The Macy’s Day Parade was originally intended to be a huge advertising ploy for the store. However, since then, it has become an enormous spectacle, full of music, dancing, obscenely large balloons, and the occasional disaster.
Honestly, dragging building-sized balloons down the narrow streets of New York City is a hell of a challenge. I don’t think it’s any surprise so many of them end in disaster, resulting in sad, deflated, mascots.
In the earlier days of the Macy’s Day Parade, they thought that releasing a ton of balloons into the sky would be a good idea. The plan was that, if you managed to grab one, you could turn it into Macy’s for a prize. This seems like a good, if not environmentally devastating, idea.
However, student pilot Annette Gipson had the bright idea of trying to catch a balloon with her plane. Hitting the Tom Cat balloon with her wing, she …