VIDEO: The House From “Up” Exists in Real Life And It Flies

Here’s something that would make you swear off drinking, smoking, talking on the cell-phone while driving, and all those other terrible vices – a house being carried through the air by a ton of balloons. Hallucinating? Not at all. It’s just an experiment for a brand new show. Sometimes I think I must be a real stick-in-the-mud. I saw the Pixar movie Up and really enjoyed it. I thought the adventure was fun and the flying house was pretty cool, but I never ever considered if it could be done in real life. Cartoon = fiction, right? Yep, but fiction can sometimes become reality.

National Geographic has a new series coming this fall called How Hard Can It Be? And they decided to find out how hard it would be to really use balloons to make a house fly. Sure, it’s not an actual full-sized house; only 16 by 16 feet, but like the old saying goes, “It’s not the size that matters.”

The National Geographic Channel teamed up with Pixar, two balloon pilots, engineers, scientists, and a group of volunteers who probably felt like the luckiest people on the planet.

300 three-meter-tall weather balloons, each filled with a tank of helium, were used to lift the house into the air from a private airfield in Los Angeles on Saturday. The real-life Up house reached an altitude of over 3,000 meters and flew for almost an hour, before touching down for a safe landing.

Take a look at the video and then check out the awesome gallery of photos, which includes a great shot from inside the house and one of the balloon pilots who actually got to ride in the thing. I always knew I should have been putting my hot air to better use.

What do you think about the real-life Up house? I don’t know about you, but I can hardly wait to see what else the new show has in store for us.