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Americans Set Flugtag World Record With 207-Foot Flight at Red Bull Event

by Caleb Johnson on July 26, 2010 at 03:26 PM

Flugtag World Record
We Americans have a penchant for borrowing traditions from other cultures and making them our own. For example, on Saturday, 90,000 gathered on the banks of the Mississippi River in St. Paul, Minnesota to watch people compete in flugtag. As part of flugtag, which is German for "flight day," teams build awesome homemade aircrafts, and launch them off a platform in order to see who can glide the farthest before crashing into the water below.

Not only did this massive audience get to see gliders shaped like roller skates and baseball bats, but it also saw a new flugtag world record. According to the Star Tribune, the team known as Major Trouble and the Dirty Dixies (possibly the best name in the competition, too), designed a glider to resemble a World War II era B-25 bomber, and flew it an astounding 207 feet. That's much farther than the previous U.S. record of 155 feet, and it also eclipsed the previous world record, which had been set in Australia at 195 feet. Along with setting a new world record, Major Trouble and the Dirty Dixies won the event, which takes showmanship and creativity into account, as well. The Spooners, whose glider was based on a sculpture, and Team Griswold, which, we guess, piloted a station wagon-inspired glider, finished second and third, respectively. [From: Star Tribune and Neatorama]

Tags: aircraft, diy, flight, Flugtag, redbull, RedBullFlugtag, top, transportation, WorldRecord

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