The world’s first floating skatepark at over 2,000ft in the sky

Limits do not exist for BMX rider and Red Bull athlete Kriss Kyle who has achieved something seemingly impossible. With a skatepark suspended from one of the world’s largest hot-air balloons, Kriss Kyle floats over 2,000 feet above ground, showcasing an array of tricks suspended in mid-air for his latest pioneering BMX film.

Kriss braves his fear of heights to ride against the clock, contending with the Formula One engineered BMX bowl swinging underneath him. In a masterpiece of precision, Kriss uses his unique riding style, quick thinking and years of experience  to manoeuvre the compact space, with no room for error.  Onlookers stood with jaws dropped at the spectacle of the world’s first floating skatepark, as Kriss performed a range of tricks, fighting against a heavily weighted parachute, and the bowl moving and bouncing like never before.

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The engineering feat saw Kriss work with Red Bull Advanced Technologies, the technological arm of the Oracle Red Bull Racing Formula One Team to design and develop the one of a kind carbon fiber BMX bowl. Made from the same composite as a Formula One car, he utilised their world leading aerodynamics, simulation and modelling expertise. This was combined with the record breaking capabilities of Cameron Balloons, to design and create one of the world’s largest operating hot-air balloons alongside a group of Kriss’ close friends who have been riding BMX and building ramps together since they were kids, bringing together an unlikely and multi faceted project team capable of allowing Kriss to fulfil his vision of riding his bike in the sky.

It wasn’t just aeronautical engineering challenges which made this project difficult to get off the ground – very specific climatic conditions are needed to get a balloon six times larger than a standard hot air balloon and capable of carrying a 1.7-ton bmx bowl in the sky. A rare combination of high atmospheric pressure, cold and dry conditions, along with surface wind speeds of less than 3 mph were needed. It took nearly three years of planning, waiting and weather-watching for Kriss to finally realise his ambitions of riding his BMX at over 2,000ft.

Manufacturing of the carbon-composite bowl
Once designed by GTR’s client Red Bull Advanced Technologies, GTR production engineered and manufactured the carbon-composite bowl. The project took 10 weeks to manufacture and delivered a structure that was 11 meters long, 8 meters wide and 3 meters deep. The bowl has a surface area of 160 square meters and once produced, weighed 1500 kgs. The bowl was manufactured in 22 separate individual modules that were then bolted together to create the final assembly. The production process involved the use of a low-cost tooling method using high density foam. Each mould was created and surface finished before being layed up as a vacuum assisted wet lay-up using dry fibre CFRP over a pigmented gelcoat that was then cured under vacuum, out of autoclave.

Simon Kingdon-Butcher, Director and Co-founder at GTR said: “This was a really exciting project for our team to work on here at GTR and I’d like to thank Andy Dance, in particular, for his detailed management of the project on our side. We were selected by Red Bull Advanced Technologies as they are an existing client of ours who fully understand our ability to deliver on a unique, complex and safety critical project such as this. Due to the size and complexity, we had to adjust our approach in a number of areas including the application of an ‘out of autoclave’ process. The final product fully met the requirements and we’re exceedingly proud of our achievements that demonstrate, once again, our ability to produce any kind of component or structure across multiple applications and sectors”. He added: “the ‘Don’t Look Down!’ film is simply stunning and can be viewed on the link. Please do take a look, it’s amazing to watch!”.