Pair Lifts Off in Tandem Lawn Chair Balloon Flight
BEND, Ore. (AP) - An Oregon man and an Iraqi adventurer have taken to the sky in a pair of lawn chairs suspended from helium-filled party balloons.
Cheered by several hundred supporters, Kent Couch and Fareed Lafta lifted off Saturday morning from a Shell gas station in Bend, OR.
Earlier, volunteers filled 350 5-foot-diameter balloons with helium and tied them to Couch's homemade tandem lawn chair rig.
The two men hope to fly through the night across Idaho and touch down Sunday morning somewhere in southwestern Montana. But winds were carrying them in a southeastern direction shortly after the
10:20 a.m. takeoff.
The flight is a warm-up for plans to fly a tandem lawn chair balloon rig in Baghdad sometime in the future.
Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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