Baron von Brunk’s Decade of Flight: 1993-2003 – original T-shirt design I made for myself to specifically wear at the 2023 Red Bull Flugtag amateur aircraft competition in Cincinnati, Ohio. This quirky design commemorates my failed attempts at building amateur aircraft since my childhood all the way to my late teen years, when I was rejected from the 2003 Flugtag.
Backstory:
A lot of older Baron von Brunk fans and close friends/family should remember how for a duration of 10 years – summer 1993 to summer 2003 – I made several attempts at conceptualizing and building homemade aircraft. The earliest attempt was in summer 1993 when I was inspired by the airship boss battles of Super Mario Bros. 3 and tried to make actual wooden flying airships. Obviously I lacked the funds and ability to truly understand flight dynamics at the time, thus this plan never came to fruition.
Flash forward to the early 2000s: when as a high school student I designed plans for making a blimp-hovercraft hybrid in metal shop class. This idea merely existed as a general concept but was never actually built. In 2003 Red Bull announced a North American Flugtag competition for amateur aircraft enthusiasts to build and potentially fly homemade machines – in a humorous and tawdry manner for spectacle. Obviously I was excited, and thus retooled my blimp-hovercraft blueprints as an official entry to the competition, by reducing its size and streamlining it for competition guidelines. Sadly in July of that year, I was officially rejected but sent a free coffee table book on aircraft as a sort of consolation prize.
Getting rejected from the 2003 Red Bull Flugtag always bothered me and sort of lingered in my head for the years to come. I would always look back at it with a sort of Marlon Brando-esque “I coulda been a contender” lamenting feeling. Eventually by 2020 when reminiscing of my teenage years, I fully accepted it by realizing the harsh truths that A) My blimp-hovercraft was extremely impractical and wouldn’t have achieved flight in its intended method, and that B) As a naive kid at the time, I lacked any real logistical abilities to actually build the project in time, form a sufficient team of crew members, and transport it all to the competition in New York from Pennsylvania. Hell, I didn’t even get a driver’s license until age 23 – so how was I going to even drive this thing to the event?
With that said, in mid-August 2023 I attended the Red Bull Flugtag in Cincinnati, Ohio as a spectator to actually watch the show in person. This is the 20-year anniversary of my rejection from the 2003 New York Red Bull, so this particular event meant a lot to me. And because I’m the coolest dork ever, I actually designed and printed a special commemorative T-shirt to wear at the event: it’s an illustration I made of a Viking Zeppelin airship which pays tribute to my failed attempts at flying during my youth. Also accompanied in the design is a Pour le Mérite medal (a.k.a. a Blue Max): in the Imperial German Military, this was the highest-achievable award and was infamous for being given to ace fighter pilots in the First World War. As a descendant of Prussian nobility, this little detail is quite apt!
