if you can’t beat ’em, loin ’em — by stripping down to a Speedo in front of 100,000 spectators. That was the motto of the Wrong Brothers — a team of four University of Central Florida aerospace engineering graduate students and one space shuttle engineer — who went to Tampa to participate in the July 18 Red Bull Flugtag (“flying day” in German).
Although Red Bull championed the Wrong Brothers as the brains of the competition, their homemade Flying Fish aircraft, called Bernoulli, did not glide along the water as hoped but rather took a nose dive off the 30-foothigh dock.
It turned out that the cheers they got by stripping down and jumping in after the glider outweighed their desire to beat out the competition. “As far as flying far, we did not do as good as we thought we would, but that is not the whole point of the Flugtag,” said Jason Dunn, team captain and craft pilot. “The point is making some really wacky-looking aircraft and crazy costumes and having a good time. The audience really liked us.”
Forty teams were chosen out of 300 applications nationwide to build their own human-powered flying machines, to be judged on the distance flown, showmanship and creativity At first, the team took winning the Flugtag very seriously. But after the trials and tribulations of building the Bernoulli mounted, they decided to have fun with the event. “Originally we wanted to beat the record of 195 feet. Being engineers we wanted to do it right,” Dunn said.
“As the months progressed little things made us realize it would not work out that way.” The five men wore homemade costumes (two crabs, two starfish and one fish), which they cut out on felt from stencils and stapled together, and performed a short dance, which they choreographed themselves by watching music videos on YouTube.com.
Each of the 40 flying machines in the competition were wheeled in parade fashion to the dock. Once the Wrong Brothers got to the edge they did their skit, which included stripping off their costumes to reveal Speedos, painted to look like thongs, to the 1979 tune “It’s Raining Men” before jumping into the water after Bernoulli.
“It really was raining men when we went off. We figured if we did that and everything else went wrong, the audience would at least be happy because we were nearly naked,” Dunn said. “My parents were in the front row. Thankfully they were really supportive.” According to Red Bull, past Flugtag aircrafts include a Flying Purple People Eater, Santa and his sleigh, a flying toilet and even an Oscar Mayer wiener.
This year a team of lifeguards gained the most distance. The grand prize is a pilot’s training course, second prize is skydiving lessons and third prize is paragliding lessons. “We didn’t even know there was a prize until a few weeks into building the glider. But then we got really excited about the flying lessons,” Dunn said.
The team spent every evening and most weekends for more than a month at the UCF Turbine Laboratory, where the four graduate students work, building Bernoulli and neglecting families, girlfriends and dogs. Team member Mike Ricklick said the guys spent each night arguing over how to build Bernoulli and poking fun at one another for lame ideas. They knew they should have used steel and other expensive products, but to stay within their $1,000 budget they used PVC piping, aluminum tubing, nylon fabric for the skin and a lot of duct tape.
“We did not expect it to take off and fly across the lake but we were hoping it would have gone further than it did,” said Keegan Ford, the shuttle engineer. “Red Bull talked us up as more or less the brains of the competition but also said that we did not have any real advantage because there are no rockets allowed in Flugtag.
“If there were rockets, we would have won,” he joked. An Le, another member, reeled in two business sponsors — Job Connection and All Signs and Neon Inc. — and Dunn’s grandmother and uncle sent them a few checks as well. The team members had to come up with about $400, which is difficult on a graduate student’s salary.
“If it were not for [the sponsors], we would be in debt, on the side of the street begging for money right now,” Dunn said. Ford said none of the members on their team are what society views as typical aerospace engineers, which is why they were all intrigued by a silly event like Flugtag. “We saw this as an opportunity to goof around and still do something we got our degrees in,” he said.
“People think we must be NASA nerds, but we love sports or anything else that gets us outside. We are not straitlaced or geeky.” Ford and Dunn participated in a similar event called the Great Naval Orange Race during their freshman year at UCF, where students built remote-controlled boats designed to pick up an orange in the campus reflecting pool.
The first to get the orange wins. “I liked it because I got to control the boat and so I got to run around in the reflection pond,” Ford said. “It got me interested in engineering because it showed me it could be fun and hands-on.” Dunn said the Wrong Brothers will most likely fly again. “We have been talking about doing it again.
Each time something went wrong we talked about how to do it better next time. It took a lot out of us but it was very worthwhile.”
