From the Daily Mail:
The real Up! Scientists recreate floating house from Pixar movie... and prove it really CAN fly
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.
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.'
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.
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