This article is from page 9 of the 2006-06-06 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 9 JPG
A TULLA man and his flug-tag crew found on Sunday that Red Bull doesn’t give you wings.
In fact, Emelyn Heaps and his home-built plane were grounded when they tried to take part in the Red Bull Flug Tag event in the River Shannon in Limerick city at the weekend.
An angry Emelyn told The Clare People that after rebuilding parts of his plane three times, when it came his turn to fly, “I was told that the tide had gone out. How hard would it have been to calculate what time the tide goes out?”
With a background in aeronautical engineering, Emelyn currently holds the distance record for the Flug Tag flight, after taking part in the event in Dublin five years ago.
A team of six worked to build his plane “Record Breaker” in a bid to beat Emelyn’s record.
“We arrived with the plane on Saturday, but weren’t told until Sunday that the launch trolley was too heavy. The Clare Scaffolding Company came to our rescue with aluminium poles to make it lighter and we rebuilt it.”
When the carriage was rebuilt, organisers then told the team that the river authority were not allowing trolleys to go into the river. “This despite the fact that there were already trolleys in the river from earlier flights,” said Emelyn.
They re-built their magnificent flying machine’s trolley a third time “but then we were told, sorry lads, the tide is gone out. You can’t go.”
The crew had planned to launch their “Lying Air” flight captained by Michael O’ Query, offering flights to anywhere in the world for €1 plus €300 Government tax.
Emelyn said that he was “bitterly disappointed and very embarrassed. I roped a lot of people into working on this with me and they were expecting a day of great craic. The Red Bull people said they would ‘look after’ us, but the only useful thing they did was to point out where the pub was.”
The plane cost about €1,000 to put together “but it took a lot of time from people who helped. I’m so angry because of them.”
A spokesman for Red Bull said that it was the health and safety team who pulled the plug on the Tulla team.
“It was such a hot day that the water level went right down with the tide. There were two teams left and we pleaded to even let both of them go together, but there was no go. We were gutted for them.”
The spokesman said that Red Bull would be contacting both teams in the coming days to try to find a way to ease the disappointment.