Flugtag or "Flight Day" as it is translated from German is an event sponsored by Red Bull.  The general concept is that you get a team together to build a pile of crafts that can somehow support a human being, and then you push that pile (with your human attached) from a large height into water in front of 80,000 spectators in hopes that it might give the appearance of flight.  I really think the team I was on accomplished all of those goals except maybe the last one.  

To be a Flugtag participant, every potential team had to submit a mock up drawing that would represent their intentions on what they would build.  We decided we wanted to do something that could somehow represent both Austin and flying so we naturally came up with doing a play on the Congress Bridge Bats that fly out in the millions every summer night in downtown Austin.  So I whipped up the below picture and we waited to see if we were selected.

Somehow we were selected but were given the strict warning that we couldn't actually hang someone upside down as our picture suggested.  Pity, because I had this idea that was pretty amazing and probably wouldn't have killed our pilot, Andrew.

From there we basically spent most nights at Todd's place yelling at each other, drinking beer and using Alex's miter saw in anyway we knew how.  We came up with our characters which were a setting sun to wake up the bats, the bats themselves and a stereotypical (questionably racist) Asian tourist with a large camera.  We also developed a dance and I mixed a song that involved Wham!'s Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, Prince's Batdance and O' Fortuna for the various parts of our performance (more on that in a bit).

It was time to start, so dressed as a bat, I got on the ground, put my feet in the air, and got mentally ready.  The crowd was a record setting 80,000 and I think at that moment, everyone was cheering in unison as we prepared to chuck our ugly love-child of a flying craft into the murky water below...and that's when it happened: over the loud speakers, we hear "Who Let the Dogs Out", an auditory abortion of a song from the Baja Men.  This was supposed to be my cleverly mixed set list that told the story of waking up to the setting sun, drinking some Red Bull to get our wings, dancing and then flying out into the night...and it was now going to be accompanied by this?? Are you kidding me???  So I yell at the guy in charge "Hey! This isn't our song!!" who responded with "Ok, what was it supposed to be?" to which I replied "It starts with Wham!'s Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go".  So of course, instead of the mix we get the Wham! song in its entirety..perfect.  At this point though, the crowd is getting restless so we just decide to wing it and give them what they want. 

So we danced, we pushed, and we jumped in after our craft* which went basically straight down (later analysis shows that Andrew fell out of his seat and therefore all of the weight was shifted to the front).  It was majestic.

We ended up getting "People's Choice", most likely because we got all of our friends to text for us, and we've got a lot of them, and they all know how to text.  For our achievements, we were awarded a trip to Dallas to watch a NASCAR event which was another story all together involving, strip clubs, passing out next to the racetrack, and subtly mocking the racecar drivers' heights to their faces.

*Well, most of us jumped, Christian claims he got held back by a camera guy and therefore couldn't jump.  He will never live this down.