A wild idea took shape in the mind of Victor Paulo, CityROCK Cape Town’s maintenance man and long-time Red Bull event enthusiast. Having previously competed as part of the CityROCK Dirtbaggers team in the Red Bull Soapbox Race in the Bo-Kaap, Victor set his sights on a new challenge: the legendary Red Bull Flugtag, held at Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront.
For the uninitiated, Flugtag (German for ‘flight day’) challenges teams to build homemade flying machines, dress up in outrageous costumes, perform a short dance, and then launch themselves and their contraptions off a 10-metre ramp into the harbour. Points are awarded for creativity, showmanship, and distance (in that order), and fifty teams compete for the glory of human-powered flight before a roaring crowd of over 100,000 spectators.
Our Flugtag adventure started off with some rudimentary models made of card and plastic. Pushing them off the table to simulate the flight, we settled on a design that seemed to fly. Our theme was to do with braai and boerewors. Victor would dress up as a sausage, the plane would look like a braai grid, and the trolley for launching the plane would be made to look like a braai, complete with a drum and flames coming out of it. Our team name was ‘Wors Case Scenario’. The scene is this : You’re having a Sunday evening braai on your second story balcony, cooking some boerewors, when suddenly it slips through the folding grid and is dangling precariously over the coals. You lunge to save it, but in so doing, trip and send the whole braai and grid with sausage hanging out, off the edge of the balcony flying into the abyss. This is the worse (wors) case scenario for many people and we felt it was something many South Africans could easily relate to and hopefully find entertaining.
Juggling work and Flugtag aircraft building is stressful, and we all pulled together as a team to make it work in the end. I was responsible for designing and building the ‘braai’ section of our contraption, which included a large wooden frame and four road bicycle wheels. The plane itself was made from a thin plywood for the structural bits, with a special strong type of foam to give the wings their shape. The wings and tail were wrapped in a type of clear shrink-wrap, which was applied in sheets with a clothes iron, and then shrunk with a heat gun. The ‘cockpit’ area was made from aluminum square tubing, with 2 round bars for Victor (the wors) to hang from.
Jemma nailed it with our costumes. Her costume was a bottle of Mrs. H.S Balls Chutney, fashioned out of cardboard with a very creative and real-looking Mrs. Balls chutney label. I was a sweetcorn mielie, with yellow fabric sewn onto a hula hoop to keep its shape. Rectangular bits of foam were used to make the corn kernels. I also wore a green cape and painted my body and arms green to look like the leaves of a mielie. Michael transformed himself into a braaibroodjtie, which was made from flat pieces of foam and painted to look like barbequed bread. Victor was of course the wors, with brown material covering his whole body and an upside-down bucket with brown material over it on his head to give him a tubular sausage appearance.
The day came to transport our aircraft to the waterfront, where we were given a small area to assemble it and get it ready for flight. The logistics of this event are not to be sneered at, and it’s no wonder 10 of the 50 teams didn’t end up pitching up. Our craft had to be transported in 2 trips with 2 bakkies, with large fragile objects hanging awkwardly off the cars. The wind was unfortunately quite strong, and the most nerve-wracking part of the whole process was transporting the wings, which are of course made to catch the air. We had to gently strap them down and drive as slowly as we possibly could.
Luckily, we made it through mostly unscathed and assembled our plane quickly, tying it down using some pallets and some large bricks, hoping it would survive the night of wind ahead.
We arrived the next day to find our plane in one piece, although some other teams were not so lucky and had their planes destroyed by the strong wind. This was the last day of prep work before the big day. The Red Bull DJ had set up in front of everyone and was keeping spirits high with his groovy music. Free Red Bull was being dished out as well, so everyone was buzzing. Some teams were only beginning to build their craft; others were just placing the final cherry on top. Ours was mostly done but we had a full day of being interviewed and scored by judges on creativity. At one stage the wind blew our plane on top of the neighboring team’s plane, puncturing a massive hole in one of our wings. Luckily Allister (who was on duty at CityROCK that day) saved us by bringing a box of supplies to fix the hole and get us back on track. Later that day, another plane blew onto ours and again broke our wing. We scrambled to fix it and bolstered our defenses around the plane with pallets and bits of wood to protect it.
Perfect flying weather welcomed us the following day, quite hot but importantly very little wind. A reported crowd of around 100,000 people had gathered at the Waterfront to watch us. At this stage our nerves are absolutely jangling, probably in part due to all the Red bull we had been drinking. Second in the line-up, it doesn’t take long for the organizers to call us to bring our plane to the bottom of the ramp. We are given helmets and life jackets and then we join the parade of pilots onto the ramp where we all dance around and get the crowd hyped up for a few minutes.
Things move very quickly after the parade. The first team goes, and suddenly we are being hustled up the ramp to the top, lining up our craft to go off the edge. I’m feeling concerned it won’t run straight and end up going off one of the edges, but I don’t have long to worry as the presenter is already starting to get the ball rolling. Suddenly our music is playing, but it has started at completely the wrong time, and we feel a bit confused during our dance. We make it work though, and Michael and I drop our costumes simultaneously to reveal speedos with the South African flag printed on them. The presenter goes YOOOOOOHHHH!!! and we continue dancing until the music stops, where we run to the plane, still in our speedos, to start the main event that we have all been waiting on for months – flight!
Everything that follows happens in a blur. Victor is crouched terrifyingly inside the braai, and we begin pushing him, as fast as we can. Pure adrenaline takes over, and we fear for Victor’s well-being as we force ourselves to push as hard as we can towards the edge, which looks extremely high now. The braai wheels run straight and true, as it picks up speed and hurtles violently off the end of the ramp. We see the plane take flight – for about a second or two, and then the tail smashes into the braai and it spectacularly splashes down into the water. Victor the wors has achieved a distance of 12.6 meters, turning out to be 9th best distance out of the 40 teams that flew that day. After seeing that Victor survived, we all take the plunge off the ramp. The water is cold but none of us really notice as we’re so hyped up on adrenalin and Red Bull. We are greeted by some photographers with big waterproof cameras, who snap away as we splash about. Jemma hesitates for a second before jumping but eventually sends it. We all get put into a boat and are whisked away to the jetty, where Victor gets interviewed by a small lady with big sunglasses.
Next, we rush to the other side of the quay (still in speedos and green body paint) to see what can be salvaged of our plane. Sadly, it has been smashed into a million pieces to fit onto the trailer pulling the broken craft out of the water, and there’s nothing salvageable left of it. The braai survived the fall, but it is now as heavy as a block of lead – for some reason the wood seems to be holding a lot of water. We strip some souvenirs from it and head straight for the Red Bull ‘athlete zone’ with the free drinks, to watch the other teams throw themselves like lemmings off the ramp.
A highlight of the show was watching FlySafair (one of the main event sponsors) making two low flyovers with a Boeing 737. We all became like children watching it roar toward us and then over us, making a quick banking turn to avoid Lion’s head.
The day ends with a prize giving, with team Thunderstruck taking pole position. Their design included a crazy force multiplying catapult system, which sent them 18 metres from the ramp and helped them claim the victory. The team came from an aviation sales company and included some actual pilots !
Team Wors Case Scenario ended up coming 9th overall for distance, as well as 9th for creativity from a pool of 40 teams. In the end, our braai didn’t exactly redefine flight, but it brought a team of CityROCKers together for one unforgettable adventure. In true South African style, we sent it: wors, braai, and all.
