On a quiet road in Willow Glen, a picturesque neighborhood in San Jose, California, Adam Albert has one thing on his mind: flying. "We want to make it to Treasure Island," he says, leaning against the Treasure Island Express, his homemade flying machine. See it in action tonight on "Tech Live."
Albert and his crew of three have spent the last eight weeks designing and building a human-powered aircraft sturdy enough to make the one-and-a-half mile trip across the San Francisco Bay to Treasure Island.
Albert and co-designer John Kanalakis have clocked countless hours at Albert's home amping up for the first annual American Red Bull
Flugtag competition. The first Flugtag, German for "flying day," took place in Austria in 1991. The folks at Red Bull brought the event to the States last year, where it was simply a showcase of creativity and showmanship and participants displayed a potential for distance. The flying portion of the competition, however, was canceled due to September 11. This year, all creations will take the trans-Bay flying test.
Albert's design last year, which was similar to this year's, took first place.
"We knew that we wanted to go far," Albert says. "Distance was our primary motivation. So that's what this whole craft was designed to accomplish -- going far."
His creation is a 26-foot-long shaft, topped by a 40-foot wide, 12-foot tall airfoil wing that encircles a propeller. A conventional wing, he says, would have created leverage problems at the point where the wings attached to the fuselage.
"There would be a lot of pressure at that point, which means that we would have had to use heavier materials," he says.
Styrofoam and ripped pine make up the wings' ribs, PVC tubes link together for the spars, and 1/8-inch-thick plywood makes up the fuselage. Its propulsion system is a dismembered garage-sale bike pedaled by Albert's wife Holly.
"It would just be incredible to be able to fly to Treasure Island on my own, under my own pedal power," she says, training ferociously on the family's once-dusty recumbent bike. "I just think it'll be great fun."
Come flight day, she'll have one thing on her mind: "Pedal like crazy. Don't get wet."
With less than a week before the competition, Albert and crew still have a couple of kinks to work out before they take to the skies. A handful of trial runs at a nearby high school last Saturday proved to be less than stellar. After four attempts with four people pushing, the structure didn't elevate.
"I'm not sure why we're not feeling more lift with these runs," Albert says, trying to get a more even view of the wings from afar. "I wasn't expecting it to take off, but I was expecting it to reduce its weight from the aerodynamic lift."
But the team's spirits are high, and Kanalakis has faith. "I think it's coming along well. Real well."
The countdown begins.
Red Bull's Flugtag is flying day, where teams of competitors fly handmade machines as far as they possibly can. The event began in Austria in 1991 and is taking place for the first time this year in America, in San Francisco. You can see the amateur aviators on "Tech Live," and watch them fly into the San Francisco Bay on October 26.
