Balloon Boy: A Tragic Tale of Parenting… And Math.
While an entire nation was busy watching, praying, and volunteering to help get an innocent 6 year old boy down from the sky in a homemade weather balloon… a couple was laughing at how easily the instant renewal in their publicity had come. Not going to bore you with the details as everyone as I’m sure had heard the story of little Falcon Heene ad nauseam by this point, but I would like to join the official side of the “the parents are camera hungry whack jobs who staged it” believers. And I will tell you why.
Aside from the dodgy clips from interviews already done with the lil Icarus, the whole situation reminded me of a Mythbusters episode I once saw involving a child and some balloons… so I went on a hunt to find the details of the experiment . According to Wikipedia (source) the episode I am thinking of was one called Ping Pong Salvage, with a demi experiement in the episode titled “carried away.” In the experiment, Adam and Jamie set out to test the urban legend of a child being handed a large bundle of fairground helium balloons and being whisked away into the sky as a result.
After hours of inflating balloons with helium and fixing them together, they came to the following conclusion:
Carried Away
The Build Team takes on a gag used in many comedic works, where a baby or small child could be lifted into the air and fly away unintentionally when given helium balloons.
| Myth statement | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| A 4 year old child can be lifted by a bunch of party balloons. | Busted | It would require such a large number of balloons (3,500) to lift an average four-year-old girl of 44 pounds(20 kg) just a few feet off the ground that there is no way the myth could have happened unintentionally. to |
So… what does this have to do with Balloon Boy? Well, the balloon that carried said youngster to “great heights” (and great camera time) is reported to be 20 by 5 ft balloon with a volume of 77 cubic feet. Now the average party balloon, an 11″ latex variety, has a volume of .50 cf. For the child in the Mythbusters experiment, they needed 3,500 balloons to lift the child off the ground, that’s a volume equating to .50 cf x 3500 = 1750cf of helium required to lift a 4 year old girl weighing 44lbs off the ground by a few feet.
So, are we really to believe that a balloon with a capacity of 77cf REALLY lifted a 6 year old boy thousands of feet into the air? I sure don’t. And perhaps the publicity hungry parents should check their math the next time they try to fool an entire nation.
Why be famous when you can be infamous?
October 18th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
“the parents are camera hungry whack jobs who staged it” I’m on your side on this as well.