Bundles of balloons a new form of carbon-free travel?

by Tyler Falk

Move over Balloon Boy. Cluster ballooning’s as real as it gets.Photo: omnibus via FlickrIt’s carbon-free, it flies, and it has lots of balloons. How are cluster balloons not catching on?

Well at least one man is getting around the way Balloon Boy
pretended to do
and the way the old man in UP does.

Last weekend, Jonathan Trappe flew “The Spirit Cluster”—57 helium-filled balloons and a small harness—109 miles in 14 hours above his home state of North Carolina, AOL News reports.

“Flying a gas balloon is unlike any other
    experience. There is no sound. No propellers, no jet engines. No
burner,
    no heart-thumping rotors of a helicopter. Not even the wind that
gliders
    experience. This is true, silent flight,” Trappe said on his website. “When you launch a balloon, part of the wonder is that you do
    not know where you will land. You are carried with the wind,
towards destinations
    unknown. It is a wonderful adventure, and it is the most pure form
of flight.”

It might not stimulate the new green economy, but if this catches on look for a boom in circus shops and landing gear (scissors).

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