The real Up! Scientists recreate floating house from Pixar movie... and prove it really CAN fly

By RACHEL QUIGLEY

Magic: The Up! house which will be part of a new National Geographic TV series called How Hard Can It Be? was 10 stories high, including the balloons. It reached 10,000 feet and flew for about one hour


It was another one of those Disney moments of magic.

When 78-year-old retiree Carl Frederickson's house takes off into the air aided by the help of hundreds of helium balloons in Up!, viewers saw it is a heart-warming moment of pure fiction.

But for some people, it became more than that.


Record: Dozens of volunteers worked around the clock in the Californain desert to get the custom-built house airborne with the aid of 300 eight-foot-high helium balloons


Film: Carl Fredricksen attached the balloons to his house to fulfil his life-long dream of discovering the wild in South America


The team from National Geographic have built a house inspired by the Pixar movie Up! that can really fly.

Using 300 helium-filled weather balloons, a team of scientists, engineers, two balloon pilots and dozens of volunteers, they managed to get the small house 10,000 feet into the air.

Of course it was not a real house, but a custom-built light weight one.
Executive producer Ben Bowie said: 'We found that it is actually close to impossible to fly a real house.'

Producer Ian White added: 'But what we can do is kind of fly a light-weight house and fly it safely with people on board.'


Up!: National Geograhic's house, left, and the Pixar one from the Disney film Up! about an old man's journey to see the great wilds of South America which he travels to in his own house which flies with helium balloons


Up! The house was life-sized and together with the balloons was ten storeys high


Away!: The house and two pilots soared 10,000 feet into the air for more than an hour over the desert


Each of the balloons were eight-feet high and filled with a whole tank of helium.
As well as getting the house to fly, they set a world record for largest cluster balloon flight ever attempted.

The experiment was done as part of a new National Geographic TV series How Hard Can it Be?

The 4.8m x 4.8m x 5.5m house flew across California's High Desert for about an hour with two people inside, just like the Disney Pixar film.

The new series will premier in the autumn.



source: dailymail