Red Bull has officially reached the point where it seems less interested in marketing energy drinks and more interested in humiliating the laws of physics.
Its latest stunt may be one of the wildest yet.
Pilot Dario Costa successfully landed a race plane on top of a moving cargo train traveling at 120 km/h (75 mph), and then somehow took off again moments later.
Yes, really. And according to Red Bull, this had never been done before.
The Margin For Error Was Basically Nonexistent
Costa wasn’t landing on a full runway.
He only had the final cargo container on the train to work with.
That gave him just 158 feet of landing space, along with roughly 50 centimeters of margin on each side.
That’s an absurdly small target for any aircraft.
Costa said all three wheels needed to touch down at the same time before he immediately accelerated again for takeoff.
Anything less would have likely ended very badly.
He Had To Land While Basically Flying Blind
The stunt gets even crazier when you realize Costa couldn’t properly see the train during landing.
Because of the aircraft’s design, much of his forward view was blocked.
At one point, he explained that all he could really see was sky during the final approach.
That meant he was essentially trusting calculations, timing, and pure instinct.
Before attempting the actual stunt, Costa practiced by hovering above a reversing Rimac Nevera R traveling at similar speeds to simulate the turbulence he’d experience above the train.
Even that test proved difficult.
The Plane Was Flying Right On The Edge Of Stalling
Costa used a 400-horsepower Zivko Edge 540, an aircraft built for aerobatics, but even that plane was being pushed to its limits.
The train was traveling at 120 km/h (75 mph), while Costa had to reduce his airspeed to roughly 87 km/h (54 mph) to match it.
That put him dangerously close to the aircraft’s stall speed.
He said anything slower and the plane would basically stop behaving like a plane.
In his own words, it would become “just a piece of cardboard.”
That’s not exactly what you want to hear before attempting something like this.
Turbulence Made Everything Worse
The air above the train created violent turbulence.
Costa said the aircraft could suddenly move left, right, up, or down by as much as four meters.
That unpredictability made a precise landing nearly impossible.
During practice runs, he admitted he wasn’t even sure the stunt would work.
At one point, he described the turbulence as “wild.”
That may have been an understatement.
Somehow, He Pulled It Off
Despite all of those challenges, Costa nailed the landing.
Then he immediately accelerated and lifted back off the moving train before running out of track.
Mission accomplished.
The entire stunt lasted only seconds, but it reportedly required months of planning and testing.
Once again, Red Bull proved that if something sounds physically impossible, it probably just means they haven’t tried it yet.