But it's all in good fun. Artisan engineer and Sunnyvale resident Daryl Fox and a group of friends built the contraption to participate in the Red Bull Flugtag, held on piers 30­32 in San Francisco on Oct. 25.

Flugtag comes from the German term for "flying day."

Teams build one-man machines that power off a pier and simply drop into the water. No real flying is involved—the crafts cannot employ any energy beyond that exerted by humans, and can't incorporate aids like parachutes or the wings of a hang glider. The projectiles that go the farthest can win prizes, but the true competition involves showmanship and a battle of wills.

Along those lines, Fox's team adopted a very Silicon Valley approach to the foreign competition. They learned their lesson after last year's "Der Fliegen Plastik" fiasco. "Yeah, we figured out why Boeing doesn't make a plastic airplane," admits team member Brian Reed.

This year, the group put their engineering education to good use to bring Fox's cannon concept to life. Over the course of several months of Sunday workdays, they built two 10-foot cannons, complete with a track inside, that fit together over an angled chassis.

In effect, Fox turned himself into a human cannonball. He rode a wooden board up the track as two team members pulled him by a rope, all while hurtling toward San Francisco Bay. "It wasn't hard to find people to push me off the pier," Fox admits.

To fit in with such a tremendous feat, Fox dubbed himself Captain Courage. "It's like Captain America, Evel Knievel and a human cannonball superglued with Super Dave Osborne," Fox explains.

He and his teammates, who comprise the Courage Cannon auxiliary, wore matching uniforms—made from the ultimate in Silicon Valley fashion. "Clean-room suits are really cheap," Fox says. "I got a pack of 25."

These preparations underscore the true attraction of Flugtag—the spectacle. Last year's Flugtag competition in San Francisco—the first one in the United States—drew 20,000 onlookers. The Los Angeles Flugtag lured 50,000 spectators a few weeks ago. With the outcome of every attempted flight a certainty, the competition really comes down to who wins the favor of the crowd.

Each group had to stage a two-minute skit before launch, but even facing ominous names such as Carriage of Carnage and Lord Drakon's Cold Air Zeppelin, the Courage Canyon wasn't intimidated by their rivals. "In our two minutes, we can go through the entire theme song of 'Battlestar Galactica,'" Fox says. He also anticipated the hallmark of every brave feat: fainting women. "That's what you always see in those old movies when the daredevil pulls off his stunt," Fox says.

Fox, who came to Sunnyvale from Canada in 1997, normally limits his flirtations with gravity to hang gliding. But an advertisement for last year's Flugtag intrigued him, and he scrounged up a group of friends to help with his last-minute plastic plane entry. As he was sitting in the cockpit waiting for takeoff, he had a moment to reflect. "I started thinking, "This might not be the best idea,'" he says.

But before he knew it, he sailed 30 feet into the bay and was already anticipating this year's event. "The water wasn't as shockingly cold as I thought it would be," he says. Within a few weeks, he had drawn out a plan for this year's cannon motif. He also decided not to hog all the glory this go-round. "This year, they're getting in the water with me," he says, pointing to his teammates.

At the competition on Saturday, all of the Courage Cannon's handles broke off and Fox slipped off the sled and got momentarily stuck in the barrel. But despite these setbacks, Fox still says the Flugtag went just swimmingly.