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Flugtag, Human Powered Flying Machine Competition
Mike Lohse writes "Redbull is promoting its human-powered flying competition called Flugtag in San Francisco. Looks like creativity wins. The rules? Less than 30 feet wide, less than 450 lbs., only human power for propulsion. Applications are due August 20th, applicants are selected August 27th, and the competition is October 26th in San Francisco. Get sketching..."
I thought it was *Redbull* that gave you wings!
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jonathan barket
Does spending a week winding up a huge rubber band count?
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
If there are bonus points for going under weight, I would just run naked and flap my arms. Might lose points for "Lack" or flight, but bonus points for wieght...no? ok then
"CPU's Don't make mistakes....They just miss a few cycles sometimes..."
"You'll laugh, you'll fly... just not very far."
:)
I guess if you're going to fall to a horrible bloody death, it pays to have a sense of humor about it.
too funny - check out the videos of previous Flugtag's on the linked website.
My fave is the Red Baron mock-up that flew, oh about.... 4 feet (1.26m for you Euros)
10 MD
"No drinking Redbull for a period of 12 hours before the competition."
Red Bull is non-alcoholic, however it does contain caffeine, guarana (very similar to caffeine), and ephedra (very similar to, well, amphetamines). Ephedra is basically amphetamine (in terms of it's chemistry and effects) with less buzz and more side-effects. Combined with caffeine and the notion that a store bought drink is healthy, many people have been sent to the hospital for heart attacks, uncontrolable twitching, and hallucinations. And cases of ephedra abuse are on the rise (however it's normally associated with pill-form ephedra). So, it's more like a "let's get tweeked out and jump into the world's filthiest bay while the people who competed in the chugging contest are picking at their skin".
Only the meek get pinched. The bold survive.
"Less than 30 feet wide,"
Human-powered flight with a smaller wingspan than most gasoline-powered planes? Ouch. IIRC, the guy who flew over the English Channel had something like 50 feet to play with.
"less than 450 lbs"
With a wingspan like that I would certainly hope so!
Red Bull sponsored one of these last year in Dublin. It was quite amusing. It was held in a harbour inlet with a big platform over the water. The flying/gliding machines didn't really go that far. I think 3 or 4 metres won. The best was a bunch of Finnish guys who were in Dublin having a big piss up before a guy got married. They heard about Flugtag, built something on short notice and made asses of themselves along with everyone else. Quality. Maybe the SF people will 'fly' further that the Dubliners.
Because pulling 10 tons out of the 'Frisco bay is a pain in the ass...
they have combined this event with the "International Chicken-Dance Competition". It was discovered that the movements were essentially the same.
Table-ized A.I.
I don't much like the "send your application we'll tell you if you can compete" idea. They should judge all entries that show up for competition.
I have a strange feeling this isn't so much about competing to see who can build the best human power flying craft, but mora thinly veiled marketing event that they hope to control as much as possible.
I'll bet that the design contraints are there so they can more easily fit the vehicle on a tow-trailer and take it around the country with just a few people as crew. I'll bet the designs are being avaulated for advertising space and visual impact on a crowd rather than functional design.
Then again maybe I've just spend too much time in the presence of marketing companies.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
Lawn Chair Balloon Flight Link
Photo of Lawn Chair Balloon Flight LONG BEACH, Calif, July 2 (AP) A truck driver with 45 weather balloons rigged to a lawn chair took a 45-minute ride aloft to 16,000 feet today before he got cold, shot some balloons out and crashed into a power line, the police said.
Gliders of any sort aren't flying, they're falling with class (to paraphrase Buzz Lightyear). Note that they generally have specifications that say how many inches down they fall per feet of forwawrd flight.
As for ultralights, they only became possible with modern advances that maximized the hp-per-pound of modern Otto cycle engines.
You can do human-powered flight (somebody used it to fly over the English Channel in the 80's, but I'm too lazy to Google it), but it's going to be... interesting with such a small wingspan.
They hosted one last year in SF, ran commercials for it etc. Then they cancelled it at the last minute with no notification. Many people showed up and there was a lot of confusion, as they hadn't even bothered to post signs saying it had been cancelled. The website was even down, so there wasn't even anyway to get official information. We just kind of meandered around hoping that someone official would show up, but it never happened.
Pretty lame.
All this flap over flying floppy flappers failing and falling over flailing flippers makes me want to flip off these floundering floating flightless floor finding flunkies. Then again it looks like they are having flukey flakey flun, I mean fun.
Table-ized A.I.
Lighter-than-air would seem to be the way to go.
Strap yourself to a miniature blimp, wear some fins for propulsion and steering- your distance would be limited only by the judges' patience, weight would difficult to measure- and unless they add the weight of displaced air to everyone else's total, they should count it as negative(your body weight).
Human powered
Less than 30 ft wide
Less than 450 lbs.-
seems to fit all the rules.
Less than 30 feet wide, less than 450 lbs., only human power for propulsion.
I don't suppose I could enter myself in the contest..
slashdot!=valid HTML
human powered, can I liposuck all the fat from some fat person and run an engine off the fat oil? .. isnt it?
That's human powered
It's a joke.
You are not expected to fly.
It's more about "how many drunken idiots can we get to strap drowning machines to themselves and jump into the San Francisco Bay?"
The Gossamer Condor, which won the Kremer Prize in 1977 is, so far, the smallest human powered aircraft. It has a wingspan of 70 feet. The Gossamer Albatross, which crossed the English Channel, and won the second Kremer Prize, has a wingspan of 90 feet.
A wingspan of 30 feet is pretty mugh guaranteed to not result in flight, if the wings alone are intended to provide the lift, with just human power.
The weight limit lets out most practicaly designs, such as a neutral buoyancy ornithopter with a helium lifting baloon with a 30 foot maximum width (hint: search for "one person helium balloon").
-- Terry
Wings? Who needs wings?
500 bucks worth of canned beans oughtta do it.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
How about human powered flight + ultra-light carbon fiber flywheels?
Peddle at a leisurely pace for 30 minutes, press the "takeoff" button, then continue peddling enough to keep the "fuel gauge" (energy in the flywheel) up to a reasonable level. Have a computer control prop output to maintain a minimal airspeed to conserve energy.
I'm no engineer, but I think this could really work.
-Peter
Less than 30 feet wide
My entry will be 26 feet in width and 68 feet long.
Oh, and by the way, it flys sideways.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I remember that program, professor Heinz Wolfe presented it. Sort of like a 70's version of Scrapheap Challenge, but for boffins and REAL geeks only ;-)
Here's a link to some info about it...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
The wingspan of the velair was only 22.7m, the sakuzo 24.5m, and the musculair 22m. These both took off from a flat runway, with no launching ramp or platform. If your goal isn't sustained powered flight, you don't need the extrememly high efficiencies afforded by high aspect ratio wings (27-35) and can get by with lower AR.
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
And this costs, what two bucks? Three dollars? WTF?
You are basically getting highly sugared water (about 5 teaspoons per can) and 80mg of caffeine, which is not that much. If this is your thing, then all the more power to you, but there are vastly cheaper ways to go about it. Personally I just go down to Kmart and buy caffeine pills: each of those is 200mg and you can buy a package of 90 of them for a few dollars. Avoid the brand names, they cost a lot more. And if it's sugar that you crave, then soda should do the trick.
So that just leaves us with these mysterious ingredients taurine and glucuronolactone. Here is where we encounter the manufacturer's (and anyone hocking these three dollar sugar shots) claims of all sorts of "revitalization." Yeah, whatever. I have not the medical knowledge to debunk this load, but just consider that taurine is often an ingredient in baby milk formulas and that when Coca Cola was still a young company they often touted "the wonderful Coca plant and the famous Cola nut" and the "invigorating" power of its mysterious ingredients -- the secret is that there is no secret.
So if you're truly athletic and drink Red Bull for performance, then go read a book on nutrition or sports medicine. How could a drink that's a diuretic and contains only a sip of water possibly be a good sports drink?
Ah, the club crowd -- the company's bread and butter, although they claim otherwise (see the linked article below for a direct quote from a company representative.) Drinking alcohol with Red Bull is a poor man's speedball, caffeine's upper to alcohol's downer. I'm sure it lets you stay awake longer and drink more, and it's oh-so-trendy. I have no problem with this, but just realize that there's nothing magical or special in that $3 can.
An excellent article on Red Bull's company background and marketing tactics, including their fling with extreme-style sports.
If you can build one, more power to you: do it. You will win in at leastone category, and may win overall for effectiely making fun of the making fun.
Given the cost, and the lack of a long enough launching/landing strip, I think it's a non-issue.
-- Terry
SF has a sizable hang gliding crowd. They fly from Fort Funston, among other places. There are some low-speed hang gliders that can be launched from a run, and there might, just possibly, be enough of a thermal on the bay side to get some lift.
The restrictions in the rules and the general tone of the web site indicate this is just a promo event for wankers to get pissed and chuck themselves off a low platform.
REAL birdman competitions, on the other hand start with platforms a good 10 metres high and include some outstanding entrants in the human-powered division.
I used to watch the Toriningen competition that takes place on Biwa Lake in Japan. Every year the HPA division would see increasingly insane distances that would have easily won the Kramer prize if it had been a straight line. The contenstant would end up disappearing into the haze over the lake and they'd have to send a chopper to follow it as the rest of the competition went on.
Fantastic stuff.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
You get more uppers from a 24oz bottle of mtn dew. I'm not personally very worried.
I live in a giant bucket.
People here seem to be taking this so seriously, discussing the ingredients in RedBull and how much further the birdmen in Japan can fly. Is doing silly things for fun an alien concept in geekland?