6 year old boy floats away in hot air balloon

[Tucson]

The parents drug the kids out of bed in CO. to be live on the Today Show and GMA. Falcon lost his cookies on both shows.

See Youtube.

There is also a Youtube video of the boys doing a nasty little diddy about pajamas.

I think the dad is bonkers.

[GIMNEPIWO]

The only reason this didnt happen back when I was growing up is that me and my two brothers never thought of it. We built a number of things, some flew, some blew up, and some sank. We never made CNN - not that they had CNN back in the 1800's but still.

Edited to Add: After reading lots more about the family, dad in particular, I need to add that the things my brothers and I did were on our own, my dad was never involved. Well, at least not until the police or the fire fighters got him involved.

LMAO ... Been there, built that

... just remembered some of the ramps, slings and trebuchet's we built to launch some sort of body, ammunition or mechanized device off of and into the air ... never entered our minds that we would have to land at some point, or that the neighbors house may be in the line of fire ...

[dittoz]

As soon as they described the dimensions of the balloon, I knew there was no way the kid was in/on it. Not enough helium in that 20' disc - it was less than 5' in height !

By my rough calculations, it would take about 4000 average balloons filled with helium to lift a 100 lb boy - 2000 for a 50lb boy. That disc was well under 500 cubic feet in volume and if each balloon is less than 1 cubic foot, well...

Regardless (and sadly), the media loved it !

[DonnieS]

As soon as they described the dimensions of the balloon, I knew there was no way the kid was in/on it. Not enough helium in that 20' disc - it was less than 5' in height !

By my rough calculations, it would take about 4000 average balloons filled with helium to lift a 100 lb boy - 2000 for a 50' boy. That disc was well under 500 cubic feet in volume and if each balloon is less than 1 cubic foot, well...

Regardless (and sadly), the media loved it !

I didnt hear anything about the dimensions of the balloon until much later. But watching the thing as it rotated, there didnt appear to be any kind of an opening, or latch area or anything like that.

[DonnieS]

The only reason this didnt happen back when I was growing up is that me and my two brothers never thought of it. We built a number of things, some flew, some blew up, and some sank. We never made CNN - not that they had CNN back in the 1800's but still.

Edited to Add: After reading lots more about the family, dad in particular, I need to add that the things my brothers and I did were on our own, my dad was never involved. Well, at least not until the police or the fire fighters got him involved.

LMAO ... Been there, built that

... just remembered some of the ramps, slings and trebuchet's we built to launch some sort of body, ammunition or mechanized device off of and into the air ... never entered our minds that we would have to land at some point, or that the neighbors house may be in the line of fire ...

G, we did the ramps, giant sling shots (huge Y in the tree that our tree house was in - unfortunately only pointed at one very victimized neighbor - who could have guessed he would have turned out to be one of my football coaches, too bad he had a very good memory ) , and some other stuff that I have to check on statute of limitations before I mention.

A very interesting thing between generations, or maybe the way I raised my kids, my 2nd son came up to me, he was about 12-14, ( at his age, the local hospital ER knew me and my brothers on a first name basis, we just would walk in, they would sew us up, and we would head home, we would catch hell when the insurance stuff would get to the house) anyway, young son comes in and says ' hey dad, I was talk to Uncle Big Mouth, and he told me you figured out the formula for making explosives from the World Book Encyclopedia - can you show me how you did that?'

Now who in our generation would ever come to dad and say something like that and then maybe even live. For sure you would be farmed out to one of the relatives to chop cotton for a few weeks or haul loads of disgusting bio-material.