Flying Octopus - Piloted Balloon Art

I have always been fascinated with flight. While growing up, I took part in the usual kid activities of making kites and paper planes. As I got older I started designing my own paper planes, moved on to building and designing model rockets, and eventually experimented with remote controlled gliders. Now, at long last, I've satisfied my childhood dream of launching a 25 foot tall manned octopus. Well, okay, that wasn't really a childhood dream, but I did it anyway.

I didn't do this alone. Two years ago John Ninomiya and I met on-line and began talking about a piloted balloon sculpture. As an experienced cluster balloon pilot (one of only a few in the world), John was looking for a new adventure in the air. I was looking for something unusual to build. Many long discussions took place over safety issues and flight requirements. Many designs were proposed and later tossed out until we reached something we could agree on that would satisfy my interests as an artist and John's concerns as the pilot.

A team of 23 odd (and I mean really odd) balloon artists gathered on July 14 in Sodus Point, NY to help construct a giant octopus using over 18,000 balloons. Precisely how many over is hard to say. Put a bunch of balloon twisters together and you never know quite what to expect. All of the balloons intended for the project were on site when we arrived, but that didn't stop several people from taking out their own balloons to supplement my original order for some of the work that came at the end. It seems that not everyone on the team uses the same selection of balloon sizes that I use for detail work, and since the crew was chosen for their individual skills as artists, it would have been foolish to hold them back from being creative with their own tools.

Conditions were far from ideal for building a balloon sculpture. For starters, there was no way to build the sculpture at the location where it would ultimately be seen. This meant that the sculpture had to be built in a modular fashion. Each piece had to be small enough and manageable enough to carry three quarters of a mile by foot past obstacles like low power lines. If that wasn't enough, there was no floor in the building (more precisely, a 10,000 square foot barn) we worked in. We worked on the dirt and gravel ground. This isn't a complaint. I knew the conditions before agreeing to the location. There were enough reasons to agree to it. Among them, we needed an open, in-door space as large as the one they could provide. I was up for all of these challenges. Thankfully, it turns out, carpet installers also tear out carpet and are more than happy to let you have the carpet being discarded. This probably seems obvious to everyone reading this, but I hadn't even considered this possibility for flooring at the start of the project. When the Sodus Point Family Fest coordinator, Andrew Ramsey, made this discovery, we were able to make the place somewhat more comfortable for the completion of the work.

Even in the most perfect of conditions, building a sculpture this size is always a challenge. By design, no two sculptures are the same. While I learn from each new creation, the only way to know exactly how something will work is to repeat an old project. That's something I've never done. I enjoy creating new challenges for myself. For each new project, drawings can be made, small scale tests can be done, and calculations can be completed to determine the number of balloons needed, but the creation of a sculpture doesn't follow a precise plan. It's an evolutionary process. I look at the sculpture as it grows and change things based on what feels right. Sometimes balloons, made from a natural product, exhibit flaws or behave differently than they always did before. Because of this, there are always problems to be solved related to stability and strength of the sculpture. As expected, we needed to change our approach a few times on various pieces, and succeeded in producing an aesthetically pleasing and strong sculpture capable of withstanding the flight.

When all of the pieces of the octopus were complete, we paraded them to the launch site where we assembled the whole thing in the hot sun. Balloons popped, but this was anticipated during the design phase, and since most of the balloons had been inflated days earlier, they were relaxed enough that the majority made it through the day. On the sixth day after this whole adventure began, with 700 man hours into the construction, two years after the initial concept, we found ourselves on the ball field in the center of town surrounded by a huge crowd of onlookers as the launch took place. This crowd didn't feel like an audience as much as a group of friends cheering for us while we took on the last part of the project. Roughly 100 balloons ranging in size from five to seven feet were inflated with 10,000 cubic feet of helium and placed inside or over the octopus. With the help of his flight crew, John maneuvered himself onto the giant beast, and the octopus was launched.

Piloting a craft of this sort is no simple task. Even without the octopus, a cluster of helium-filled balloons can be quite dangerous if care isn't taken. Unlike a hot-air balloon, there's no way to simply add more lift when not rising fast enough to clear trees and power lines. Add an additional 25 feet of sculpture and making sure you clear all obstacles becomes an even greater challenge. The weight of the sculpture led to a less than smooth liftoff and quite a bit of discomfort for John. John surrendered some of his ballast (and therefore some safety margin) in order to get the sculpture off the ground. In fact, I only learned of some of this after the flight. I was aware that a misuse of the octopus' inner helium balloons reduced their lift. I didn't know just how much John needed to compensate for the blunder.

John carried the octopus to an altitude of approximately 1000 feet and released the creature over Sodus Bay (right near the edge of Lake Ontario). The release of the too-heavy octopus thrust John skyward, making his landing more of a challenge than anticipated. Despite the rapid climb and the quick descent needed to compensate for that, he did achieve a successful and safe landing on the boat waiting for him below. The local fire department, with the aid of the Coast Guard, towed the octopus to shore where the crowd popped it in search of prizes hidden inside. Five days to build; five minutes to destroy.

The support of everyone in the town was incredible. Already I've received calls asking if we're planning on doing it again. I'm not sure John or I are ready to commit to that just yet, but it's a great feeling knowing that we did something that everyone enjoyed so much. We certainly learned a lot doing this first collaboration and, even several weeks later, we're still learning from each other about things that happened. I expect that after we've discussed all of the challenges, successes, and blunders of this project, we'll be ready to plan the next one.

Larry Moss
July 2003