Balloon boy

Am I the only one whose first thought about this story was - "can this balloon even lift a 6 year old boy?"

Am I the only one who saw the episode of mythbusters where they tried to lift a 4 year old girl with ordinary balloons? It took 3500 of them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8i7ESjCw3o

Let's take a look.

From the news videos, the balloon looks about the size of an SUV (15 foot) and about 4 feet tall based on the people around it. Very rough numbers to be sure.

The average weight of a 6 year old boy is about 46.2 lb. Let's say he's a little on the skinny side.
http://obesity.ygoy.com/ideal-weight-and-height-for-boys/

So I looked up the lift of helium:
http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~lecturedemonstrations/Composer/Pages/36.39.html
about 1.02 g / liter

4	Balloon Ht (ft)
15	Balloon Dis (ft)
706.86	Volume of Balloon (cu ft)
28.32	Conversion cu ft to liters
20016.11	Liters
1.02	Lift (g/L)
20416.43	Balloon lift (Grams)
0.002204	gram to lb
45	Balloon Lift (lb)

So assuming also that:

• it was not a warm day
• the structure at the bottom of the balloon did not weigh anything
• they didn't start at a high elevation (BTW Fort Collins is at 5000 ft)
• nothing else was inside of the balloon's structure

I think the balloon could just barely have floated the boy with the above assumptions... but he wouldn't have gotten very high or lasted very long. And it was probably 30 - 40% deflated when it finally landed.

Oh, and while we're at it... what makes anyone thing that the structure at the bottom of the balloon was even capable of holding 45-ish pounds? Well, not enough to speculate on that.

I call publicity stunt, and I gotta believe that someone in the National Gaurd thought this too. I don't believe that anyone at CNN was clever enough to wonder about this.

Not only that - if the dad was all about teaching his kids science like he claims, he know exactly how much lift the balloon has. Either he's a lousy science teacher, a lousy dad, or a great media whore. Maybe all three.