Aerobatic Flying
The Grab: Is This The Most Unconventional Red Bull Can Delivery Ever?
A Red Bull can, a knife-edge plane, and a motorbike at full throttle—how Patrick Davidson and Brian Capper turned a wild idea into a daring stunt, with 15cm to spare...
It might not sound like it from the ground, but there’s a certain kind of silence in the cockpit of an aerobatic plane where instinct, calculation and muscle memory dance on the edge of chaos. Patrick Davidson knows that silence well. He's lived in it for years, flipped through it, raced against it. But what he and motorcycle stunt-riding legend, Brian Capper pulled off recently wasn’t just another stunt...
A Red Bull Energy Drink can mounted just behind the aileron of Davidson’s GameBird (known over South African skies by the callsign: 'Red Bull 1'). Capper, speeding underneath on his motorcycle, riding up alongside a plane banking on its knife edge—wheels vertical, wing down—aimed to snatch the can mid-flight.
Brian Capper looks on
© Tyrone Bradley / Red Bull Content Pool
It sounds like something out of a video game. But for Davidson, it was all about real-world inches, not digital dreams.
“We were behind the drag curve. The power’s on and off, the prop is loud, and there’s a lot more movement than it looks from 200 meters away,” Davidson recalled. “I had to put the wing next to his head—only about 150 mil max between my aileron and his bar.”
Davidson and Capper contemplating
© Tyrone Bradley / Red Bull Content Pool
It wasn’t the first time he and Capper had dreamt this up. Over a casual night in St. Francis, the idea was born. “He was like, ‘I just want to ride next to the plane,’” Davidson laughed. “And I said, ‘Okay, well I’ll pull off next to you and you catch the can.’”
Success
© Tyrone Bradley / Red Bull Content Pool
What followed was weeks of adjustment, redesign, and pilot instinct pushed to its edge. “We were struggling with a storyline as to how the can got there. So I was like, ‘Screw it, let’s just put it on the wing.’”
That improvisation meant adapting the wing mount, shifting angles, ensuring the prop blast didn’t send the can flying—and most importantly, that Capper wouldn’t lose his grip at 150 km/h with a plane whispering inches from his helmet. The rest, as they say, is written in Instagram Stories...
But actually, that’s just half the story.
Patrick Davidson
© Tyrone Bradley / Red Bull Content Pool
While the internet buzzed over the airborne stunt, Davidson had already notched a quieter—but perhaps more meaningful—win in early 2025. After years of chasing the top podium spot in Red Bull’s global air race series, he claimed a win at the first round of Air Race X, a cutting-edge virtual air racing format that evolved out of Red Bull Air Race that was designed to cut carbon costs without cutting corners on competition.
“From the Red Bull days, I’d always been there—second, third, fourth. But never the top step. This time, we managed to do it—and we did it properly," he says. "We were fast from the Qualifying, fast in everything, right into the final.”
Air Race X uses GPS-coordinated virtual pylons, letting pilots compete globally from their home skies. It's a blend of aviation engineering, data telemetry, and razor-edge flying. Once a pilot activates their race token, they’ve got 90 minutes—two runs max—to post a time.
“It’s actually more of a visualization exercise than anything else,” Davidson said. “With no beacons, just ground markers and telemetry, it demands a whole different mindset.”
From a world-first aerial stunt with a motorbike, to winning a digital-era race format, Davidson is flying higher—and smarter—than ever before. And if the “Can Grab” proved anything, it’s that he's not afraid to pull off something new when the story is worth the risk. What is next?