Flights of fancy will take on a literal meaning when wannabe aviators rule the skies over the Charles River Basin today.
Madcap amateur aeronautics in the form of decorative gliders will take flight when Red Bull Flugtag visits Boston for the first time today at 11 a.m.
The DCR Hatch Memorial Shell at the Esplanade on the Charles River will serve as the staging area and launch site for the mixed-gender, five-member crews and their aircrafts.
Flugtag is German for Flying Day, the aircrafts are homemade human-powered machines and most of the pilots are women. Johanna DeFrancisco will manage the control stick dressed as Wonder Woman for Team Flyin’ Ryan.
Team Flyin’ Ryan will be outfitted as comic book superheroes. Their endeavor is dedicated to a deceased friend of the crew named Ryan McGrale, the popular former bartender at Tavern Road who was known to belt show tunes wearing a red Superman cape.
“We made our craft a little bird-like based on the ever present Boston sea gull,” said Domingo Martin, a designer on Team Flyin’ Ryan. “So it has that sort of winged shape and some of the designs we worked off were Leonardo Di Vinci designs from the 1400s.”
The competitors will plunge off a 28-foot vertical flight deck and attempt to traverse the Charles River Basin in the direction of Cambridge. Ellie Rundell is the pilot for Team Dinosoar, a contraption that is part velociraptor and part eagle encased in a bright orange package.
“We are a dinosaur with golden eagle wings and it’s just about the most terrifying thing we could come up with,” said Rundell. “It’s less about the speed from the push off and more in catching the wind as you begin to fall. It is less propulsion and more of a glider system.”
The Flugtag flight record is 258 feet, so the pilots will likely need to make a water landing. Life vests are a common-sense appendage even in the placid shallow waters upstream from the Longfellow Bridge.
“I’m coming into this expecting to make a water landing and that seems pretty much the norm,” said Rundell.
The Flugtag competition invites aspiring pilots, designers and builders to apply their ingenuity and creativity in a fun-filled attempt to turn back the clock on mechanized flight.
Michael Ricci helped put together Mass Instruction as part of a school project. The Mass Instruction crew is comprised of five Boston Public school teachers based out of the Thomas Edison grammar school in Brighton.
The pilot of Mass Instruction is a female math teacher who goes by the alias “Slope,” which might have something to do with the launch pad.
“We tried to take inspiration from some of the past winners who have won the Flugtag and a little bit of inspiration from nature like the albatross,” said Ricci. “The albatross is legendary for hovering at low speeds.
“The craft fuselage looks like a giant pencil with lined paper for wings. And yes, our hope is to have a safe water landing.”
