May 16, 2026
Strange Days
In my previous story, I ended it with the whimsical tale of my Trashcan Spaceship project in 10th grade in 2001. Now in this story we’ll start if off at the end of summer 2001 as I was about to enter my 11th grade year in high school. I was an imaginative and eccentric teenager going on 17, and about to start some new technological classes at Hempfield High School. That year marked my third year with construction technology with Mr. James (woodworking) as well as my first and only year with manufacturing technology under Mr. Johnson (welding and metallurgy). It was a new school year in 2001-2002, and of course it meant it was a whole new adventure for myself. To make a long story short, several big shake-ups occurred in my personal life between 10th and 11th grade.
The first big life-changer was when my mother and stepfather divorced. I won’t get into too many details of this event, but I’ve touched upon it briefly in my story about renting video tapes, as my stepdad was a manager for the defunct Hollywood Video chain. With the void of a father figure in my life, I was able to get into contact with my biological father and formed a somewhat pen-pal relationship with him, but wasn’t entirely reunited with him yet. Also with the fractured parental structure, my older sister (who had recently graduated high school) was hanging out with the wrong crowd and was getting kicked out of our home. Meanwhile my close friendships began to splinter for various reasons, and I was gradually becoming adversaries with people to whom I was previously close with, and I was making new friends in other circles. I even managed to join a local Columbia, PA chapter for the Freemason youth society known as DeMolay International.
So to make a long story short, in just the span of a months I’ve witnessed my parents divorce (again), lost several friends, gained new friends, became on speaking terms with my estranged father, and joined a strange organization. Suffice it to say, as these events all transpired, September 2001 was shaping up to become a rather unusual and unpredictable year. Things would only get crazier from here.
As mentioned previously, I signed up for both metal shop and wood shop for this school year. Mr. James was the same wood shop teacher whom gave me an A+ for my essay about the trashcan spaceship in the previous school year. One particular Tuesday morning as I began my metal shop class with Mr. Johnson, suddenly the classroom’s side service door barged open with Mr. James rushing through in a sense of urgency. Both the wood shop and metal shop classes were connected with a service corridor so that teachers could easily borrow tools and supplies if needed. Anyway, I couldn’t hear what Mr. James was saying, but I remember watching him furiously rush towards Mr. Johnson’s desk and said something along the lines of, “. . . TWO HUGE FIREBALLS!”
Curiously, Mr. Johnson turned on the nearest TV set which immediately showed footage of the Twin Towers on fire. Everyone in class just stared at the TV in complete silence, due to the shock and confusion being almost paralyzing. None of us really knew how to process what we were witnessing. Immediately after the truth set in, Mr. Johnson quietly canceled our plans for that day and instructed us to remain calm and continue watching the TV screen for further developments. In between class periods, the normal calamity of students in the hallway was oddly serene. Rather than the typical crowds of kids chatting as they went to their next class, everyone just kind of slowly wandered in a daze – almost in a trance-like state. There wasn’t a lot of chatter, and it was quite eerie.
Each teacher during the rest of the day just had us ignore that day’s lesson and instead made us stare in silence at the TV screen with the events unfolding. People speculated about who the culprits were; rumors went around that it was Saddam Hussein and Iraqis, since we were only about a decade removed from the Persian Gulf War. In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, I remember a tonal shift of culture in the nation. I remember specific quirks such as when all of the school buses began to display American flags on them, and how the radio stations changed their formatting to play specific songs but to omit other songs from their lineups. But despite all of the togetherness, something that wasn’t united in the aftermath of 9/11 was my relationship with my friends and family.
For completely unrelated reasons, I was no longer on speaking terms with my best friend Skot. This stemmed from some arguments we got ourselves into in the previous school year, so now in fall 2001 I effectively substituted Skot’s friendship with a kid named Devin. This new guy Devin was quite the character. An awkward and eccentric nerdy guy who was into anime and video games, had crazy long hair and wore glasses and a trenchcoat. He basically looked and acted like a young StyxHexenHammer666, ha. So now Devin was my new best friend, and we would hang out together often and conceptualize ideas for computer games in RPG Maker. Then we’d binge-watch edgy early internet Flash cartoons on Newgrounds, especially the recent wave of anti-Osama bin Laden videos and games that popped up everywhere.
Meanwhile my home life was going pretty bad as well. With my stepdad out of the picture, my mom was working extra hours at her job and overall wasn’t at the house a lot, where I lived with my two sisters. My older sister got involved with the wrong crowd and started bringing scummy people to the house. I would clash with them constantly, as some of them would steal things from me. I especially despised my older sister’s new boyfriend: we got into numerous fights, some of which nearly got physical and involved the police. The fractured relationship with my friends and family caused me to lose a previously-close friendships, as people began taking sides with different groups.
One day in fall 2001 as I went for a walk with Devin, we chuckled that it would be great to have some sort of flying machine so we can just get away from it all. You know, like something out of that corny Tom Hanks movie Radio Flyer. Devin said something along the lines of, “You know, if we had air coverage, we wouldn’t have to deal with your sister or her friends anymore. We wouldn’t be bothered by Skot or his friends either. We can just fly into the air and ignore them. We would be unstoppable.”
Back to the Drawing Board
Immediately the next day in school I began sketching out crude plans for makeshift homemade flying craft. I created a wild mishmash of potential ideas for impractical aircraft, ranging from portable hot air balloons to miniature Zeppelins. One particular idea was to make a portable hot air balloon whose main bag could fold into a trenchcoat, and the baskets could be folded into suitcases. Basically it was some kind of cartoonish balloon suit like something out of a satirical Mad Magazine comic.
Meanwhile, Devin suggested we assemble a homemade Ultralite aircraft in his backyard and use a nearby alley as a runway. I wanted to build something much larger and also capable of hovering, as opposed to a standard plane with a motor. The impractical concept that I eventually designed would be dubbed The LB-1 – The Luft Brunk 1 – a direct nod to the original name designation of the model LZ 1 under Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin! I told Devin about the dubious idea, and he was all onboard with the idea, and he even began sketching up his own versions of how the LB-1 should look. He even liked the aircraft name too, since he was a fellow German-American, and thus appreciated the nod to Count Zeppelin.
Devin’s concept art was rather rudimentary, whereas my designs were much more elaborate. The basic idea behind my version of the LB-1 was that it intended to have the ability to not only fly in the sky, but also to maneuver on the ground and sea. I wanted some soft of multipurpose vehicle that essentially go anywhere! It wouldn’t just be all-terrain, it would be all-directional! Ergo, the LB-1 would be a blimp-hovercraft! Theoretically its hovercraft mode could travel around on the ground and water, and then could deploy a dirigible bag for achieving flight – whether by hot air or lighter than air gases.
The general idea was that the hovercraft portion could be piloted around on the ground to get from Point A to Point B, and the hovering feature could allow it to glide across small bodies of water in the case of approaching rivers and lakes. And then if we wanted to fly, we’d simply initiate the balloon function to gradually float away, while using the thrust propeller to move it forward in the skies. Obviously I don’t need to tell you that clearly I never even considered building a giant flammable airship using hydrogen. I’ve already referenced one major fiery airline disaster in this story, so I’m not going to mention another one. Helium would way too difficult to procure, so this left me with trying to make a hot-air balloon concept for the LB-1.
Hot air ships do exist; they’re called Thermal Ships, which are basically a hybrid of hot air balloons and blimps. The LB-1 would have been exactly that, albeit with a hovercraft portion fixed onto the undercarriage of the cockpit. Unfortunately, thermal ships have significantly lower lift capacity compared to blimps or Zeppelins, due to the nature of hot hair. Not to mention a large part of the ship’s dead weight load would have been storage of the propane gas tank to produce the hot air for the ship’s bag. Due to my limited knowledge of engineering and flight dynamics at the time, I greatly underestimated the necessary size of the hot air balloon for the LB-1. In my head, it would have been relatively small.
Throughout the remainder of my 11th grade school year, Devin and I would throw around more drawing plans for this potential multipurpose vehicle of ours, but none truly came to fruition. During the start of 2002, I was contacted by a recruiter for the Armed Forces, since this was common for them to meet students at our schools for military recruitment drives. In post-9/11 times, this was even more common tenfold. After speaking with the recruiter and having several meetings with my mother’s permission, I made arrangements to enlist in the U.S. Army as an engineer in the Armored Division. Since at the time I was really interested in welding and metal fabrication in Mr. Johnson’s class, I decided this could be a potentially good career move.
Mind you, this was well over a year prior to the invasion of Iraq and the quagmire from that conflict; and of course the Global War on Terror was a relatively new thing that we assumed would be momentary. For joining the Army, I had the full blessing of my mother and even my estranged father who thought I was making the right decision. I’ve mentioned before that I come from a military background: my father was a combat medic in the Pennsylvania 28th Infantry in the ’80s. His father was an officer in the U.S. Coast Guard who saw action and had confirmed kills in World War 2. His grandfather – Julius Theodore von Brunk – was a Prussian-born cavalry fighter who was a decorated soldier in the American Indian Wars in the Wild West, and served in the Union Army in the Civil War. If you go back even further, on my Native American side of the family I’m a direct descendant of Chief Tecumseh. I may be a creative artist, but I’ve got warrior blood.
After several weeks of going back and forth to MEPS in Harrisburg, PA – Military Entrance Processing Station – I was sadly not chosen to move forward with basic training, after I failed the tests for vision and hearing in the initial physical exams. I was deemed not suitable for the specific military career I’ve chosen, and at that point I just got tired of the recruitment process, and thus didn’t bother to apply for the medical waiver to see if I could try again to enlist. I realized then that it wasn’t for me.
Towards the end of the school year, one of Hempfield’s honor’s level science classes held an annual science fair. Of course I didn’t submit any projects to it, since I wasn’t an honors student, but I sort of jokingly wanted to somehow sneak into the event with my LB-1 model as a submission to see how far I could make it. I even drew up a fictional comic strip depicting myself as the winner of the science fair with my blimp-hovercraft as the winning entry. I don’t know, I thought it was kind of funny. I don’t remember who actually won the science fair in 2002, but I think the grand prize winner eventually got himself in trouble for plagiarism. I think: don’t quote me on that one.
The Precipice
The 2001-2002 school year finally ended. During the summer vacation between 11th and 12th grade, in a weird twist of fate I would splinter my friendships with Devin while I was able to slightly patch things up with Skot. I won’t get into too many details of it, but suffice it to say, Devin and I clashed over a girl. During the time off between 11th and 12th grade I was also speaking with my biological father regularly and learning more facts about my family history. These included interesting facts such as Grandpa Brunk’s military service in World War 2, Grandma Brunk’s Native American ancestry from the Ottawa and Chippewa tribes, as well as the von Brunk family’s noble Prussian origins prior to the American Civil War.
I spent most of summer 2002 improving myself, but also playing an extensive amount of old Nintendo games after I was able to repair my family’s old NES. Playing countless hours of Super Mario Bros. 3 for the first time in years sparked my fascination for an old long-lost love: those giant flying wooden airships! My fascination for building giant homemade aircraft truly never ended, but would just take on various forms over the years. At one point in summer 2002 out of boredom, I even attempted to build a small model Fokker DR1 triplane out of toothpicks. Don’t ask.
The start of my senior year in high school was a whole new chapter in my life. I changed my physical appearance quite a bit; notably I switched from eyeglasses to contact lenses. I began my 12th grade year at Hempfield as a changed young man, as I was approaching my 18th birthday. This was also around the time when I began using the moniker Baron von Brunk on a regular basis on early social media, when I learned more of my family history from my father during my summer break. I chose a name to reflect my family history as being a descendant of the Prussian Junkers, and thus borrowed the nickname Baron von Brunk from my father’s old AOL profile site.
Not everything about my 12th grade year was so exciting, however. Previously in 11th grade, I missed a considerable amount of school days during my attempts at enlisting in the Army, which meant I had to devote my upcoming 12th grade electives to making up failed 11th grade classes. This of course meant I wasn’t taking any tech classes during this time, so unfortunately I could not go back to making projects with wood and metal as I did in the previous years. The majority of my classes for 2002-2003 were essentially boring retakes of failed classes such as math and English, as opposed to making any cool projects with tools. Nonetheless, I was ever so optimistic for the future.
In spring 2003 I saw a commercial on TV that forever changed me: it was a promotional ad for the upcoming 2003 New York Red Bull Flugtag event. The Red Bull Flugtag is an annual amateur aircraft competition where participants are tasked with building comical homemade flying craft for exhibition and comical purposes, rather than any practical flying purposes. For instance, these flying machines were not intended to having any actual flight dynamics such as propulsion, aerodynamics, nor controls – but rather, were meant to just be pushed off a runway into the water for the sake of entertaining spectacle. In other words, the competition wasn’t meant to achieve flight by constructing a functional aircraft, but instead to build a giant hunk of cardboard and craft paint to achieve 15 minutes of fame as it plummets into the river.
If I have a sardonic tone in the description of the Flugtag event, it’s of course because it’s written with hindsight bias of over 20 years. At the time I initially saw this commercial on TV, however, my opinion was quite the contrary. I was a wide-eyed eager kid who assumed this event could be my finest hour so to speak. I visualized in my head that I could build a real flying machine that’s not a goofy hunk of cardboard, and could actually impress thousands of spectators. This was my moment to shine!
The Big Dream
After seeing the watershed advertisement for the 2003 Red Bull Flugtag, I immediately visited the Red Bull website and downloaded the necessary application, then sent it back to await my full application kit to arrive in the mail! In the following days and weeks, I imagined what sort of whimsical designs and concepts I would use for my aircraft. I was a huge fan of classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons like Wacky Races, so I considered perhaps modeling my kayfabe character persona to that of the legendary Dick Dastardly. Maybe I could market myself as some kind of fictional villain like a wrestling heel character, rather than going for any kind of generic Evel Knievel “good guy” persona.
I should also point out that the competition explicitly stated that each aircraft must be accompanied by a small team of people. The homemade aircraft could not be self-propelled with any kind of machinery nor fuel sources, as they would essentially merely be flight gliders on wheels that were to be pushed off a runway with the intention of briefly achieving mere seconds of flight. The LB-1 would already be disqualified in advance, as it was a hovering dirigible and specifically not a glider. Since all of the planes could not be self-propelled, the crew of people was necessary to
Despite these hindrances, I was somewhat in denial that I could possibly have my plans rejected. As the 2002-2003 school year came to an end, I was naively optimistic that I would have my blimp-hovercraft plan successfully allowed to enter the Red Bull Flugtag. At the end of the school year when everyone was signing autographs in yearbooks, I gave an autographed drawing of mine to my social studies teacher, and wrote a blurb which read, “Here’s to getting my aircraft off the ground!”. My teacher was a bit confused by it, but I explained he’ll hopefully soon understand what it means.
During the summer break I received my application kit in the mail from Red Bull. The application kit included a blueprint-like sheet of paper with a graph pattern where I was to sketch up the basic concept of my design. Unfortunately, this time I actually read the instructions of the guidelines and realized that it explicitly stated that all submissions must be some form of a glider, could not contain motors, and could not contain fuel sources. The hypothetical LB-1 was a hot-air blimp contraption that used a gas engine for propulsion and required a combustible source such as propane gas to elevate the balloon portion. These factors automatically disqualified any remote chances I would have to enter my aircraft.
Realizing I had to go back to square one, I quickly scrambled to redesign the LB-1 to be a dumbed-down analog version of its original self. I really didn’t know what to do, to be honest. Without the gas engine, I could not give the aircraft thrust. Without the hovercraft portion, the versatility of the vehicle would be neutered. So without really thinking, I sketched up some crude monstrosity of a hot-air balloon blimp attached to a bicycle – yes, a bicycle – with its drivetrain attached to a propeller in the rear. Basically, imagine some kind of crude, childish contraption that looked like it was rejected from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, or that it was some comical Rube Goldberg thing flown by Pee Wee Herman. It still didn’t even meet the requirements for being a gliding plane, but I just kind of assumed they would want something a little less conventional to shake things up. In other words, since every submission at that point consisted of flying gliders, I figured maybe they would want something completely different – a bicycle-powered blimp thing.
I also didn’t even amass a team of crew members. At that point in my personal life, my friend group was heavily fractured, and I only had a small core of close friends. I doubt any of them would have been able join my team and assist me for the competition. I should also point out that the 2003 Flugtag was to be held in New York City, and I didn’t drive a car at that time; in fact, none of my close friends had a car. So hypothetically, even if my plans were accepted and I could somehow build the revised aircraft in my backyard, I had no means of transporting it to New York and exhibiting it for the Flugtag. These factors never even crossed my mind. It was a true “cart before the horse” thing.
I don’t need to tell you that my plans were promptly rejected after I mailed in my rough sketch. As a consolation gift, Red Bull sent me a free coffee table book on strange aircraft. To be honest, I was really disappointed in the subsequent months and years following the rejection. For a while, I would kind of look back at the whole ordeal with a feeling of “I could have been a contender” type of lament. In the coming months, things in my personal life would take a turn for the worst, ending with my summer 2003 adventure that deserves its own story in itself. And with my plans to build amateur aircraft now effectively being grounded, I completely gave up with the idea of building any sort of flying machines, especially the original LB-1 completely.
This rejection in 2003 marked the end of my decade of flight – or lack thereof, really.
Epilogue
In the years following my rejection from the Red Bull Flugtag, I would make subtle references to the LB-1 in some of my personal lost media. In 2005 when I would regularly upload crude Flash animations to Newgrounds, I conceptualized a potential cartoon series involving steampunk-esque warfare in the skies, using a version of the LB-1 as the primary vehicle in the animations. I created a proof-of-concept pilot episode (no pun intended) and uploaded it to Newgrounds, which was received fairly well, despite the extremely terrible animation and artwork. I never created any subsequent episodes from there, and eventually removed that single episode from my uploads.
Every now and then during the 2000s and 2010s I would randomly bring up the 2003 Red Bull Flugtag and the LB-1 in casual conversation. Just the description of the event and my rejection alone sounds utterly ridiculous, so I’d usually just laugh off the absurdity. But deep down inside, I would really feel a sense of disappointment and guilt that I was never able to build my aircraft and enter it in a competition in front of spectators. This would culminate to a head-on in summer 2020 when I was alone at night in my Manhattan Upper East Side apartment. That summer was extremely bleak and nihilistic for most people including myself, and I had a lot to think about in my life at that point. I had recently commemorated my 10-year anniversary as a New Yorker, so during that summer I began reminiscing about my youth in Lancaster.
When reality finally kicked in and I realized it would have been impossible to compete in the 2003 Flugtag, I was able to finally accept that my lamenting of the rejection had been in vain. As mentioned earlier, there’s no chance the streamlined LB-1 would have been accepted in the competition at all, considering it was a hot-air dirigible and not a glider. I also had no large group of friends as teammates, nor any means to transport my aircraft to the event in New York. Therefore, during all of these years I was essentially crying over spilled milk.
So by 2023 when I started focusing a lot on making T-shirt graphics for my eBay/Etsy stores, I created a T-shirt concept as a tongue-in-cheek nod to my failed attempts at building aircraft from 1993-2003. The shirt features a shield crest of a Viking airship accompanied by text which commemorated my “Decade of Flight”. This was now the 20-year anniversary of my rejection from the 2003 Flugtag, and I finally decided to attend an actual Flugtag event in person for old times sake, which was being held in Ohio in the summer. Prior to attending the event, I built a LEGO diorama depicting a Viking ship Zeppelin for a LEGO Ideas competition; my T-shirt design used the same vehicle concept as the focus for its central logo. Then I had one of my special T-shirts printed, and then headed over to Cincinnati in August 2023 to witness the Red Bull Flugtag in person at last!
I was actually impressed how elaborate the aircraft were in the event. I was expecting a bunch of crude cardboard boxes with flimsy wings, but instead I saw some truly unique flying machines. One particular flying craft that stood out for me was a mock bomber plane with an all-female crew, that was themed after the movie Top Gun. Before trying to fly off the runway, the ladies staged a comical volleyball game as a nod to the infamous scene in the movie. After wandering around and getting my precious face completely decimated by sunburn, I eventually retreated to my hotel and laid to rest with new firsthand knowledge of what a true Red Bull Flugtag was like.
With this new knowledge of the Red Bull Flugtag, I decided to someday hopefully build a true homemade gliding aircraft akin to the concepts seen in actual Flugtag events. I have some ideas in my head, and perhaps they could actually come to fruition. I won’t give away too many details for my aircraft, but I have thought of a name, at least: The Spirit of ’03.
-Baron von Brunk