Flugtag silliness

[red]

Ed,
How does a flight of 258 feet compare to a flight of 1212 feet?      Each of the three videos that I linked did a lot better than Red Bull's lame "record."

Gotta say, given the Red Bull's stupid rules, that 8.6:1 glide is a respectable performance.  The glider pictured looks almost like an Icarus V, but the real Icarus has too much wingspan for the Red Bull rules.  That Red Bull glider would have gone further, if the pilot could have put his feet up and kicked back, like an Icarus V.   My first glider was really not as good in performance as the one pictured, although my second one was better.  Looks like Red Bull finally got a dose of 1970s hang glider technology.
Now in this century    you would need a flight of more than 450 miles (~750km) to claim a HG record, and personal flight (like Superman) looks like this:

http://www.thermalriders.com/Z9-01-M-tris.jpg

http://user.xmission.com/~red/zapatamap.jpg

These are real hang gliders, that can handle more air than you will find just gliding into a harbor.  Here's a nice expert-class landing, back on to the seaside launch.

Strzeleki landing

Cheers,
Red

[simi_ed]

I make no claims about tha accuracy of their "news reporting", I merely passed it along since Mike was heading to Long Beach to spectate/participate.  I'm just the messenger ...

[skymasteres]

Ed,
How does a flight of 258 feet compare to a flight of 1212 feet?      Each of the three videos that I linked did a lot better than Red Bull's lame "record."

Gotta say, given the Red Bull's stupid rules, that 8.6:1 glide is a respectable performance.  The glider pictured looks almost like an Icarus V, but the real Icarus has too much wingspan for the Red Bull rules.  That Red Bull glider would have gone further, if the pilot could have put his feet up and kicked back, like an Icarus V. 

Take it easy Red. The Flugtag is just silly fun. Not a serious flying expo in any sense. I mean, 28' max wingspan? 400# max combined weight? They're lucky they get any sort of actual flight... Well, with that small an aspect ratio at least. It was just a beautiful day to ride down to Long Beach, go to an event, and see some of the crazy contraptions that they pushed off of the deck. I would love to go to a serious venue where people could actually appreciate the nuances of the designs in more serious attempts, but that's kind of hard in such a media/publicity centric event like this one...

There were two teams that actually looked like they had a shot at getting at least 100' but they went straight in due to their horizontal tails breaking on launch and giving a max nose down pitch attitude. Then there was another team that had a nifty looking bastardization of a Rutan quickie and a P-51 mustang. The unfortionate issue with the tandem wing was that they had the center of gravity too far aft and it pitched up severly on launch and did a tail slide into the the water having acheived about a 1:1 glide ratio...