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Calgary Man Soars in Lawn Chair With Helium Balloons, Gets Arrested After Weather Doesn’t Cooperate.
Daniel Boria, who owns environmentally-friendly cleaning company All Clean Natural, is now facing criminal charges over the incident which drew spectators’ eyes from the horses on the ground up to the sky.
Using a $20 lawn chair bought from Canadian Tire – Canada’s equivalent to The Warehouse – 120 oversized balloons and $12,000 worth of helium, Mr Boria achieved lift-off over the annual Calgary Stampede on Sunday local time, The Toronto Star reports.
The annual 10-day event attracts more than 1 million people a year.
Mr Boria had planned to skydive into the Stampede grounds from the chair with the company’s logo on the parachute, but the weather conditions burst his bubble.
“I was sitting in a lawn chair looking down through the clouds at 747 airplanes and looking up to a cluster of helium balloons.
“I rose to a certain altitude and the winds got pretty intense. I was somersaulting out the chair and it felt like minus 30. I watched below as the Stampede and my dream drifted away.”
He abandoned his plans and broke free from his chair, crash-landing around 3km south of where he took off, and possibly breaking his foot on impact.
After he’d come hurtling back down to earth, Calgary police arrested him and charged him with mischief causing danger to life and mischief to property under $5000. The latter charge was later dropped, but federal authorities are also looking at pressing charges for breaching airspace regulations.
“A stunt like this would require authorisation from Transport Canada. For us, the police, we usually only deal with the aftermath. In this case we are lucky that he only sustained minor injuries,” a police spokesman says.
Mr Boria did think his stunt would have authorities upset, but says the repercussions are “already worse than I thought it would be”.
Around eight months ago he set about getting his skydiving licence in the US, but his plan came unstuck when he couldn’t find anyone willing to help him with his grand plan.
“We couldn’t find anyone who could get me to that altitude,” Mr Boria said. “No pilots were willing to lose their license to fly me into controlled airspace.
“That’s when we turned to helium.”
Because the stunt had been so expensive, Mr Boria couldn’t do any test runs so only had one shot at completing it.
The lawn chair was found in a farmer’s field several kilometres outside of Calgary.
Agencies/Canadajournal
