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Shotgun Balloon Drop

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A lawn chair, 90 weather balloons, and a shotgun — this is how Erik Roner gets to 8,000 feet.

GoPro’s stunt library is full of skiers, wingsuit pilots, and cliff jumpers, but “Shotgun Balloon Drop” is built around a different kind of physics experiment. Nitro Circus athlete Erik Roner straps himself into an ordinary lawn chair, lets a cluster of helium balloons haul him into open sky, and then shoots his own ride out from under himself to come back down. It’s the lawn-chair-balloon myth — the one Up made famous — done for real, on camera, with a shotgun as the exit plan.

• Roner, a professional freeskier and BASE jumper known for his work with Nitro Circus, is lifted by roughly 90 helium-filled weather balloons tied to a standard lawn chair.
• He climbs to an altitude of about 8,000 feet before taking a shotgun to the balloons above him to start his descent.
• Once he’s broken free of the balloon cluster, Roner unclips from the chair rig, deploys his skydiving parachute, and lands safely on the ground.

The Setup: 90 Balloons and a Lawn Chair

There’s no gondola, no harness system borrowed from a hot-air balloon outfit — just a cluster of about 90 weather balloons rigged above a bare lawn chair, with Roner strapped into the seat like he’s about to watch a barbecue instead of leave the ground. GoPro cameras are mounted on the rig and on Roner himself to catch the ascent from every angle, a setup consistent with the brand’s other athlete-POV stunts. Once the ground crew lets go, there’s no steering and no throttle — the balloons simply carry him straight up.

The Climb to 8,000 Feet

The ascent takes Roner to roughly 8,000 feet, high enough that the ground shrinks into a patchwork below him and the only sound is wind against the GoPro rig. It’s the same stunt lawn-chair pilot Larry Walters made famous decades earlier over Los Angeles, except this time it’s being run by a professional stuntman with a parachute on his back and cameras rolling for GoPro’s audience instead of a curious hobbyist improvising with a BB gun.

Popping Balloons Mid-Air

Reaching altitude is only half the stunt — getting down is the part that actually requires nerve. Seated in a lawn chair thousands of feet above the ground, Roner draws a shotgun and starts firing at the balloons directly overhead, popping them one by one to force his own descent.

Ninety balloons up, a shotgun to bring them down — Roner shoots his own ride out from under himself, one balloon at a time.

The Skydive Back to Earth

Once enough balloons have burst to break the climb and start him falling, Roner detaches from the lawn chair setup entirely. From there it’s a standard skydiving exit — he releases his parachute and glides the rest of the way down, landing safely on the ground under his own canopy rather than whatever was left of the balloon rig.

It’s the kind of stunt that only makes sense once you know who’s in the chair — Roner built his reputation with Nitro Circus doing exactly this sort of thing, treating a childhood balloon myth as just another line to send. For anyone chasing the same rush closer to sea level, GoPro’s Flying 240 Miles In 22 Minutes and Laird Hamilton’s approach to extreme conditioning in Laird Hamilton’s Revolutionary Pool Workout sit in the same corner of the channel — athletes turning outlandish ideas into footage worth 8,000 feet of nerve.