The Flying Camaro in Buenos Aires.
Once more: Chevrolet wins with the flying Camaro the press award for the best exhibition booth at the 2011 Buenos Aires Salón Internacional del Automóvil (Buenos Aires Motor Show). That's three in a row after the press awards for Chevrolet at the car shows in Sao Paulo and Seoul, where the flying Chevrolets cars have been the main attraction of the show.
The flying Camaro was transported from Sao Paulo to Argentina for this exhibition and our worries it might suffer during the lengthy overland transportion turned out to be unfounded. So it was flying time again. During the ten day car show we air-staged about ten flights per day filling Chevrolets stand time and again. A nice touch was the responsiveness of the Argentinian crowd who gave our pilot for every flight a big applause, especially for smooth landings.
The Adidas project and the Smartbird.
A couple of years ago we had been contacted by TBWA Argentina. They loved our flying solutions and thought this was a fresh and exciting idea to offer to their client Adidas for their upcoming event at the Copa America. We discussed the possibilities with their creative department and narrowed it down to this: the flying concept for this event must be an idea around a ball or soccer boots or both. These were the objects associated with soccer that could be converted with high realism.
TBWA then came back with the great idea of an Adidas soccer ball flying back and forth over traffic between two high rise buildings which have been fitted with huge die cuts of famous soccer stars. Back and forth between the agency and us, the scale and details were adjusted until we had an idea that was convertible. Adidas loved the concept and we had a deal. However, the hard part was to actually get permits to do such an action. TBWA quickly hit the wall with safety minded city administrations in Venezuela. The concept was finally converted in front of the stadium in Maracaibo where the semis and the final took place. Four huge billboards with die cuts of Messi and Kaka were erected and we provided the flying Adidas balls along with a specially developed outdoor security system. The balls flew back and forth between the soccer boots of the players over a crossing.
The Flying Bumblebee Camaro attracted masses at the Chevrolet booth.
If you think car shows in China are crowded, you don't know the Seoul Motor Show. Happening every two years, there must have been millions of visitors or at least it felt that way. For this year's mega event Airstage has designed a Flying Camaro for Chevrolet's large booth featuring a bunch of new models.
The Flying Car had the same iconic design, yellow with black stripes, as the famous Bumblebee in the movie Transformers. If there would have been a price for the most photographed object at the car show the Flying Camaro would have outright won it.
We (air-)staged 10 choreographed flights per event day and filled Chevrolet's booth time after time. Operating over such large crowds comes always along with a good portion of suspense for us. The Airstage pilot team had to proceed with utmost concentration to maneuver the Flying Camaro in greater distances around the large stand avoiding obstacles and maintaining a safe height above hundreds of heads consistently. You can find a video of all the action here.
Flying Car Video on Youtube takes off.
When we uploaded this video three years ago the traffic was very modest, but then this outdoor clip of an Airstage Flying Car took off far beyond what we could ever have imagined.
Every day this video is watched by an average of 12.000 users around the globe and has received thousands of 'likes' and comments. It is our best horse to market our unique remote-controlled flying event technology to event planners and marketing executives on a very broad platform. We planned to talk about this for a long time, but now it seems the right moment to mention it: this amazing video is ranked around the top 15 search results for the
keyword 'car' on Youtube and is in the top three Google results for the search term 'flying car'. OK, it's a bit mischievous to call it a 'real flying car' in the
description, but then it is one
of our very real event products flying around in a village. The footage is actually from an experimental flight in ideal outdoor conditions.
Because of the high realism we achieve with car models the debate on Youtube (over 7800 comments so far) is quite fierce whether this is a real Opel Astra, a blimp, computer graphics or some kind of magical trick. Believe it or not, dozens of folks have contacted us and wanted to purchase one believing it's an actual flying car or wanted to order upgrade kits for their vehicles. Sorry, can't help there!
Design study of the SmartBird and a test video.
You will recall the drawings of Leonardo DaVinci's flying machines trying to copy the bird flight from nature. It took more than 500 years for his vision to be realized: in 2011 finally the Festo SmartBird has arrived.
Airstage, part of Festo's Bionic Learning Network, has designed the SmartBird for Festo's trade shows and event activities. Airstage has played a major role in the development of this ingenious flying robot from the early design sketches by our engineers to its actual production in our facility. Before, nobody has gotten any farther than elementary models with simple flapping wing technology.
The SmartBird is inspired by a seagull and its design and flying capabilities are so true to nature that it can be easily mistaken for a real bird.
The SmartBird wings don't only beat up and down, but tilt at specific angels controlled by an intelligent micro-controller monitoring continuously all data and parameters during flight and making automatically real-time adjustments. The control of flight direction is achieved with a turning head and tail, just like real birds do it when they maneuver themselves through airspace!
Our previous experience with developments for Festo, especially the AirRay and AirPenguin, helped immensely to take things a giant step further in realizing the ambitious idea of a robot bird. The SmartBird was designed to prove and convey fresh ideas regarding the potential of greater energy efficiency in aviation. The SmartBird design has reached an unprecedented energy efficiency of staggering 80%. It's extremely light weight with a minimal use of components, materials and an ingenious drive technology made this stunning invention possible.
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