
That gable should have been here.
Oops! These things happen.
It cost us valuable time and that's not our only problem.
The chimney is twisted.
We have to straighten it or the roof won't fit around it.
Is it just me or is this just really cocked this way? It is cocked.
The only thing I can do is put one of our tunderers out there, tie a rope on it and pull just a little bit of tension on it, so the thing sits in the right place while we put the roof around it.
Let's see if we can just push it ourselves, with the gussets removed.
Just hang on just a second.
Just look at it right now, shaking in the breeze.
With these on, it's still that rickety, we're not going to be able to measurably square it up.
Well, it's not Paul, if you're looking at this direction, it's so far off, it's unbelievable.
So it's off with these gussets, so we can try to straighten it.
All right, hold, hold, right there.
Push in a little more.
How's that look, Paul? I guess that'll have to do.
It's still kinda twisty, but there's really no way around it.
- Does it look better at least? - Yeah.
Good.
We can always adjust it, once we get this panel up there.
It's as square as something that noodly is going to be.
OK, good.
With the chimney straightened out, the roof should go up quick.
And it had better, because it's 11 pm and we've got just seven hours until launch time.
We're close to the end of the building section now.
We've got all of the ceiling panels in, all the wall panels in.
All we have left is a little bit of extra bracing, and before that's even finished, it's getting rock solid in here.
I'm really comfortable with the structure now.
Jonathan wants to be sure the chimney is strong enough to support his weight.
He tests it, the best way he knows how.
You know, we haven't finished bracing yet! - Yeah, sorry.
- That's all right.
- What's your feeling on that? - We can do it again! Well, I would like to jump up and down a whole lot more once the bracing is in.
There's no sense breaking it before it's ready.
Everything's gone pretty well so far.
OK, it's taken longer than we would have liked, but for the most part, it's gone well.
We didn't make any major mistakes.
I mean, we put the roof on sideways once, but, whatever - these things happen.
Who hasn't put a roof on sideways once in their life? Come on.
But we cut all the pieces to the right size, we've got all the things we needed, we haven't forgotten anything yet, to my knowledge, which might be a first for us.
And so it's going fairly smoothly, all things considered.
With the roof complete, the next job is rigging a circular metal tube called a load ring to which all the balloons will attach.
This load ring is what all the balloons connect to, where the magic happens, the connection between the lift up and the weight down.
The way the balloons attach to the load ring is of critical importance.
Far from a random collection of balloons, Jonathan has spent days planning the precise layout of the cluster.
This is a rough schematic of how the entire cluster balloon system is designed.
We start with a tier of seven all the way on the top.
Four tiers, then it starts tapering back in.
Lines, lines, all these are individual.
Whereas these are clusters, these bottom two tiers are individual.
It's this careful arrangement of the lines, together with 1, 700 pounds of ballast that will allow Jonathan and Troy to pilot the house.
The way you control this is, if you're climbing and you don't want to climb any more, you vent helium by cutting away individual balloons or popping them.
If you're descending and you don't want to descend, you arrest that descent by dropping ballast, so that you can level out, fly level and fly on.
Jonathan has the rigging straps laid out and the volunteers have created a forest of almost 300 balloons.
Now we have just three hours to harvest them.
As we're getting close to finishing, the enormity of this is dawning on me.
When Jonathan started throwing the straps out through the chimney, which is to what the balloons connect to lift the house off the ground, it became sort of undeniable and then very apparent that two humans are gonna fly in this house, you know, in this airframe that we built, which is really scary.
These guys are gonna be at 10,000 feet in a flying house we built.
Their safety, their lives depend on, in a very real sense, on the work that we did, and they'll be in a situation where there's little recourse if something goes wrong, which is formidable.
Going into this, days into this, I was worried.
Am I allowed to say that? Pilots don't talk about being afraid, not really.
But this is an uncommon system and we're talking about human life.
We take it very seriously.
So am I allowed to say I was afraid? I have been afraid.
It's 2am and the 6am launch window is approaching fast.
At this point, I'm a little too tired to be a nervous wreck about it, but it is weighing on me in a way that I did not expect, especially since things have been moving along pretty well, which makes me wonder what we've neglected and what else is lurking that we're going to find later in the night when we're less prepared to deal with it.
Timing now is really the issue.
We start to see twilight out here.
We still have a number of balloons to get up.
So really we have a limited time period in the morning to fly this thing.
We have to get it off in that time.
So now we're really racing the clock.
It's the time where we can't waste anything, we can't have any more errors.
We gotta make sure it all comes together.
We've got only one chance to fly the house.
We have to launch it at 6am and we still have over 50 balloons to attach.
We are down to the nitty gritties, this is the last few minutes.
We're something like less than 30 minutes off from launch time.
This is go time.
The last balloons are harvested and attached to the house.
OK, crow's nest guy, I kinda got get up there.
Do you know what? That's appropriate! It's time to launch, but the house is still firmly on the ground.
We need more lift, so we have to inflate more balloons.
This is a one-shot deal.
If this thing doesn't get off the ground in the next five minutes, this isn't going to happen and it's all for nothing.
Our narrow launch window has come and gone, but the house remains rooted to the ground.
I think we have fewer balloons than we thought.
I'm looking at 20 of those canisters filled will helium that didn't get put on.
Anybody who knows how to inflate balloons come with me right now! We've got to get more balloons on and ballast off the house.
They're pulling a lot of ballast.
I hope it goes soon.
Everybody, listen to me real quick! Nobody talks! Don't go near it when it moves! Stay where you are! - Look at it! - Hands off! Get out of the way! Get out of the way! Come on! Bon voyage! Well done! - Hey, that happened! - Wow! Look at them go! Whooo! Look at it! Have a great flight! I can see through the floor! OK, Troy, it's recording.
How do you feel? Oh, fabulous! This is absolutely amazing.
It took off just like we wanted.
Light winds.
Perfect, perfect day.
This has never been done and will probably never be done again.
This is unique.
I don't know if you can see this over my shoulder, but it's a bona-fide flying house, and we made it, I mean, in like two weeks.
This is a pretty incredible thing.
We're flying in a helicopter chasing the house we just let free.
It's er It's a strange day.
It's not every day that you get to fly a house and then go chase it around with helicopters.
It's completely surreal.
I mean, seeing that thing lift off You've seen it on the ground and it's like a house that looks like a cartoon and it's got an 80-foot stack of balloons on top of it, and you go, "Oh, OK, that's surreal.
" I've been up all night and there's these moon landing lights lighting it up.
It's pretty surreal.
But then it takes off and you don't even know what surreal is.
There's a flying house behind you.
But that feeling of a certain accomplishment and awe is tempered with the fact that I am scared out of my mind, because there's two human beings in that right now.
They just released an entire cluster of balloons because our house is not only flying, it's flying too high! All right, that's just cool.
Our house is really flying! Those guys are absolutely insane.
I would never do that! Oh, that's so unreal! Isn't it amazing? You know how big the house is, but it still looks small.
It looks miniscule! It really looks a lot like the movie.
We debated the size of balloons.
"Wouldn't it be nice to use party balloons?" These are eight-foot weather balloons.
At the scale of the house from here, this looks like the movie, this looks like Up.
We did it! Our house has been in the air for almost an hour and soared to 10,000 feet.
Now I just want Troy and Jonathan to land safely.
This is chase.
Go right ahead.
I'll be there as soon as I can.
- Look at that tier! - Wow, look at that! Whooo! Whooo! - Are you guys all right? - Oh, it was great! You guys good? - How did it feel? Did it come down all right? - Yeah, yeah.
It was great.
I couldn't tell if it was like really hard.
Oh! - Are you charged up enough? - It was incredible.
I've flown with Troy a number of times, and erm How long have you been flying? - 30-some years.
- I've never seen him giddy until today.
He was giddy.
Troy was, like, "Oh!" OK, not that voice, but Yep, but it was an exciting deal.
Yeah, I was excited to fly in this thing.
- Paul.
- Well done, Eric.
I'm gonna go have a heart attack now! - Well, we've managed to - I'm gonna go take a nap.
This is unbelievable! Well done.
- So how hard was it, guys? - It was pretty hard.
I'll put it as a 7½ out of 10.
Yeah, I'd put it between 6 and 7 on the hardometer.
I'm gonna go with 8, cos I was terrified.
Right, well, we'll call it 7, then, I guess.
- There we go, that rounds out even.
- Yeah.
I give it a ten.
I don't know if I get a vote, but I thought it was pretty hard.
March 2017
I've spent the last ten years building crazy machines and cool inventions.
Good job! With my buddies Paul and Eric, we're attempting our toughest ever engineering tasks.
We're using materials and know-how that anyone can get their hands on.
This hardly looks like a deathtrap.
And we're starting big.
Our first task is to find out how hard can it be to fly a housewith balloons.
No-one's done anything like this.
I don't know that anyone has even tried it! I'm an electrical engineer and the mastermind behind the whole operation.
This is go time.
Paul is a mechanical engineer.
I've known him since high school.
This is actually really hard.
Eric Gocke runs his own construction company.
We go way back.
It's got to go real fast now and have nothing go wrong.
So how hard can it be to fly a house with balloons? Here in Hollywood, California, studio executives spend all day dreaming up crazy ideas, trying harder and harder to amuse and entertain us.
But often it's the simple ideas that work best.
One of them is in the animated film Up.
A crotchety old man ties thousands of party balloons to his house.
It was a great movie moment, kind of magical, totally unforgettable.
So we got to thinking, how hard can it really be to fly a house with balloons? It might sound completely nuts, but perhaps it really can be done.
After all, it's just balloons tied to a house, right? How hard can it be? We have just two weeks to see if we can try to fly a house, and the journey begins right here.
What do you think, like, ten? Eight? Before we can fly a house, we need to figure out what kind of weight we're dealing with.
Step one is to weigh an old house, and this one is perfect.
Well, it's almost perfect.
It's the only house we can actually weigh, because it's already standing up on blocks.
But it should give us a ball-park figure to estimate the weight of the house in the movie.
The house sits on 16 blocks.
If we add up the weight bearing down on each of the blocks, then we have the total weight of the house.
We're using this load cell.
It's like a set of kitchen scales, but it goes up to 300,000 pounds.
We have to jack up the house just enough to get the load cell underneath.
Now we're moving houses! Then lower the jacks so all the weight rests on the load cell.
It sounds easy, right? It's OK.
Do we really wanna be underneath while we pick this up? Yes, I do.
The house is not gonna collapse.
I stake your life on it.
Let's just assess what happened there.
It's just his board just snapped.
One of the beams supporting the jacks has snapped.
This feels dangerous, and I'm starting to think that weighing a house with a load cell and a couple of bottle jacks might not be such a great idea.
Time for Plan B.
This house is about 50 feet long.
It's about 30 feet wide.
Turns out there's a formula we can use to guesstimate the weight.
A house like this one weighs approximately 100 pounds per square foot.
Measure the square footage of the house and we can calculate its total weight.
Our house is 30 by 50.
That's 1,500 square feet.
Times two floors.
That's 3,000 square feet.
So what's your estimation? - Almost 300,000 pounds for this house.
- Wow.
But I mean, this house is also a lot bigger than the one in the movie.
This is easily three times the size.
It's still a 100,000-pound house we're trying to lift.
That's a lot of balloons.
Yeah, we'll see.
Right, I've got these party balloons and helium.
We know that the house weighs 100,000 pounds.
Why not start with something that weighs one pound, see how many balloons that takes to lift and go from there? Sounds like a plan.
This camera weighs about a pound.
Let's see how much it actually weighs.
Just shy of a pound here.
Let's see what else we have.
- Oh, there you have it.
- This wrench is about a pound.
- Looks like it.
- Call it a pound.
Jeez! We'll use the balloon getter-downer.
What is the weight right now, Gocke? About half a pound! This is gonna be one stupid pile of balloons.
So how many balloons does it take to lift one pound? 32 37 What are you guys up to? 51? No, wait.
52.
If it takes 52 party balloons to lift one pound, then lifting 100,000 pounds will take a ridiculously huge number.
- We did 52 here? - Yep.
That's enough for er For 100,000, that's er 5.
2 million balloons.
It would appear that way.
A cluster of 5.
2 million will stand as tall as a 50-storey building.
It's going to take over 246,000 miles of string to tie all the balloons to the house.
We're gonna have a 500-foot tall column of balloons.
That means the average length of string is gonna be about 250 feet.
I don't think a balloon's gonna be able to carry 250 feet of string.
Let's test it.
We'll measure out 250 feet of string.
One.
Two.
23 24 32 33 37 38 Ohh! All right, one balloon's not gonna even carry the string it needs to pull up the house.
So how many balloons does it take to lift 250 feet of string? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11 balloons.
So what you're telling me is, it took 11 balloons to negate the weight of string length.
- That is correct.
- So it's 11 times 5.
2 million plus 5.
2 million.
So, 10 million balloons? - No, 55 million.
- Oh, OK.
I was afraid it was gonna be a lot.
Actually, Vin, it's 62.
4 million.
More balloons require more string, and more string requires even more balloons.
It's the balloon version of a vicious circle.
So what you're saying is that if we ever find the solution to this problem, not only the balloons, but the universe itself will cease to exist.
Lifting a house with party balloons? Impossible.
So it's day two on the project and we've concluded that you just cannot fly a 100,000-pound house with party balloons.
There may be some way to fly a house, but not with balloons.
So, going forward, we're going to have to get creative about how to do this.
Good news, buddy.
I got good news.
Gocke has been shopping for bigger balloons.
Five-foot diameter.
It's huge.
This balloon might just be the thing that keeps our dream alive.
- We'll take the same camera and wrench.
- I'll start filling up.
May take a minute.
I'm not gonna believe you're not making that noise on purpose.
- I can't not make it.
- I don't believe it for a second.
Is it going to float away? - All right.
- That's not a problem for it! One five-foot balloon easily does the work of 52 party balloons.
It uses much less string and it's a more efficient way of using the helium.
And that's not the only piece of good news.
The producers somehow got their hands on 80,000 cubic feet of helium.
That's nearly 300 tanks of helium.
We've gotta be able to lift something with that.
So how much can one tank of helium lift? To find out, we need an even bigger balloon.
This balloon is gonna take an entire tank of helium, just for itself.
We almost there? It's really hard to hold! This is really gonna hurt if it goes off, isn't it? This eight-foot monster is the biggest that we can find and is used by weather forecasters to carry data recording equipment high into the atmosphere.
So how much weight can it lift? So we've got our trusty one-pound camera set up and this bearing is good for another 14 pounds.
- Wow! - Is it? It's really pulling.
It's flying around at head level! There's 291 cubic feet of helium in this balloon.
Now we're getting somewhere.
Let's go take this in and measure it all out.
All right So even with the balloon as well, it's 17½ pounds of mass it took up with one tank.
Time to do the math.
So 291 cubic feet, 17½ pounds.
Paul, what does 80,000 cubic feet get us? 4,827 pounds.
Actually, it's 4,810.
Can we build a house within that weight? Well, it's not 100,000 pounds.
- So we'll have to make a really small house.
- No, I don't want a really small house.
I want to build a big house, but a really light house.
We'll make it with the lightest materials we can and we'll make it as big as possible.
We're the first people ever to attempt the impossible - to fly a house with balloons.
Our flying house will sit on a lightweight base.
This base is just like the gondola beneath a hot-air balloon and it's Paul's job to design it.
It looks something like this.
It's a flat platform.
There are beams underneath it, two running this way, two running this way.
The balloons are attached via ropes.
They pull up on the beams and lift our gondola and our house.
While Paul's figuring out the gondola, I'm figuring out how to build the house.
I'm gonna have weight restrictions and I'm also gonna have to figure out how to make it on time.
We've got just ten days left to complete this challenge.
We have eight-foot balloons, a design for a lightweight house and a truckload of helium.
But we're missing a key ingredient.
To fly a house like they did in the film, we need people on board to pilot it.
I've made some calls and there are two balloon pilots who might be crazy enough to help us out.
This is Jonathan Trappe.
In May of 2010, he strapped himself to a cluster of helium balloons and flew across the white cliffs of Dover and the English Channel.
I'm hoping he'll agree to our crazy scheme.
Hello! How are you? Nice cliffs you have here! And Troy Bradley has held over 58 world records, flying every type of balloon known to man.
It's an excellent idea.
It's gonna be a lot of fun.
Our gondola design, as it stands now, is about 16-feet square.
- The ropes, basket - an area 12-feet square.
- OK.
Then we'll put a house on the top of it, with a hole in the roof for the balloons.
I think it sounds like a very reasonable design and sturdier than some balloon baskets.
I think you've thought it all out.
With our final ingredient in place, we're ready for a record.
This is a huge, huge project and definitely the biggest cluster balloon to ever fly.
- You'll make cluster-ballooning history.
- There you go! Troy's seal of approval means I can go out and buy the materials for the house.
I've bought lightweight aluminium for the frame and plywood to cover the roof and walls.
What I have here is a sample of pretty much the lightest building materials I could possibly find, so we can actually make this thing still fly and look like a house.
- All right, Gocs.
He's been here all night.
- Wow! - What's up? - When did you get here? - Earlier.
- So is this one of the walls? It's one of many.
As I put these walls together, I'm starting to have doubts about the strength of the materials.
These aluminium studs are really light, but if you flick them too hard, they'll just bend in half.
The plywood's great because you can cut it with a knife.
But it's also so flimsy you can put your thumb right through it if you wanted to.
This is not very heavy at all.
I'm hoping that by gluing and screwing these two materials together, they will become much, much stronger than they are on their own.
You think how scary it is to put two people's lives in the hands of such wimpy materials.
With five days left, Paul's gondola parts are ready for assembly.
- Nice work, Paul.
- Thank you.
These are our gondola makings.
- That's all your hard work right there, all set up.
- Sure is.
I guess now we're done with planning, it's just time to pop some rivets, about what 2,000 of them? Yeah, on that order Let's do it.
We're setting up these rivets right now.
We're gonna be doing this a lot.
This is one of just six beams, with approximately 500 rivets per beam.
This is gonna be a long day of riveting.
How you feeling, Paul? Are you happy? - Excited to see this come together.
- Looking pretty darn neat.
- All right, man.
- Let's stand in the middle.
All right, Paul, hop down.
Let's do this again ten more times.
The machines at the shop have done their job.
The rivet holes line up perfectly.
But here's where we make our first really stupid mistake.
If we are really going to make aviation history and fly a house with balloons, then we need everything to go to plan.
Three days to launch and we've made our first mistake.
And it's a doozy.
Our house is designed to sit on four 16-foot beams.
Each one is made up of shorter pieces joined together using these metal joining plates and nuts and bolts.
These plates have to be installed before the beams are riveted together.
And guess what? On the first beam we forgot.
The problem is, we got a little overzealous and we forgot to put the plate in before we built the beams.
So we can get the first one in, but the second one's gonna be kinda hard unless you have an eight-foot-long arm to pick up those bolts.
So we're gonna have to figure out a solution for that.
We'll have to improvise something.
Paul had no time to write the instruction manual for this build, so boxing ourselves in is an everyday hazard.
A smarter bunch of guys would have put these plates in before they riveted the beams together, but anyway - We're not them.
here we are! Our solution is to glue the bolts to the plate so we can tighten them from just the outside.
Right now everyone's watching us and thinking, "Those idiots!" The glue holding some of the bolts has failed, so we need to tighten them from the inside of the beam.
It looks like we'll need those eight-foot arms after all.
You really are going to tape a wrench to a stick? - Absolutely.
- Let's see how this goes.
Paul, I'm not questioning your dexterity, but I'm questioning your dexterity.
Bottom most, bottom right as you look at the It's actually really hard.
That's the understatement of the week.
If these beams were to fail during the flight, our pilots would plummet to the ground.
Get ready.
We have to get this right.
There's one.
Wait for it.
Uh! Fishing with Paul! Fishing with Paul! There, I got it! Fifth one down.
Yeah! - Yeah! Good fishing, Paul.
- On it.
Crisis averted.
With the all-important beams joined together, we should finish the gondola, our house base, before the end of the day.
This is looking good.
It's looking like the frame of a flying house.
They're not gonna be able to complain that they don't have enough space.
That's for sure! This really beats a stupid wicker basket.
I guess we'll find out about that.
My only concern now is with the floor.
It's kinda bouncy, it's like a wrestling ring or a trampoline.
Our balloonist Troy has come back to check on progress.
This time he's brought co-pilot Jonathan Trappe and ground crew chief Nidia Ramirez with him.
- Hey, guys.
- Hey, looks like a floor! - Wow! - Can we get on it? It's gonna be a hell of a view! It's an excellent design.
You guys did a fantastic job.
And it's substantial.
It's gonna take a lot more than this.
I'm holding my breath that the flexibility of the base isn't a problem.
For landing that's actually a good thing, because it'll have a bit of give.
It turns out I needn't have worried.
- We appreciate you built that in.
Outstanding.
- We thought of that, that's for sure.
We're a considerate bunch of guys.
OK, so are there sides to this structure? - Do you wanna get one out? - That there is.
I see them.
OK.
It's a basic framed house, just with the lightest materials that we could get.
That's all there is to it.
Jonathan and Troy are considering flying as high as 10,000 feet.
To do that, they need a licence from the Federal Aviation Authority.
Luckily, Jonathan is good buddies with them.
Actually, a lot of these guys are in the FAA cos they love things that fly.
And they love interesting things that fly.
And we're right up their alley.
Troy's main concern is the landing.
It's the most dangerous part of the flight.
My hope is to have a landing that this structure actually survives and we come through unscathed as well.
That film, the Disney Pixar film Up, is a delightful movie.
I mean, for a lighter-than-air guy, this is a dream, and recreating that film in the real world um is an unparalleled experience.
That's the thumbs up, we're pulling out now.
OK, copy.
Pull out.
After 12 days of hard work, we're finally heading to our launch site in the desert to try and fly our house with balloons.
The weather forecast dictates that we must fly first thing tomorrow morning.
We've got only one shot.
This is gonna be fun, this is the pay-off.
We build the toys, we do all that hard work and now we get to go to the desert and play with them.
There's no two ways around it.
If we fly a house out of an airstrip in the desert and they land it and step out the front door totally unharmed, that is a feat.
No-one's done anything like this.
I don't know that anyone's even tried anything like this.
A number of things could go wrong.
We could lose our balloonists, our rigging could fail, our balloons could leak, the gondola could fail In my heart of hearts, I fear that most, since it was my design.
The thing that scares the bejeezus out of me is that all my houses that I've built, none of them have actually flown.
They're all just static things.
I've never built a dynamic house before.
The fact that it's going to be coming in for a landing is the thing I don't know how to prepare for.
My God, look at that pile of helium.
So, this is the desert.
I've never been to one before.
We've got 40 or so volunteers turning up later to help.
For now, we're on our own and there's a million and one things to do.
- They certainly aren't heavy.
- That is the truth.
We have to finish the painting, assemble the base or gondola, build the house, inflate 300 balloons and rig everything together.
But first Jonathan and Troy have to prepare the helium.
First we just have to get the helium bottles spread out over the airfield.
Then we can clip the balloons on to each individual tank and have the balloons moving around, without bapping into each other, causing them to fail.
We just got our gondola flipped over, right side up.
We're gonna put our ropes on, put our corner pieces on, put our house on, and then pick it up with some balloons.
How hard can it be? Right now, the weather is the big unknown.
We can only fly the house if the wind speeds are less than 7 mph for take-off.
Anything more is just too dangerous.
Right now the pilots are about to call the Weather Service.
We're gonna get the big go or no-go for inflation tonight.
So what I'm hearing from you is, we're expecting 5, 8, 10, up to 10, until perhaps 10pm local? That's miles per hour in weather forecaster speak.
Then falling off down to 5s and 3s and 2s and 1 s by dawn? - Yes.
- OK, that's what we're planning for.
That's why we Yeah.
OK.
Outstanding.
Well, with that, that's our go for inflation.
- Awesome.
- Don.
Thanks.
The weather system that allows us the launch window is actually pretty narrow.
And that means that come six o'clock tomorrow morning, at 6:18, this has gotta be ready to fly, there's no two ways about it.
If it's not, it's not gonna fly tomorrow.
We can't put the helium back in the bottles.
Once we start filling balloons, we are committed to the launch.
We've got just over 17 hours to get everything ready.
It's going to be a long day and an even longer night.
It's gonna be a little tight.
I think we'll get it.
We just gotta go real fast now and have nothing go wrong, which won't happen.
Set this end on it and then flip it over.
The first piece of house to be added to the gondola is a central chimney made of wood.
Help me get it down.
We've attached it to the base of the house with screws.
Jonathan will have to climb to the very top during the flight, so it must be stable.
I'm not sure how I feel about the chimney yet, because it's not done.
Right now it doesn't seem very solid.
I'm very confident about the sub floor.
It is solid, we've jumped around.
I feel good about it.
The centre structure, I'm seeing two-by-fours that aren't reinforced or braced, so I'm gonna see what they're doing with it.
Right now, I'm a little I'm cautious.
We'll see when it comes together what they've built for us.
You wanted a really high house and this is what you got.
I'm not saying you shouldn't worry.
Wow, that's big.
I know.
I know.
It's gonna be massive.
I mean, really, it's serious.
The base has always been serious, but when you start seeing it go up - You can see the vertical end of this too.
- I know.
- It's crazy.
- Well, we're gonna fly it.
Yeah.
Where's the bathroom? It seems like we've hardly got started and the sun is already setting.
I think you're expecting me to say something kind of upbeat, you know, "Everything is great!" But I do have concerns.
The sun is going down and the structure's not built, so it's a little bit different than I expected.
I thought we'd be rigging an hour ago or more.
So, yeah, I have some concerns that we'll be ready in time.
Sorry for not playing along, but I'd really rather let 'em work! I've got faith in our design.
Although the individual components look flimsy, joining them together should make a really strong house.
It's exciting to see it come together.
It's like a house, except it flies.
It's outrageous.
Look at that.
That's gonna be the chimney there.
Already it's fully eight feet above the roof of the house.
That in itself is already big.
This is a really big toy.
It's 12 hours until launch time.
While we scramble to complete the house, Jonathan instructs the 40 volunteers on how to inflate the balloons without damaging them.
So a two to three-person team works well, one person running the valve, one person doing this initially.
In a second, it will be light enough to lift itself.
If you open it too much, it will rip the balloon.
It becomes easier as the balloon gets bigger.
There we go.
A little more fluid.
I think I can just flip it open now.
Slowly, slowly.
I'll see.
By 6pm, the walls are going up fast.
Can you guys tell me when I get flush over here? - Kick it out there.
- Out here? Yes.
One, two, three.
One, two, three.
One, two, three.
- Are you getting to where you need? - OK, I guess that's good.
Now the walls are in place, I need to strengthen the chimney so it's strong enough for Jonathan to climb up during the flight.
We're fixing these gussets on to make this more rigid this way, cos right now it's really shaky and kinda scary.
Huh! This is taking a lot longer to get this done than we thought.
If you put a screw into that part too, it'll help hold it in place.
Let me know when I'm there.
About five hours later than we planned, we've finally got the first roof panel on.
But it doesn't fit.
I can't believe I forgot.
It should be right.
It might just be a problem with the Is our opening 7x7 now or 7x6? What did we end up making it? Huh, you know what? - If I this up, I will kill myself.
- We'll double-check.
With just eight hours left before our 6am launch, we're struggling to get our flying house built in time.
To make matters worse, we've been trying to put the roof on the wrong way round.
The gable's on the wrong side.
I can't believe I let that happen.
We changed plans midway through on how the chimney was going to work, and we forgot to update our notes, so we ended up with the gable 90 degrees off from where it should be - it's over the front door.
It should have been over the side windows.
So quickly we're gonna undo that and put the gable here.
That gable should have been here.
Oops! These things happen.
It cost us valuable time and that's not our only problem.
The chimney is twisted.
We have to straighten it or the roof won't fit around it.
Is it just me or is this just really cocked this way? It is cocked.
The only thing I can do is put one of our tunderers out there, tie a rope on it and pull just a little bit of tension on it, so the thing sits in the right place while we put the roof around it.
Let's see if we can just push it ourselves, with the gussets removed.
Just hang on just a second.
Just look at it right now, shaking in the breeze.
With these on, it's still that rickety, we're not going to be able to measurably square it up.
Well, it's not Paul, if you're looking at this direction, it's so far off, it's unbelievable.
So it's off with these gussets, so we can try to straighten it.
All right, hold, hold, right there.
Push in a little more.
How's that look, Paul? I guess that'll have to do.
It's still kinda twisty, but there's really no way around it.
- Does it look better at least? - Yeah.
Good.
We can always adjust it, once we get this panel up there.
It's as square as something that noodly is going to be.
OK, good.
With the chimney straightened out, the roof should go up quick.
And it had better, because it's 11 pm and we've got just seven hours until launch time.
We're close to the end of the building section now.
We've got all of the ceiling panels in, all the wall panels in.
All we have left is a little bit of extra bracing, and before that's even finished, it's getting rock solid in here.
I'm really comfortable with the structure now.
Jonathan wants to be sure the chimney is strong enough to support his weight.
He tests it, the best way he knows how.
You know, we haven't finished bracing yet! - Yeah, sorry.
- That's all right.
- What's your feeling on that? - We can do it again! Well, I would like to jump up and down a whole lot more once the bracing is in.
There's no sense breaking it before it's ready.
Everything's gone pretty well so far.
OK, it's taken longer than we would have liked, but for the most part, it's gone well.
We didn't make any major mistakes.
I mean, we put the roof on sideways once, but, whatever - these things happen.
Who hasn't put a roof on sideways once in their life? Come on.
But we cut all the pieces to the right size, we've got all the things we needed, we haven't forgotten anything yet, to my knowledge, which might be a first for us.
And so it's going fairly smoothly, all things considered.
With the roof complete, the next job is rigging a circular metal tube called a load ring to which all the balloons will attach.
This load ring is what all the balloons connect to, where the magic happens, the connection between the lift up and the weight down.
The way the balloons attach to the load ring is of critical importance.
Far from a random collection of balloons, Jonathan has spent days planning the precise layout of the cluster.
This is a rough schematic of how the entire cluster balloon system is designed.
We start with a tier of seven all the way on the top.
Four tiers, then it starts tapering back in.
Lines, lines, all these are individual.
Whereas these are clusters, these bottom two tiers are individual.
It's this careful arrangement of the lines, together with 1, 700 pounds of ballast that will allow Jonathan and Troy to pilot the house.
The way you control this is, if you're climbing and you don't want to climb any more, you vent helium by cutting away individual balloons or popping them.
If you're descending and you don't want to descend, you arrest that descent by dropping ballast, so that you can level out, fly level and fly on.
Jonathan has the rigging straps laid out and the volunteers have created a forest of almost 300 balloons.
Now we have just three hours to harvest them.
As we're getting close to finishing, the enormity of this is dawning on me.
When Jonathan started throwing the straps out through the chimney, which is to what the balloons connect to lift the house off the ground, it became sort of undeniable and then very apparent that two humans are gonna fly in this house, you know, in this airframe that we built, which is really scary.
These guys are gonna be at 10,000 feet in a flying house we built.
Their safety, their lives depend on, in a very real sense, on the work that we did, and they'll be in a situation where there's little recourse if something goes wrong, which is formidable.
Going into this, days into this, I was worried.
Am I allowed to say that? Pilots don't talk about being afraid, not really.
But this is an uncommon system and we're talking about human life.
We take it very seriously.
So am I allowed to say I was afraid? I have been afraid.
It's 2am and the 6am launch window is approaching fast.
At this point, I'm a little too tired to be a nervous wreck about it, but it is weighing on me in a way that I did not expect, especially since things have been moving along pretty well, which makes me wonder what we've neglected and what else is lurking that we're going to find later in the night when we're less prepared to deal with it.
Timing now is really the issue.
We start to see twilight out here.
We still have a number of balloons to get up.
So really we have a limited time period in the morning to fly this thing.
We have to get it off in that time.
So now we're really racing the clock.
It's the time where we can't waste anything, we can't have any more errors.
We gotta make sure it all comes together.
We've got only one chance to fly the house.
We have to launch it at 6am and we still have over 50 balloons to attach.
We are down to the nitty gritties, this is the last few minutes.
We're something like less than 30 minutes off from launch time.
This is go time.
The last balloons are harvested and attached to the house.
OK, crow's nest guy, I kinda got get up there.
Do you know what? That's appropriate! It's time to launch, but the house is still firmly on the ground.
We need more lift, so we have to inflate more balloons.
This is a one-shot deal.
If this thing doesn't get off the ground in the next five minutes, this isn't going to happen and it's all for nothing.
Our narrow launch window has come and gone, but the house remains rooted to the ground.
I think we have fewer balloons than we thought.
I'm looking at 20 of those canisters filled will helium that didn't get put on.
Anybody who knows how to inflate balloons come with me right now! We've got to get more balloons on and ballast off the house.
They're pulling a lot of ballast.
I hope it goes soon.
Everybody, listen to me real quick! Nobody talks! Don't go near it when it moves! Stay where you are! - Look at it! - Hands off! Get out of the way! Get out of the way! Come on! Bon voyage! Well done! - Hey, that happened! - Wow! Look at them go! Whooo! Look at it! Have a great flight! I can see through the floor! OK, Troy, it's recording.
How do you feel? Oh, fabulous! This is absolutely amazing.
It took off just like we wanted.
Light winds.
Perfect, perfect day.
This has never been done and will probably never be done again.
This is unique.
I don't know if you can see this over my shoulder, but it's a bona-fide flying house, and we made it, I mean, in like two weeks.
This is a pretty incredible thing.
We're flying in a helicopter chasing the house we just let free.
It's er It's a strange day.
It's not every day that you get to fly a house and then go chase it around with helicopters.
It's completely surreal.
I mean, seeing that thing lift off You've seen it on the ground and it's like a house that looks like a cartoon and it's got an 80-foot stack of balloons on top of it, and you go, "Oh, OK, that's surreal.
" I've been up all night and there's these moon landing lights lighting it up.
It's pretty surreal.
But then it takes off and you don't even know what surreal is.
There's a flying house behind you.
But that feeling of a certain accomplishment and awe is tempered with the fact that I am scared out of my mind, because there's two human beings in that right now.
They just released an entire cluster of balloons because our house is not only flying, it's flying too high! All right, that's just cool.
Our house is really flying! Those guys are absolutely insane.
I would never do that! Oh, that's so unreal! Isn't it amazing? You know how big the house is, but it still looks small.
It looks miniscule! It really looks a lot like the movie.
We debated the size of balloons.
"Wouldn't it be nice to use party balloons?" These are eight-foot weather balloons.
At the scale of the house from here, this looks like the movie, this looks like Up.
We did it! Our house has been in the air for almost an hour and soared to 10,000 feet.
Now I just want Troy and Jonathan to land safely.
This is chase.
Go right ahead.
I'll be there as soon as I can.
- Look at that tier! - Wow, look at that! Whooo! Whooo! - Are you guys all right? - Oh, it was great! You guys good? - How did it feel? Did it come down all right? - Yeah, yeah.
It was great.
I couldn't tell if it was like really hard.
Oh! - Are you charged up enough? - It was incredible.
I've flown with Troy a number of times, and erm How long have you been flying? - 30-some years.
- I've never seen him giddy until today.
He was giddy.
Troy was, like, "Oh!" OK, not that voice, but Yep, but it was an exciting deal.
Yeah, I was excited to fly in this thing.
- Paul.
- Well done, Eric.
I'm gonna go have a heart attack now! - Well, we've managed to - I'm gonna go take a nap.
This is unbelievable! Well done.
- So how hard was it, guys? - It was pretty hard.
I'll put it as a 7½ out of 10.
Yeah, I'd put it between 6 and 7 on the hardometer.
I'm gonna go with 8, cos I was terrified.
Right, well, we'll call it 7, then, I guess.
- There we go, that rounds out even.
- Yeah.
I give it a ten.
I don't know if I get a vote, but I thought it was pretty hard.
March 2017