Red Bull Flugtag
This is the birth story of Red Bull Flugtag, the world's wackiest airshow
Flying elephants, gliding hamburgers, pianos with wings – you name it. Millions of spectators have witnessed it at Red Bull Flugtag, consistently one of the most enjoyable shows on Earth.
It all began in 1992 in Vienna when teams of everyday folk were challenged to build homemade, human-powered flying machines and try to see if they could push them off a six-metre-high deck and watch them soar into the far blue yonder.
Er, well, not quite! What we largely saw on ‘Flugtag’ – or ‘flying day’ from the German – was a glorious few moments of high hopes before a wondrous plummeting into the blue waters below.
Ah, but it has never stopped thousands of would-be Leonardo Da Vincis trying. Ever since, in 60 cities round the world, Red Bull Flugtag has taken off, capturing everyone’s imagination wherever hope has sprung eternal. In Cape Town in 2012, for instance, no fewer than 220,000 people turned up on the waterfront to watch and gasp. See the image at the top of this story.
Get a flavour of Red Bull Flugtag below from this highlights video from a few years ago.
3 min
See the best (and worst) Red Bull Flugtag attempts of 2014
Watch the best creations and flight attempts that took place at the Red Bull Flugtag events of 2014.
Part of the joy of Red Bull Flugtag, of course, is that it’s not just about how far our dreamers can fly on a recipe of muscle, gravity and imagination; no, it’s also about just how good they look while strutting their aerial stuff. So to get on the podium, they’re judged on three criteria – flight distance, craft creativity and showmanship.
And, occasionally, the three can sometimes combine to quite glorious effect.
The Chicken Whisperers
© Carlo Cruz/Red Bull Content Pool
In 2013 in Long Beach, California, for instance, we had a bunch of five aeronautical engineers from Palo Alto who not only gave us a superbly choreographed poultry dance routine in dazzling yellow suits (pictured above), but then unleashed a craft piloted by a dextrous hen which soared out to an amazing new world record of 78.5 metres – the length of 261.6 chickens in an orderly line – Red Bull subsequently calculated.
So, congratulations to the Chicken Whisperers, who employed no fowl play to achieve their target. Beat that, Red Bull Flugtag hopefuls!