There's a very famous near - Darwin Award
...along similar lines to this, but the guy ended up in the flightpath for LAX. Apparently, he'd only intended to hover around his garden...
An Oregon man has undoubtedly set some kind of record by travelling 193 miles in a flying deckchair, the Bend Bulletin reports. Kent Couch, 47, spent eight hours and 45 minutes travelling from Bend to La Grande suspended beneath 105 four-foot helium balloons, reaching a maximum altitude of 11,000 feet. He admitted: "It's scary …
http://www.darwinawards.com/stupid/stupid1998-11.html
Now it fails to mention that larry, while atop the clouds in his helium erm powered lawn chair had actually managed to shoot his own balls off when he attempted to descend.
He killed himself a little while later, without fathering any children, thank god!
I was working a while ago on a control system for a UK airport, and had the sysadmin's privilege of choosing hostnames. So the 9 machines were all named after pioneers of aviations (orville, wilbur, bleriot, whittle, earhart etc), and I found myself 2 short. So for the first I chose "cochrane" (yes, I know, I could have gone for Gagarin or Armstrong, but I'm a geek), and for the final one I chose "walters", as he must be regarded as a pioneer.
My friend Bryan Rivers wrote a song about Larry Walters' flight in his lawn chair - it's called "Up in the Air." http://www.bryanrivers.com. Good song, great album (his 1st one, eponymous). Anyway, not something I would try, and I'm rather amused that someone would want to repeat the stunt!!!