despite missing the mark, he knows he s still broken his previous record. so couch prepares to land. you got to have a way to make sure you can get these balloons popped on the way down. my preference is a daisy red rider bb gun. it only takes a couple of balloons to change him from ascending to descending. i m coming in on a gradual descent. i m looking for an open area. no fences or wires or houses or roads. that s what i m hoping for. couch touches down in cambridge, idaho, to a hero s welcome. his new record is 235 miles. so i think the next flight i m going to get enough balloons and ballast to go to 25,000 feet. and then see if i can stay out overnight, i could maybe break my old record and go farther. maybe i could go 500 miles. luckily, cluster ballooning is a rare pastime. these home-made aircraft require skill and training to operate safely as well as a fair amount of luck. i m contessa brewer. that s all for this edition of
because the pressure lightens as you get up. there isn t a lot of oxygen. and the air is very thin. the pressure of the helium inside the balloon is now much greater than the surrounding air pressure. so it continues to expand until finally the balloon pops and the craft comes plummeting back to earth at more than 100 miles an hour. so the parachute deploys maybe 30 seconds after the balloon bursts. it doesn t do anything until it gets to heavier air. at one point, it rocked head over heels. even though it didn t have head or heels. it was just like that. it was pretty amazing because there s a lot of reasons it wouldn t work. i ve shot a lot of things. that by far takes the cake as the most impressive thing i have ever shot. coming up
i ve never done that. party balloons seem real dependable. the funny thing is usually i use a lawn chair because it s comfortable and i can recline it and i can lean back. it s kind of redneck, and i m kind of redneck. there are some federal aviation rules to follow. but remarkably, as long as couch s aircraft stays under 254 pounds, he isn t required to have a pilot s license nor is he required to register with the faa. but couch does need some technical assistance. mark noel is my friend who has done a great job of making everything work so much better. he s a techie guy who thinks about things i don t think about. it might look unsafe, but a lot of care and attention has gone to make it very safe. cluster ballooning has come a long way since it was first attempted in the early 1930s. kent s lawn chair is outfitted with all the gear he ll need to survive a long trip. from a gps system so his ground
groups of five into larger assemblies of 15 or 20. once everything checks out, couch kisses his wife and, with cameras rolling, begins the ascent. for the most part, i can t steer myself. that s what i like about this little cluster ballooning thing. you just go where the winds take you. the thing you wouldn t realize is how peaceful it is up there. it s super-quiet. he s traveling at the same speed of the wind. even when he was moving at 50 miles an hour, he could set a napkin on his knee, and it wouldn t go anywhere. it s just like you re floating on a cloud. you start living a moment of what you dreamed as a child. nearly nine hours later, couch crosses the state line into idaho, but he s not going to make it to boise. the winds have pushed him off course about 85 miles north of the city. i was a bit tired of being up there. i m not a guy to sit still.
running out of ballast is the end of the ride in terms of his ability to control his altitude. each time it made things a little better just learning from the previous flight. i started using a pilot s parachute, which is nice and comfortable. we had more balloons, more ballast, we got more security and safety. better communication between the ground crew. july 5, 2008. kent couch attempts to fly from bend, oregon, to boise, idaho, and break his record of 193 miles traveled in a cluster balloon. on launch day, we had to be up at 3:30 in the morning. it s usually about 50 to 70 volunteers that make this thing work. we d normally have four or six helium stations. each station has four people on it with a different role. it takes a minute or two to blow up one balloon. we don t want to blow them up all the way because we want room for them to expand. after all the balloons are staged, we put them in clusters of five. then you start assembling the