Flugtag competition team to include Mountain Brook man

A group of coworkers and friends, including Mountain Brook resident Andy Odum, will be taking on a unique challenge this weekend: Red Bull's Flugtag.

Flugtag is an annual competition where teams build often-ridiculous flying crafts, which are launched off a ramp in an attempt to fly the farthest. More frequently, the homemade craft immediately lands in the water below.

Cayenne Creative, based in downtown Birmingham, decided to assemble a team after hearing about the competition for the first time this year. The rest of the team includes John Ennis, Chris Baker, Zach Searcy, Chris Murphy and pilot Dan Murch. They will compete at Nashville's Riverfront on Saturday, Sept. 23 under the team name "Just Plane Foolish."

Odum said most Flugtag teams are there either to seriously compete for the most distance or to entertain the crowds with outlandish designs and skits performed at the top of the ramp. As a team of newbies, Baker said their goal from the beginning was to "fall with style. We never intended to fly." 

Their design is a 16-foot-long "plane in a bottle," with a styrofoam plane built inside a custom, inflatable bottle. Odum said they created the design to be "one of those things that really have a wow factor." As pilot, Murch will attempt to ride on top of the bottle and hang on until it lands in the water.

Baker said since the bottle is inflatable, he's looking forward to seeing whether it survives the landing and bounces Murch back into the air. While they'll be doing a "Red Baron" themed skit before pushing the plane off the ramp, several members of the team said they intend to jump into the water behind the plane.

As of Wednesday, Sept. 20, the plane was still under construction in the Cayenne office, but they were preparing to transport it to Nashville by U-Haul.

You can follow the team's build process and competition on the Cayenne Creative Instagram. The Flugtag competition will not be televised but can be followed on the Facebook event page. The team is also asking for votes for fan favorite by using the hashtags #RedBullFlugtag and #VotePlaneFoolish on Twitter and Instagram.