My birthday and the Airbeast!

The closeness of joy and sorrow.

After the World Cup race in Offenburg the whole Cannondale Factory Team had a relaxed extended dinner at the hotel. Good races are always followed by a lot of talking and discussing, especially Hepse, one of our team bosses, likes to do the closing speech after such a racing day (which sometimes can easily turn into some kind of preaching).

Furthermore this evening everybody was waiting for the stroke of midnight for my 33rd birthday. This is how it came that at midnight Hepse and Flo (our other team boss – this one preaching less) entered singing the hotel bar with a birthday ring cake, a German Gugelhupf with burning candles! I was really surprised, but I was thunderstruck when I even got another birthday present as well: those guys really gave me an Airbeast! Wow…

The Airbeast is a nice, little, 2-rotors-for-beginners, radio controlled helicopter with a cockpit painted like a dangerous hornet head! It looks great! The ones among you knowing me already for longer may know that I am a bit into RC car racing, but now this was my first RC helicopter! One of those I had wished for already for a long time!

And even better: the Airbeast was ready to fly right out of the box! Happier than a kid beneath the Christmas tree I made my first flying attempts right in the hotel bar. I was surprised that I was able operate this helicopter so quickly and steering it didn’t seem to be so difficult as I always had expected! Soon the hotel bar became too small for my flying exercises - or maybe due to the barmaid’s looks turning from admonishing into angry and black, we had to go outside to try a longer flight.

So it came that in the middle of the night on a dimly lit hotel parking the Airbeast got airborne in the Offenburg air space for its very first time. I well realized that, once the helicopter was off the ground, I needed to give it just a little bit juice only to keep it staying in the air. But the thing is if you’re used to full speed RC car driving, I am telling you this might NOT work out that EASILY!

It was difficult to me to control the throttle and therefore my new shiny Airbeast soared up into heaven, soared and soared,… until it disappeared in the dark of the night. The whole Cannondale team was gazing after my helicopter and, now that it was out of sight, we were listening to the engine noise only and tried to follow it, when eventually also the noise finally disappeared. With wide eyes we were all staring at the stars when… “THUD”, something hit the ground behind our backs…. holy crap……..

My Airbeast just had made its first nose dive like being on a kamikaze mission. And its last. A bad crash. It was totally destroyed. I just had smashed my new Airbeast RC helicopter  I had owned for such long 31 minutes.  It was simply B-R-O-K-E-N!!!! (For any further information about the damage, please talk to Craig our mechanic). I am a crash pilot. Thank God I am a better bike rider!