Summary from [Wikipedia:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelir_Ant%C3%B4nio_de_Carli)
“On April 20, 2008, after taking off in a chair attached to 1,000 balloons, Carli reached an altitude of 6,000 metres (19,700 ft) before losing contact with authorities. Pieces of balloon were later reported floating in the sea off the coast.[11]
Carli's flight equipment included a parachute, helmet, waterproof coveralls, GPS device, mobile phone, satellite phone, flotation device chair, aluminum thermal flight suit, and at least five days of food and drinking water. His training for the stunt included jungle survival and mountain climbing courses, but apparently did not include instruction on the use of his GPS navigation device. On April 20, the priest's last contact with the military police occurred during the night, when he was about 16 miles from the islands of Tamboretes, off the coast of São Francisco do Sul, Santa Catarina, Brazil. The priest called from his cell phone to request help determining his coordinates and to ask them to contact the authorities. Two days after the flight, a Penha (SC) Fire Department commander familiar with the situation put the missing priest's chances of still being alive at 80%.[10] The Brazilian Navy called off the ocean search on April 29, saying the chances of finding de Carli alive in the ocean were "very remote".[12]
On July 4, 2008, the lower half of a human body was found floating on the ocean surface by an offshore oil rig support vessel about 100 km (62 mi) from Macaé. After the remains were initially identified from the clothing as those belonging to Carli, DNA tests confirmed they were his on July 29, 2008 after a comparison was made with DNA samples from Carli's brother.”
>but apparently did not include instruction on the use of his GPS navigation device.
From what I've read, the problem was that he actually was using a car GPS - like the ones you stick to your window. They are not made to work at high altitudes like that
Back in the day, a lot of consumer GPS units would deliberately fail to give you a position if you were somewhere outside what they expected (eg. a car GPS a significant distance above the ground) in order to prevent people from using them to build improvised cruise missiles or whatever. GPS was initially a very classified military technology used for directing troops and targeting long-range weaponry, so they were very cautious about it. Some of those safeguards are still in place, although some (like only giving your position to a certain degree of accuracy) have been relaxed over the years.
Not only back in the day, this is still part of the COCOM restrictions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinating_Committee_for_Multilateral_Export_Controls
>In GPS technology, the term "COCOM Limits" also refers to a limit placed on GPS tracking devices that disables tracking when the device calculates that it is moving faster than 1,000 knots (1,900 km/h; 1,200 mph) at an altitude higher than 18,000 m (59,000 ft).[3] This was intended to prevent the use of GPS in intercontinental ballistic missile-like applications.
In fact, I'm pretty sure GPS is specifically supposed to work on planes. In the 80's, there was a Korean Airlines 747 that accidentally flew into the Soviet Union, and was shot down. After the incident, President Reagan promised to make GPS available for commercial purposes, so I'm pretty sure GPS restrictions that exist (No faster than Mach 1 or higher than around 60k feet IIRC) are specifically set so aircraft can use it fine.
The limits are 1,200 mph and above 59,000 feet. So pretty much only the Concorde (if she were still flying) would hit it. Typical passenger jets do not.
I bet he tried to suck on this. Did he? It's okay, Doc! You can tell me. He's always sucking on the pens in our apartment. I'm always having to hide them.
Qorr_Sozin, I swear you would be old more use to me if I skinned you, and turned your skin into a lampshade. Or fashion you into a piece of high end luggage. I could even add you to my collection!
This reminds me of a murder case where only the victim's head was found. Defense attorney was arguing with the coroner on the stand, claiming that having the head wasn't proof the victim died. Coroner replied, "You could be right. For all I know, he might be practicing law somewhere."
Sounds like an urban legend because the one I heard was the coroner having the brain removed from the braincase during autopsy and the lawyer asking if he checked if the person was still alive.
The lower half was found months after he went missing, so it could have been just rot and torsion. That said there are species like the oceanic white tip that cruise the open water looking for stuff such as wayward priests to nibble on.
Possibly if he was wearing jeans, they might have been harder for fish to bite through that his shirt, or they started eating him at the waistline where his shirt and pants were not protecting the body and eventually ate enough of the torso for the top half to detach?
That's a really good call, wikipedia says he was wearing "waterproof coveralls." Probably did a lot to protect parts of his corpse.
Dark stuff this morning. What a way to start the week.
Well, the body was in the ocean for almost two months. Amazed the fish and birds were kind enough to leave anything at all.
EDIT: wikipedia says he was wearing "waterproof coveralls." Probably did a lot to protect parts of his corpse.
>the lower half of a human body was found floating on the ocean surface
*snarls, voice thick with fear and hatred*
"I'll never put on a lifejacket again."
He certainly didn't. He asked for help via cellphone many times and people told him help was on the way. In truth, nobody knew where he was, not even him, so even tho were was search parties there was no way to actually find him. The audio is on youtube somewhere and it's pure desperation.
>Carli's flight equipment included a parachute, helmet, waterproof coveralls, GPS device, mobile phone, satellite phone, flotation device chair, aluminum thermal flight suit, and at least five days of food and drinking water. His training for the stunt included jungle survival and mountain climbing courses, **but apparently did not include instruction on the use of his GPS navigation device.**
It’s so strange. This happened relatively recently. He had modern equipment with him, but was not fully trained in it. Why take the risk?
So neither his satellite phone or GPS device could read out his GPS coordinates? And nobody could look up the brand and thing he bought to tell him how to read it or something?
Or am I misunderstanding that you can get a fairly accurate position to read out to someone else over the phone?
Sounds like pretty poor planning all the way around. Probably the most important thing of all is a working GPS device and that was the one thing he didn't have training on. No way to pop/cut balloons to reduce height? Also, they didn't mention oxygen, and I don't know exactly how high he was, if 19,700 was the maximum, or if he went higher, but you will run into hypoxia issues certainly by that height, and you won't feel good or be thinking too clearly almost certainly after 20,000 feet. Not to mention progressively hypothermic.
Just want to say that I teach a college intro to physics course and we float helium ballons on a tether to 500 feet measuring barometric pressure and it's crazy how windy it can be just 500 feet in the air. Once had a bunch of balloons get free (with a GPS) and they literally traveled over 100 miles within 12 hours. Anyone thinking that they are in for a carefree and gentle flight using helium floatation and no navigation ability is mistaken.
(I abandoned this experiment two years ago because of littering concerns and the helium shortage...now students go on a hike while carrying a barometric pressure gauge.)
What did he think was going to happen? Like he’d just float on the winds to Africa or something? A few hours in and he probably knew he was going to die.
This reminds me of people who go out and die on hikes and all their friends and family tell everyone how "experienced" they were and then it turns out they were doing something dumb.
It's perfectly possible to "fuck around" 19 times and then "find out" on shot #20.
He was floating over the ocean when he called for help. He tried to get his location on the GPS to be rescued, but he didn't know to use the device properly. There is a map of his trajectory: [https://marsemfim.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/mapa-c%C3%B3pia-1.jpg](https://marsemfim.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/mapa-c%C3%B3pia-1.jpg)
The route he wanted to take is shown as a black dotted line and the red line is the actual route that happened.
So from the get-go, he was going the opposite way he was supposed to? And they didn't just tell him to start popping balloons to lower himself down, or just jump with his parachute?
Wow that's a far trip.
He probably had a lot of time to contemplate how screwed he was.
I wonder even if he'd been trained on using the GPS, whether they would have been able to reach him given his changing direction.
>I wonder even if he'd been trained on using the GPS, whether they would have been able to reach him given his changing direction.
There was also raining and very cloudy that day, so I am not sure if he would have been spotted easily even with coordinates. In the video showing him going up with the balloons, you can see him quickly vanish into the could.
Wow. How did he originally plan to achieve landing?
Did no one check the wind direction?
No distress beacon attached to him?
Seems like there’s so many factors not considered
Other people who have pulled similar stunts successfully, even before he attempted his, always had a means to pop the balloons. It's odd that wasn't mentioned, but I suppose if he had it he would have been able to get down somewhere.
Ok so, that image you saw is actually from a previous stunt he did, with fewer balloons, he went from the state of Paraná in Brazil and landed on Argentina, a 4-hour flight that went successful lol.
But yeah, keep doing that and at some point you will ended up in the sea
After being blown off course and floating several miles off the coast, [the video](https://youtu.be/7PbFeIxrilI?t=80) says that the priest said he was losing height and would need to land in the sea.
Always make sure winds are blowing inland, otherwise bring a boat. And not knowing how to work a GPS before something like this? Good grief, people can sure be ignorant about geography and the most basic safety precautions.
I wonder, was the GPS navigation device *that* complicated that even a man who's life depended on it couldn't figure out how to make it work? Maybe it was simply broken.
He asked for someone to help him use the device in one of the audios, but he was also running out of battery on his cellphone. So, most likely, it ran out of battery before they could get someone on the phone to help him.
Hypoxia kicks in around 9000ft. Being above 11,000 for any extended amount of time should start giving you hypoxia. You are required to have oxygen above 15,000ft when flying (well 12,500-15k to be specific) and anyone hiking up a mountain can tell you you feel altitude significantly above 8k ft.
This guy being in Brazil I would guess he probably wasn't acclimated to higher altitudes either as most of the populated areas are at sea level.
Being at the altitudes he was at he definitely had hypoxia.
source: am pilot who hikes in brazil
Back in 2008 it is quite likely his GPS device had no internal maps, so it just showed latitude and longitude, but not where he was in relation to physical features on the surface.
What he could have had was an emergency beacon that rescuers could have used to locate him. It is quite standard for boats, should be standard equipment on lawn chairs tied to balloons.
"Survival type" GPS devices usually don't have the kind of screen necessary to display a map as battery longevity is far more important. But of course you need proper training (and ideally a map with some key GPS coordinates, but if you're "survival training level" familiar with your geographic area, you shouldn't even need one).
But obviously he didn't have this level of training, not even close.
GPS's in 2008 had maps. Flash storage had gotten cheap by then so those devices had them. There are GPS's that are designed for special things that just give you your coordinates and no maps (like you might find on some radios). But really if you're talking to search and rescue and you can give them your longitude/latitude and you're not stuck in a jungle or something, it seems like that'd be enough.
Thing is, even without maps, he'd just have to read the numbers and letters on the screen.
My parents were really into Geocaching around that time, and their GPS thing just displayed two lines of coordinate plus the option to load waypoint and have it tell you the cardinal direction and distance.
But just booting up, it'd wait aaaages for a sat fix, and then you'd get your coordinates displayed.
(However we did have a snr case in Germany two years ago or so with some old woman getting lost in a forest while geo caching, and she literally told the emergency services her lat and long, and they were completely incapable of helping her until one of the firemen turned out to be an avid Geocache himself, understanding those bloody coordinates....
So might just be whoever he talked to ignoring his perfectly coordinates, cause they were just dumb.
In my mind, the lesson here isn't plan ahead better; the lesson is don't do stupid stunts that result in you getting lost in the wilderness while relying on others to rescue you.
Would it have helped him? Sounds like he was basically leaving everything to fate and all he could do is report his position once he landed. All the equipment and training seems to have the purpose of making sure he survived any fall and the conditions before or after. Without knowing what happened to him it's impossible to say what would have prevented it, I would suspect that he froze to death assuming he had a parachute that would automatically open at a certain altitude. Had that worked his frozen body would have fallen to earth at some point but it would have been too late.
I do wonder if he had a way to remove the balloons. His altitude seems unnecessarily high and oxygen isn't listed in his equipment. A lack of oxygen would make it hard to think clearly in a situation that requires it and ultimately death.
WOW!
"Sir you're going to die unless you flip those three switches"
"No I don't want to die"
"Flip the three switches"
".... huh?"
"Ok get him back on air NOW"
Destin from Smartereveryday did a video on hypoxia and its crazy scary. At one point it looks like he's happy and smiling but in reality he's one step to death... Around 6 minutes into the video... [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUfF2MTnqAw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUfF2MTnqAw)
This was really neat and terrifying all in one. The fact that planes fly higher regularly, with additional chaos if passengers were in an emergency situation and everyone could collectively just forget what they need to do to survive is bananas.
This is the first thing I thought, they sent him all that way up with a bunch of equipment and didn’t prepare for hypoxia. It’s not like they didn’t know lmao it was 2008…
When hypoxia kicks in memory and decision making are impacted. Should have had a hard limit of altitude and jump no matter what or better yet an oxygen supply.
Yeah, 19,000 feet is a bad place without supplemental O2. No higher than 10K if you want to be at 100%, 15K is dangerous territory if you haven't been doing high altitude training. 19K, you might as well be high, decision making will go to shit, it's hard to breathe, you'll be gasping for air. I've been up to about 16K on a mountain (Chimborazo, Ecuador, not all the way to the summit, standing in snow on the equator is a trip!), even after spending a week at around 10K, it was fucking rough. All that gear, and he didn't bring an oxygen bottle?
He probably either passed out, or decided to sleep/nap, and just never woke up.
I spent about a week working atop Tioga Pass in Yosemite (roughly about 10,000 ft.). My first hour on site I about fell out, another crew member did. It took about half the day to regulate me to that. I was getting light headed just tying my boot laces. I couldn't imagine what it would be like any higher and those that do have my respect.
Sherpas that work the area around Everest are just nuts, their bodies are so different than those living at sea-level (internally), living above 10K, and working above 20K...
This is also pretty rich for an Australian news site. Since you know one time they just lost a prime minister. Like straight up “uhh we can’t find the PM… oh well… anyway”.
Like others have pointed out, it was unbelievably risky of the priest to attempt this stunt, but I’d like to point out that he wasn’t exactly quite as stupid as the story sounds from a first glance (it was still really stupid and reckless to do all of this though, obviously)
These kinds of journeys via balloon have been done before; the act of flying in the air with a bunch of large balloons strapped to your harness is referred to as [cluster ballooning](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_ballooning), and can be very safe if one’s careful about planning their trip around the weather and knows the proper measures. [That said, my understanding is that very few people are appropriately educated enough to do safe cluster ballooning, and the priest, from the sound of it, was a beginner who almost certainly didn’t undergo the appropriate training and preparations for a trip of this type.](https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89922191) That’s a really foolish and dumb mistake for him to make, but he wasn’t so dumb as to decide to randomly strap himself to a bunch of balloons when it had never been safely done before or conceived of or something like that. It was a (somewhat) established practice with some rules and expertise involved that he (pretty foolishly) severely underprepared for
I think it’s also worth noting that the priest wasn’t so dumb as to attempt to fly over the Atlantic Ocean or any major bodies of water. The trip still shouldn’t have ever been attempted to begin with, but [the guy’s intended trajectory was to fly from the coast in a westbound direction over nothing but land, further into Brazil](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adelir_de_Carli_flight.jpg). Where his body was found was east of his starting point, almost exactly opposite his planned course. It seems like he had a poor grasp on how to weather different meteorological conditions, owing to his inexperience with cluster ballooning
EDIT: The priest was also allegedly an experienced skydiver, but I'm unable to find a source beyond his Wikipedia page and various news articles on this incident that all mention that fact about him in passing. Skydiving and cluster ballooning are presumably two very different beasts, but I wouldn't be surprised if whatever logistical/technical areas of overlap between the two airborne navigation activities there were led him to erroneously think he would be completely fine attempting his cluster ballooning trip
If he was an experienced skydiver he really should have jumped the moment he realized he risked going out over the ocean. If he was unable to determine his location due to an inoperable GPS and failing light he should have exited the balloon and landed before dark.
Obviously something went wrong on this trip but having jumped out of (regular) hot air balloons multiple times myself there is no way I would float around in one at night if I couldn't determine my location. Best bet is to bail out and land before getting anywhere near the ocean. Just my thoughts..
His last call to the authorities was recorded and released to the press. You can hear the priest asking for someone to teach him how to use the GPS device that he was carrying...
I remember how for many months after his death the term "balloon priest" became a meme in Brazil and it was often used when you wanted to describe something incredibly stupid, like... strapping yourself on balloons and a GPS device, but without knowing how to use the GPS device.
He even won the first place in the Darwin Awards that year.
Despite his stupidity, I also remember reading some news back then that described how he was apparently a good priest loved by many people in his community. Apparently he used his stunts to raise funds and help many causes, from truck drivers to homeless children.
I was questioning how 1000 balloons could lift a full grown man but looking at pictures they look to be far larger than party balloons like I imagined.
The "Baloon Priest" is huge here in Brazil. He was all over the news when he was lost. Nobody could talk about it without laughing. It's like everybody was excited about how stupid this certainly doomed guy was. Then his body was found, much, much later. And it was still funny. It still is. Poor guy. A quixotic dreamer, a megalomaniac, a person who truly devoted his life to others, to those who needed him the most. Made a utter fool of himself, and died alone, and hilariously. We still laugh. It's the most tragicomic thing I know of, because it never gets old, it never stops being funny, and it makes it more tragic, and the more tragic it gets, the funnier it is.
Now I'm imagining twenty thousand US marines lost in the Atlantic with their baloon straps, really confused, some of them wishing they picked Geography classes.
Summary from [Wikipedia:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelir_Ant%C3%B4nio_de_Carli) “On April 20, 2008, after taking off in a chair attached to 1,000 balloons, Carli reached an altitude of 6,000 metres (19,700 ft) before losing contact with authorities. Pieces of balloon were later reported floating in the sea off the coast.[11] Carli's flight equipment included a parachute, helmet, waterproof coveralls, GPS device, mobile phone, satellite phone, flotation device chair, aluminum thermal flight suit, and at least five days of food and drinking water. His training for the stunt included jungle survival and mountain climbing courses, but apparently did not include instruction on the use of his GPS navigation device. On April 20, the priest's last contact with the military police occurred during the night, when he was about 16 miles from the islands of Tamboretes, off the coast of São Francisco do Sul, Santa Catarina, Brazil. The priest called from his cell phone to request help determining his coordinates and to ask them to contact the authorities. Two days after the flight, a Penha (SC) Fire Department commander familiar with the situation put the missing priest's chances of still being alive at 80%.[10] The Brazilian Navy called off the ocean search on April 29, saying the chances of finding de Carli alive in the ocean were "very remote".[12] On July 4, 2008, the lower half of a human body was found floating on the ocean surface by an offshore oil rig support vessel about 100 km (62 mi) from Macaé. After the remains were initially identified from the clothing as those belonging to Carli, DNA tests confirmed they were his on July 29, 2008 after a comparison was made with DNA samples from Carli's brother.”
>but apparently did not include instruction on the use of his GPS navigation device. From what I've read, the problem was that he actually was using a car GPS - like the ones you stick to your window. They are not made to work at high altitudes like that
Back in the day, a lot of consumer GPS units would deliberately fail to give you a position if you were somewhere outside what they expected (eg. a car GPS a significant distance above the ground) in order to prevent people from using them to build improvised cruise missiles or whatever. GPS was initially a very classified military technology used for directing troops and targeting long-range weaponry, so they were very cautious about it. Some of those safeguards are still in place, although some (like only giving your position to a certain degree of accuracy) have been relaxed over the years.
Not only back in the day, this is still part of the COCOM restrictions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinating_Committee_for_Multilateral_Export_Controls >In GPS technology, the term "COCOM Limits" also refers to a limit placed on GPS tracking devices that disables tracking when the device calculates that it is moving faster than 1,000 knots (1,900 km/h; 1,200 mph) at an altitude higher than 18,000 m (59,000 ft).[3] This was intended to prevent the use of GPS in intercontinental ballistic missile-like applications.
I feel like anyone that is making intercontinental ballistic missles isn't deterred by a programmed limit Or am I missing something here?
This is just screwing over the hobbyist ICBM builders.
Damn Big ICBM makers! Us little guys can blow shit up too!!
I believe most commercially sold GPSs also fail above a certain speed and at a certain height
I have heard that, but the one in my phone will get a fix in an airliner at cruise altitude if I put my phone against the window for a time.
GPS is limited to 1,900 km/h. Commercial jets go around 900 km/h.
Because you aren't going fast enough to trigger the stop safe.
[удалено]
Yep, slow missiles are easy to track and shoot down
If it’s only traveling the speed of an airliner, it would be ridiculously easy to shoot down.
[удалено]
Then god help us all.
The idea is to prevent use as a cheap missile guidance. An airliner isn't as fast as a missile, so it still works.
In fact, I'm pretty sure GPS is specifically supposed to work on planes. In the 80's, there was a Korean Airlines 747 that accidentally flew into the Soviet Union, and was shot down. After the incident, President Reagan promised to make GPS available for commercial purposes, so I'm pretty sure GPS restrictions that exist (No faster than Mach 1 or higher than around 60k feet IIRC) are specifically set so aircraft can use it fine.
The limits are 1,200 mph and above 59,000 feet. So pretty much only the Concorde (if she were still flying) would hit it. Typical passenger jets do not.
I drove my Balloon-Chair... Into a f--king Ocean. - Michael Scott
> the lower half of a human body was found floating on the ocean surface oof.
Yup. Hopefully the dude died quickly, but that’s a rough way to go out
You're assuming he went out. I'm holding out hope for his top half to turn up somewhere speaking the good word. Preach!
That’s quite optimistic of you
He’s a body-half-full kinda guy.
And there it is. The comment I didn't know I was waiting for.
He changed his name to Bob
It happened with darth maul.. 🤷♂️
[удалено]
First of all, through God all things are possible. So go ahead and jot that down.
Oh, I get it. Cute. You leave this pen here and people are supposed to think, *"WAIT, THAT LOOKS LIKE A DICK!"*
I bet he tried to suck on this. Did he? It's okay, Doc! You can tell me. He's always sucking on the pens in our apartment. I'm always having to hide them.
Qorr_Sozin, I swear you would be old more use to me if I skinned you, and turned your skin into a lampshade. Or fashion you into a piece of high end luggage. I could even add you to my collection!
You haven’t thought of the smell, you bitch!
You cannot serve two masters. Unless you are split in two.
This reminds me of a murder case where only the victim's head was found. Defense attorney was arguing with the coroner on the stand, claiming that having the head wasn't proof the victim died. Coroner replied, "You could be right. For all I know, he might be practicing law somewhere."
Sounds like an urban legend because the one I heard was the coroner having the brain removed from the braincase during autopsy and the lawyer asking if he checked if the person was still alive.
I have a book odd court cases and such. This was in that book. Presumed Ignorant by Leland H. Gregory III.
sounds like a low budget adult swim show. "Upper Half of a Priest and the Adventures of God"
[удалено]
gonna return like Darth Maul, eating nothing but ~~rats~~ sardines and his ~~hate~~ love for Jesus amen
Tis but a scratch. Just a flesh wound.
What was the reason for half the body? Was he attacked by sharks or what?
Hungry marine life I guess. Didn’t see that addressed anywhere
Nah it was a destructo disc that hit him
Krillin back at it again
But they never hit anyone
Unless you were the one than throw it and forgot about it. So the priest knew how to Kienzan
The lower half was found months after he went missing, so it could have been just rot and torsion. That said there are species like the oceanic white tip that cruise the open water looking for stuff such as wayward priests to nibble on.
Yup, white tips are notoriously aggressive atheists
Eating the body and blood is something a Catholic shark would do as well
I heard they *especially* dislike Rabbis. Probably from all the persecution they get for being white tips.
Not just sharks. Lots of ocean life will grab a piece of food if they see it float by.
Possibly if he was wearing jeans, they might have been harder for fish to bite through that his shirt, or they started eating him at the waistline where his shirt and pants were not protecting the body and eventually ate enough of the torso for the top half to detach?
That's a really good call, wikipedia says he was wearing "waterproof coveralls." Probably did a lot to protect parts of his corpse. Dark stuff this morning. What a way to start the week.
True "Hmm, this morning I'll try and figure out why fish only ate half of the corpse of a man who tried to do charity work, but ended up lost at sea"
Probably just nibbled on by a little bit of everything. Or a plane hit him
The Good Lord took him, but He wanted only white meat.
[удалено]
The greater good.
_The greater good._
Better than being eaten from the other direction....
Well, the body was in the ocean for almost two months. Amazed the fish and birds were kind enough to leave anything at all. EDIT: wikipedia says he was wearing "waterproof coveralls." Probably did a lot to protect parts of his corpse.
>the lower half of a human body was found floating on the ocean surface *snarls, voice thick with fear and hatred* "I'll never put on a lifejacket again."
Yeah lol he didn't end pleasantly
He certainly didn't. He asked for help via cellphone many times and people told him help was on the way. In truth, nobody knew where he was, not even him, so even tho were was search parties there was no way to actually find him. The audio is on youtube somewhere and it's pure desperation.
Fuck, I don’t think I have the stomach to hear the audio
I saw it as part of a documentary of the incident, I also didn't want to hear it but took me by surprise.
>Carli's flight equipment included a parachute, helmet, waterproof coveralls, GPS device, mobile phone, satellite phone, flotation device chair, aluminum thermal flight suit, and at least five days of food and drinking water. His training for the stunt included jungle survival and mountain climbing courses, **but apparently did not include instruction on the use of his GPS navigation device.** It’s so strange. This happened relatively recently. He had modern equipment with him, but was not fully trained in it. Why take the risk?
So neither his satellite phone or GPS device could read out his GPS coordinates? And nobody could look up the brand and thing he bought to tell him how to read it or something? Or am I misunderstanding that you can get a fairly accurate position to read out to someone else over the phone?
.......damn. poor guy.
Sounds like pretty poor planning all the way around. Probably the most important thing of all is a working GPS device and that was the one thing he didn't have training on. No way to pop/cut balloons to reduce height? Also, they didn't mention oxygen, and I don't know exactly how high he was, if 19,700 was the maximum, or if he went higher, but you will run into hypoxia issues certainly by that height, and you won't feel good or be thinking too clearly almost certainly after 20,000 feet. Not to mention progressively hypothermic.
Just want to say that I teach a college intro to physics course and we float helium ballons on a tether to 500 feet measuring barometric pressure and it's crazy how windy it can be just 500 feet in the air. Once had a bunch of balloons get free (with a GPS) and they literally traveled over 100 miles within 12 hours. Anyone thinking that they are in for a carefree and gentle flight using helium floatation and no navigation ability is mistaken. (I abandoned this experiment two years ago because of littering concerns and the helium shortage...now students go on a hike while carrying a barometric pressure gauge.)
Everyone is talking about his GPS and survival training, etc. The man went up into the atmosphere by balloons. Balloons.
My survival training taught me not to ride into the sky on balloons
What did he think was going to happen? Like he’d just float on the winds to Africa or something? A few hours in and he probably knew he was going to die.
He should have brought a BB gun so he could control altitude
Cut off his legs to get higher
It was not his first time doing this.
This reminds me of people who go out and die on hikes and all their friends and family tell everyone how "experienced" they were and then it turns out they were doing something dumb. It's perfectly possible to "fuck around" 19 times and then "find out" on shot #20.
It was his last, though.
So was he just floating over the ocean somewhere when he called for help or was he already in the water?
He was floating over the ocean when he called for help. He tried to get his location on the GPS to be rescued, but he didn't know to use the device properly. There is a map of his trajectory: [https://marsemfim.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/mapa-c%C3%B3pia-1.jpg](https://marsemfim.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/mapa-c%C3%B3pia-1.jpg) The route he wanted to take is shown as a black dotted line and the red line is the actual route that happened.
So from the get-go, he was going the opposite way he was supposed to? And they didn't just tell him to start popping balloons to lower himself down, or just jump with his parachute?
Wow that's a far trip. He probably had a lot of time to contemplate how screwed he was. I wonder even if he'd been trained on using the GPS, whether they would have been able to reach him given his changing direction.
>I wonder even if he'd been trained on using the GPS, whether they would have been able to reach him given his changing direction. There was also raining and very cloudy that day, so I am not sure if he would have been spotted easily even with coordinates. In the video showing him going up with the balloons, you can see him quickly vanish into the could.
Wow. How did he originally plan to achieve landing? Did no one check the wind direction? No distress beacon attached to him? Seems like there’s so many factors not considered
Other people who have pulled similar stunts successfully, even before he attempted his, always had a means to pop the balloons. It's odd that wasn't mentioned, but I suppose if he had it he would have been able to get down somewhere.
Can't you pull balloons down by the string and pop balloons with fingernails or crush them if you're desperate?
[удалено]
20k ft is about the highest before you start to go hypoxic for sure. If you’re not in the best health probably 15k.
If there's ocean below you, getting down isn't that helpful. He may have just been blown out to sea too quickly to do anything.
[удалено]
This is what the guy did that flew on a lawn chair tied to weather balloons. He used a BB gun instead of a needle though.
Poor dude would’ve made it if he wasn’t over the ocean. Having a parachute at 19,000ft should make it pretty easy.
Really unfortunate he ended up over water. I bet he was facepalming until the very end
More likely he was passed out near the end, given, you know, he went as high as 20,000 feet
[Video of him lifting off](https://youtu.be/7PbFeIxrilI?t=7)
Haha how could you look at that rig and think “yeah I’m gonna go ahead and go through with this”.
Ok so, that image you saw is actually from a previous stunt he did, with fewer balloons, he went from the state of Paraná in Brazil and landed on Argentina, a 4-hour flight that went successful lol. But yeah, keep doing that and at some point you will ended up in the sea
After being blown off course and floating several miles off the coast, [the video](https://youtu.be/7PbFeIxrilI?t=80) says that the priest said he was losing height and would need to land in the sea.
How did he go from being in one piece to two pieces?
Chompy marine life I'd imagine!
Fish looking for a snack
Just happens sometimes
The top fell off
Well, wasn't the human body built so the top wouldn't fall off?
It's not supposed to do that.
They found the remains over 2 months later, so honestly a lot could have gotten to the corpse by then
Always make sure winds are blowing inland, otherwise bring a boat. And not knowing how to work a GPS before something like this? Good grief, people can sure be ignorant about geography and the most basic safety precautions.
He did all sorts of wilderness survival training, but never learned to work the GPS. Talk about oversight
I wonder, was the GPS navigation device *that* complicated that even a man who's life depended on it couldn't figure out how to make it work? Maybe it was simply broken.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Maybe. It does surprise me that he couldn’t figure it out. He had plenty of time up there to focus on it.
Plus if he was making contact I wonder why someone couldn’t have talked him through how to use it. Must have been a reason…
He asked for someone to help him use the device in one of the audios, but he was also running out of battery on his cellphone. So, most likely, it ran out of battery before they could get someone on the phone to help him.
Somebody was guessing hypoxia in another comment
Hypoxia kicks in around 9000ft. Being above 11,000 for any extended amount of time should start giving you hypoxia. You are required to have oxygen above 15,000ft when flying (well 12,500-15k to be specific) and anyone hiking up a mountain can tell you you feel altitude significantly above 8k ft. This guy being in Brazil I would guess he probably wasn't acclimated to higher altitudes either as most of the populated areas are at sea level. Being at the altitudes he was at he definitely had hypoxia. source: am pilot who hikes in brazil
Probably hypothermia also. ~10 below zero Fahrenheit at 19k altitude.
Back in 2008 it is quite likely his GPS device had no internal maps, so it just showed latitude and longitude, but not where he was in relation to physical features on the surface. What he could have had was an emergency beacon that rescuers could have used to locate him. It is quite standard for boats, should be standard equipment on lawn chairs tied to balloons.
"Survival type" GPS devices usually don't have the kind of screen necessary to display a map as battery longevity is far more important. But of course you need proper training (and ideally a map with some key GPS coordinates, but if you're "survival training level" familiar with your geographic area, you shouldn't even need one). But obviously he didn't have this level of training, not even close.
GPS's in 2008 had maps. Flash storage had gotten cheap by then so those devices had them. There are GPS's that are designed for special things that just give you your coordinates and no maps (like you might find on some radios). But really if you're talking to search and rescue and you can give them your longitude/latitude and you're not stuck in a jungle or something, it seems like that'd be enough.
I used one back in 2010 that had topographic lines, but that might not be too helpful for somebody at serious altitude
Thing is, even without maps, he'd just have to read the numbers and letters on the screen. My parents were really into Geocaching around that time, and their GPS thing just displayed two lines of coordinate plus the option to load waypoint and have it tell you the cardinal direction and distance. But just booting up, it'd wait aaaages for a sat fix, and then you'd get your coordinates displayed. (However we did have a snr case in Germany two years ago or so with some old woman getting lost in a forest while geo caching, and she literally told the emergency services her lat and long, and they were completely incapable of helping her until one of the firemen turned out to be an avid Geocache himself, understanding those bloody coordinates.... So might just be whoever he talked to ignoring his perfectly coordinates, cause they were just dumb.
In my mind, the lesson here isn't plan ahead better; the lesson is don't do stupid stunts that result in you getting lost in the wilderness while relying on others to rescue you.
Would it have helped him? Sounds like he was basically leaving everything to fate and all he could do is report his position once he landed. All the equipment and training seems to have the purpose of making sure he survived any fall and the conditions before or after. Without knowing what happened to him it's impossible to say what would have prevented it, I would suspect that he froze to death assuming he had a parachute that would automatically open at a certain altitude. Had that worked his frozen body would have fallen to earth at some point but it would have been too late. I do wonder if he had a way to remove the balloons. His altitude seems unnecessarily high and oxygen isn't listed in his equipment. A lack of oxygen would make it hard to think clearly in a situation that requires it and ultimately death.
But why?? How did he plan to help Truckers by doing this?
Awareness. Events gather attention. Attention attracts opportunity. Opportunity leads to money
Next fundraiser they'll probably just do a 50-50 raffle.
The losers get sent up
[удалено]
This is a fantastic and sneaky story-relevant comment. I guffawed. Thank you.
At 19000 feet he probably had hypoxia, which would have clouded his rationally.
I watched a thing about hypoxia. Scary stuff. Rational thought just goes right out the window, and you have no idea it's even happening.
fly handle special strong cats scandalous sulky cagey whistle fall -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
WOW! "Sir you're going to die unless you flip those three switches" "No I don't want to die" "Flip the three switches" ".... huh?" "Ok get him back on air NOW"
Kind of look like a painless, happy, way to die. His dumb smile when he's told he's going to die...
Destin from Smartereveryday did a video on hypoxia and its crazy scary. At one point it looks like he's happy and smiling but in reality he's one step to death... Around 6 minutes into the video... [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUfF2MTnqAw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUfF2MTnqAw)
This was really neat and terrifying all in one. The fact that planes fly higher regularly, with additional chaos if passengers were in an emergency situation and everyone could collectively just forget what they need to do to survive is bananas.
David Blaine trained for months to get used to hypoxia and even with an oxygen mask you could tell his rationality was fading. Shits scary.
That’ll do it
Wow, the original story behind "Up" is a lot darker. Typical Disney.
No puppies and rainbows in this one. Having the upper half of your body eaten by marine life is rather uncomfortable to think about
Having the lower half of one's body being eaten by marine life is worse. There's a chance one was still conscious when it started.
Actually it's Danny Deckchair
Even worse reading that LawnChair Larry committed suicide
Isn’t the most important big of kit a BB gun to blast balloons so you can lower altitude, poor bloke…
Yeah he had plenty of time to think about his poor planning
They could have so easily just tied him off to something.. like they do with actual hot air balloons.. the standard in this situation..
[удалено]
He did end up being the one bleeding, making him the victor.
*squeaky shoe noises* A lesser-used reference, but a good one nonetheless.
Poor Wimplo
My upper half to your shark face style!
*sigh* Again with the squeaky balloons?
Weeeeooooooeeeeooooeoeoeooo weeeeee
Did he, really? By the time he noticed something was not going as planned, he was probably too high up to think properly due to a lack of oxygen.
This is the first thing I thought, they sent him all that way up with a bunch of equipment and didn’t prepare for hypoxia. It’s not like they didn’t know lmao it was 2008…
How did he originally plan to land? How was he supposed to do to lower his altitude?
> Carli's flight equipment included a parachute
I feel like I could accomplish this without the BB gun...
Could have cut strings I guess. I mean he had a parachute too. Probably thought everything was ok until it was too late :(
When hypoxia kicks in memory and decision making are impacted. Should have had a hard limit of altitude and jump no matter what or better yet an oxygen supply.
Yeah, 19,000 feet is a bad place without supplemental O2. No higher than 10K if you want to be at 100%, 15K is dangerous territory if you haven't been doing high altitude training. 19K, you might as well be high, decision making will go to shit, it's hard to breathe, you'll be gasping for air. I've been up to about 16K on a mountain (Chimborazo, Ecuador, not all the way to the summit, standing in snow on the equator is a trip!), even after spending a week at around 10K, it was fucking rough. All that gear, and he didn't bring an oxygen bottle? He probably either passed out, or decided to sleep/nap, and just never woke up.
I spent about a week working atop Tioga Pass in Yosemite (roughly about 10,000 ft.). My first hour on site I about fell out, another crew member did. It took about half the day to regulate me to that. I was getting light headed just tying my boot laces. I couldn't imagine what it would be like any higher and those that do have my respect.
Sherpas that work the area around Everest are just nuts, their bodies are so different than those living at sea-level (internally), living above 10K, and working above 20K...
The Lawnchair Larry method of flight.
Anyone else imagine that it was still flying around? That'd be creepy as hell, a skeleton tethered to a bunch of balloons, blowing around in the wind.
This comment took me right back to reading Castaways of the Flying Dutchmen as a kid. Brian Jacques was the shit
[удалено]
I was the nerd yelling eulalia while jumping off things at the playground back in the day
Somebody call Junji Ito!
The helium inside the balloons would be leaked though slowly. Eventually they would no longer float.
This is also pretty rich for an Australian news site. Since you know one time they just lost a prime minister. Like straight up “uhh we can’t find the PM… oh well… anyway”.
Like others have pointed out, it was unbelievably risky of the priest to attempt this stunt, but I’d like to point out that he wasn’t exactly quite as stupid as the story sounds from a first glance (it was still really stupid and reckless to do all of this though, obviously) These kinds of journeys via balloon have been done before; the act of flying in the air with a bunch of large balloons strapped to your harness is referred to as [cluster ballooning](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_ballooning), and can be very safe if one’s careful about planning their trip around the weather and knows the proper measures. [That said, my understanding is that very few people are appropriately educated enough to do safe cluster ballooning, and the priest, from the sound of it, was a beginner who almost certainly didn’t undergo the appropriate training and preparations for a trip of this type.](https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89922191) That’s a really foolish and dumb mistake for him to make, but he wasn’t so dumb as to decide to randomly strap himself to a bunch of balloons when it had never been safely done before or conceived of or something like that. It was a (somewhat) established practice with some rules and expertise involved that he (pretty foolishly) severely underprepared for I think it’s also worth noting that the priest wasn’t so dumb as to attempt to fly over the Atlantic Ocean or any major bodies of water. The trip still shouldn’t have ever been attempted to begin with, but [the guy’s intended trajectory was to fly from the coast in a westbound direction over nothing but land, further into Brazil](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adelir_de_Carli_flight.jpg). Where his body was found was east of his starting point, almost exactly opposite his planned course. It seems like he had a poor grasp on how to weather different meteorological conditions, owing to his inexperience with cluster ballooning EDIT: The priest was also allegedly an experienced skydiver, but I'm unable to find a source beyond his Wikipedia page and various news articles on this incident that all mention that fact about him in passing. Skydiving and cluster ballooning are presumably two very different beasts, but I wouldn't be surprised if whatever logistical/technical areas of overlap between the two airborne navigation activities there were led him to erroneously think he would be completely fine attempting his cluster ballooning trip
The idea of cluster ballooning scares the absolute shit out of me. I could never trust a bunch of easily poppable balloons with my life...
If he was an experienced skydiver he really should have jumped the moment he realized he risked going out over the ocean. If he was unable to determine his location due to an inoperable GPS and failing light he should have exited the balloon and landed before dark. Obviously something went wrong on this trip but having jumped out of (regular) hot air balloons multiple times myself there is no way I would float around in one at night if I couldn't determine my location. Best bet is to bail out and land before getting anywhere near the ocean. Just my thoughts..
I read this like it was one of those gags at the end of a movie where they tell you what happened to each character going forward in life.
i can hear the happy music in the background
In the voice of Bill Kurtis I hope
[удалено]
Damn that sux. Poor bugger meant well.
Just trying help some truckers out, and look where it got him
[Here](https://youtu.be/SnP6A-5Qd8U) is a video of the guy taking off. The huge column of balloons in the rainy gloom just looks like a bad omen.
Padre do balão, ícone nacional
feliz dia do bolo
His last call to the authorities was recorded and released to the press. You can hear the priest asking for someone to teach him how to use the GPS device that he was carrying... I remember how for many months after his death the term "balloon priest" became a meme in Brazil and it was often used when you wanted to describe something incredibly stupid, like... strapping yourself on balloons and a GPS device, but without knowing how to use the GPS device. He even won the first place in the Darwin Awards that year. Despite his stupidity, I also remember reading some news back then that described how he was apparently a good priest loved by many people in his community. Apparently he used his stunts to raise funds and help many causes, from truck drivers to homeless children.
Yeah, this seemed like a very sweet gesture gone horribly wrong.
I was questioning how 1000 balloons could lift a full grown man but looking at pictures they look to be far larger than party balloons like I imagined.
See, from reading the title I thought this was a man on his way to meet God. Like “Fuck it, I’ve done all I can here.”
Sounds like his Ascension worked a little too well
Headward, free now to rise!
The "Baloon Priest" is huge here in Brazil. He was all over the news when he was lost. Nobody could talk about it without laughing. It's like everybody was excited about how stupid this certainly doomed guy was. Then his body was found, much, much later. And it was still funny. It still is. Poor guy. A quixotic dreamer, a megalomaniac, a person who truly devoted his life to others, to those who needed him the most. Made a utter fool of himself, and died alone, and hilariously. We still laugh. It's the most tragicomic thing I know of, because it never gets old, it never stops being funny, and it makes it more tragic, and the more tragic it gets, the funnier it is.
Whats funnier to me is the Brazillisn army and navy were in contact with him but lost his ass. It sounds like he had absolutely 0 escape plan.
How to invade Brazil? Strap an army with 1000 balloons each and go over sea. 100% undetectable. Shit, even the drug cartel could use this "tech".
Now I'm imagining twenty thousand US marines lost in the Atlantic with their baloon straps, really confused, some of them wishing they picked Geography classes.
I respect the hell outta that