Hangar 7

Living at a boarding school on cold winter weekends is great. When you're tired of hanging around the house, but don't really want to venture out into the tundra, you escape to the student center or the gym or simply let Nikolas run up and down the empty hallways by the classrooms. We miss that!

Today we escaped to Hangar-7, which is just what is sounds like: a hangar by the airport. It's not your usual hangar, however. It's the private hangar of Dietrich Mateschitz, the mastermind behind the Red Bull energy drink, and was constructed to house his personal collection of planes, helicopters, and race cars. It also has a restaurant that features a different 'guest chef' each month (the current chef is from Boston), has a couple bars, an art gallery, and is a special event center.

Red Bull is one of the few Austrian products that has a worldwide reputation, and Dietrich Mateschitz is a self-made billionaire because of it. His marketing strategies targeted athletics and extreme sports, so I guess it should be no surprise that over time he bought the Salzburg hockey team, the Salzburg soccer team, the New York MetroStars soccer team, and two Formula 1 race car teams. All of these now carry the Red Bull name.

Hangar-7 is quite a spectacular building. It is a massive glass dome, the panes of glass being custom made in China so that no two are exactly the same size or shape. The collection of planes and race cars (full size and in miniature) is also quite amazing and includes historic and rare planes. Nikolas was quite interested in the water plane, complete with paddle strapped to one of the pontoons, which is supposedly the only water plane in Austria! The hangar stands on the far side of the Salzburg Airport, the runway running along side it. It was funny to see people run (literally) from admiring the glistening vehicles to the windows to watch a plane take off when the roar of engines was heard.

When we left, someone (maybe it was Mateschitz himself) was playing in a helicopter in the stretch of tamac between Hangar-7 and Hangar-8 (the workshop for the collection). It hovered only a few feet off the ground for quite a while, spinning around and lurching here and there. Eventually it lifted off properly and flew off. The company's slogan "Red Bull gives you wings" certainly seems fitting after a visit to Hangar-7.