‘FLUGTAG’ GIVES YOU WINGS
Aeronautics students heading off into the wild blue yonder — or into the drink
The Red Bull Flugtag, a glider competition with a wet ending, often sees eccentric designs, flightless aircraft and big splashes. A team of Pittsburgh students wants to break records with a plywood and fabric machine, not just get wet.
Dustin Colella, a former Marine who now is a Pittsburgh Institute of Aeronautics student, is leading a fiveperson student team to get a Wright Brothers-inspired manned glider off the work bench and into the sky for this year’s Red Bull Flugtag 2017 in August, part of the EQT Three Rivers Regatta.
“We’re about three-quarters of the way done,” Mr. Colella said Tuesday. “Keeping it simple was the hardest part. We’re reducing everything that we’ve been taught. We need to save weight and time and it still has to fly.”
Flugtag — German for “flying day” — works like this: A team of five people must dress up and perform a skit or dance to a song at the top of a 22-foot-high platform above the Allegheny River and then push the human-powered glider off with the pilot inside. Teams will be judged on flight distance, creativity of the craft, and showmanship, which has inspired flying tacos, cakes and human cannonballs in the past. Winners will get to skydive with the Red Bull skydiving team.
The team, called the Wright
Burgh’ers, will transport attendees back to the 1920s with their biplane, inspired by PIA’s roots in early flight. It was Orville Wright, one of the two brothers to first successfully fly an airplane, who co-founded the school in 1929. Since then, the school has gone on to place at No. 11 this year in a Forbes Magazine list of the 30 best twoyear trade schools nation.
Under the supervision of Jason Pfarr, the school’s dean, the team is working about three hours daily to be ready for its flight date of Aug. 5.
Their aircraft, made of plywood, fabric and sheets of aluminum, will be 15 feet long, have an 18-foot wingspan and weigh about 350 pounds. With the added weight of the pilot, the craft will weigh just under the 500pound limit. Mr. Pfarr is confident in the team’s ability to make the aircraft work. He said all the students have experience in much of the work they’re doing as part of the school’s “getting-their-hands-dirty” curriculum.
“Here at PAI, they’re training to become aviation maintenance technicians and just about all of our curriculum is hands-on,” Mr. Pfarr said. “In this field they’re going to have to work in groups and work together to accomplish a common task. This is the perfect project to bring all that out.”
The team will have no time to test the craft, so the flight Aug. 5 is the ultimate