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Red Bull lands plane on a moving train and a Rimac Nevera R drives 87 km/h backwards for training
20/02/2026
Red Bull and “normal” have not gone together for quite some time, but this one firmly belongs in the how‑is‑this‑even‑possible category.
Aerobatic pilot Dario Costa has managed to land an aircraft on a moving freight train, only to take off again moments later. A world first, executed on 15 February 2026 in Afyonkarahisar, Turkey, along a 2.5 km stretch of track. The train was travelling at 120 km/h, and according to Rimac, Costa had a window of just 50 seconds to execute the entire manoeuvre correctly.
Up to that point: pure aviation madness.
But the automotive link? That is where it truly becomes AutoNext.
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Why a hypercar suddenly became part of a flight exercise
For his preparation, Costa did not head to a runway with Red Bull alone, but also with Rimac. During a 3‑day test programme at Pula Airport in Croatia, a Rimac Nevera and Nevera R were used as a moving reference platform. A rolling target that allowed Costa to train speed synchronisation, alignment and timing as if he were already flying alongside the train.
The real mind‑bender: to simulate the turbulence created by a moving train, the Nevera R even had to drive in reverse at around 87 km/h, right around the near‑stall speed at which Costa approached the train. And yes, that sounds absurd. But from Rimac’s perspective, that is exactly the point: driving at an extremely precise pace, repeatable, stable and drama‑free, so the pilot could train human factors instead of reacting to chaos.
Rimac did more than just “bring a fast car”
The story does not end with “we put a hypercar next to an aircraft”. Rimac states that its engineers also developed a fully bespoke cockpit seat for Costa, moulded to his body and tuned for stability, feedback and fatigue reduction during extreme manoeuvres. They even describe it as, to their knowledge, the first application of this level of precision seat engineering in a race aircraft.
AutoNext take
This is classic Red Bull: a stunt that is simultaneously ridiculous and technically mind‑blowing. And it is also classic Rimac: not flexing power figures, but using engineering as a tool to do something no one has ever done before.
If you ever needed an example of why high‑performance engineering is not always about faster 0–100, but sometimes about precision on command, this is your case study.
