Flugtag follies

I've attended some lame shit over the years: poorly planned house parties, disastrous dates, a live sex show in the New Orleans French Quarter that didn't feature any actual fucking. But few events have struck me as silly as the Red Bull Flugtag spectacle that took place last Saturday at the Tampa Convention Center.

By this point, I'm sure you've heard about it. Thirty-odd teams built would-be flying machines and ran them off a 30-foot-high ramp into the notoriously dirty-ass Hillsborough River. One or more person(s) piloted the "aircraft" and took the plunge. Typically, teammates followed their falling apparatus by jumping into the brown water. I stood in the sun watching — cooking, cringing and losing faith in humanity, myself included.

I kept thinking of that old parental saying: If everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you? In Tampa, apparently that's the case. Organizers expected a crowd of 50,000 to witness this nonsense. Reportedly, more than 100,000 suckers attended.

One of the Flugtag participants was my co-worker, London, a brave woman who put herself in a craft largely constructed of old copies of Creative Loafing. Good gawd. London and fellow Loafers called themselves the Bread Winners. Countless hours went into building what they billed as the "Flying Cuban Sandwich." "We are closing in on the big day," said a message from "The Captain" posted on the Bread Winners' website July 14. "We still have some work to do in order to make everything originally envisioned a reality, but in another evening we should be all but done. The pilot [London] and I spent another night getting some finishing details knocked out after work with a couple of cold beers. We had a mock assembly of our flying Cuban, and it was quite a sight to behold."

The damn thing didn't even have wings. Well, kinda, but they were about as wide as oars. From where I was perched Saturday afternoon it looked like a giant coffin. The death box had me seriously worried that London would not emerge from it, or if she did, it would be with a severe spinal or brain injury. Or with a limb missing.

"You know it's not too late to back out," I told her about 20 minutes before she took the plunge.

"I can't," she said, with more than a hint of fear in her voice.

Our entourage of friends and colleagues then bade London farewell, wormed our way through the all-ages crowd — who brings newborns to Flugtag? — and, thanks to our group consisting largely of young women, were able to score last-minute waterfront seats behind a concession tent.

Things kicked off as scheduled around 1 p.m. A bunch of David Hasselhoff-worshiping gym and sun freaks dressed as lifeguards constituted a team dubbed Tampa Baywatch. The Hasselhoffs attached a glider to the top of their contraption and, with a person inside, flew it a little over 100 feet. Impressive, I thought. But then flying machine after flying machine dropped straight down into the murky waters.

I did some research. Flying 100 feet is not so impressive. The winner in Nashville last year traveled 155 feet. Even more disconcerting was learning that there were actual engineering students who entered contraptions that fell off the pier like bovines being pushed over a cliff.

"We built it a little too nose-heavy," reads a quote in Sunday's St. Petersburg Times. It's attributed to a Max Hirsh of DeLand's Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Engineering students from UF and FSU also entered, only to be bested by a lifeguard brigade. "His zealous teammates finished their skit and began to push the aircraft," reads the explanation in the Times as to why the UF team tanked. "They forgot that [John] Bornberg needed a few seconds to remove bungee cords fastening the glider to the rest of the gear." This probably says a lot about why NASA hasn't accomplished anything remarkable in my lifetime.

CL's Flying Cuban Sandwich, the third contestant of the day, fell apart before it even hit the brackish waters. But that should be expected from an alternative newspaper's team — especially one, according to the Bread Winner website, that features a "world traveling bootlegger," an "honorary Loafer based on her love of drinking" and a woman "cool enough to party with Creed on their tour bus."

It seemed to take about a half hour between each launch. We left after about a half dozen when our booze supply ended, which occurred right when the concession stand we were practically sitting in ran out of beer as well. We didn't miss much. Baywatch won.

I have yet to have an in-depth conversation with London since she braved life and limb for the stunt, but I did see her being pulled out of the dark waters and wave to us, so, y'know, she survived. But who knows about the whole brain damage thing. I need to evaluate her mental state. And question my own sanity for attending such a dumb event.