Max

Maximum "Max" Ride is 14 years old in the first five books; in the sixth book, she turns 15. The flock (the group of five other bird-kids) is the only group of human-avian hybrids ever created. Max is the flock's leader, and the eldest of all six children; she is four months older than Fang and six months older than Iggy.

Appearance
Like the rest of the flock, Max is tall for her age and has strong lungs with air sacs and light bones. Her wingspan is thirteen feet, and are presumbly hawk wings. She has long brown hair with blonde streaks, sometimes cut chopply in case it is bothering her and brown eyes. Max often wears jackets and ungirly clothes due to her hate of girlyness. She has a chip implanted into her left arm when she was younger.

Personality
Max has a strong sense of leadership being the oldest of the flock. She is protective of them, especially Angel, and treats them like her family. She sometimes takes the role of a mom, and calling Nudge, the Gasman, and Angel "sweetie" or "honey" and jealous whenever some take over her role, such as in School's Out-Forever, Anne Walker tucks the younger ones to sleep or helps them whenever one is hurt, Max is mad since she says she is the leader. Max is sometimes stressed by her Voice, who often tells her to save the world. Max has a tendency to cook horribly, and is often left up to Iggy to do.Max is also very Sarcastic.

Max often acts in a tough manner, due to being hunted by Erasers or tortured in the School or being the eldest and having to protect the flock. Max is very persistent, as seen when they were being attacked by the Erasers in the strawberry fields and they were being attacked, Max was knocked down by an Eraser yet kept trying to get up because she knew the others were in worse pain than she.

However, Max does have a soft spot. In Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports, she starts to develop feelings for Fang. But Max is so confused about her feelings that when she kissed him for the first time, she ran away. She has brown hair with red and blonde streaks in it, and says that she hates pink. She doesn't like to show emotion.

Like the other flock members, Max has wings, hollow bones, air sacs (in addition to strong lungs), a very efficient heart and her blood cells have nuclei. She is 5'8". She and the rest of the flock tends to burn calories very quickly because they gets lots of exercise while flying. Therefore, they need to eat as many as four times more food than a normal human. The flock is described to have super strength as Max says they are two times stronger than the average human male. Max like the rest of the Flock can move pretty fast and have enhanced speed and reflexes. Max has enhanced vision describing it as a hawk eye vision and can see from miles away than normal humans and also developed the ability of enhanced smell, such as when she smelled her flock members in Itex with Maya.

In Max, Max and Fang become a couple. She loves and cares for the flock, and she is like a mother to them. Max and her flock are skilled fighters. They grew up in a lab called The School, and were taken back there again in The Angel Experiment and Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports. Using amnio-centesis, scientists at the School grafted the flock with avian DNA; the flock is 98% human and 2% bird.

In Fang, Fang leaves the flock (including Max) behind. Dylan is another human-avian hybrid whom the flock discovers in Fang. He was created to be Max's "perfect other half," but she loves Fang. Fang believes that he is attracting danger to the flock and leaves them, devastating Max. Max only finds a letter that he wrote before he left. In the second book, Max develops a skill where she can fly in overdrive and reach speeds of up to three-hundred miles per hour. This proves useful when she needs to escape from battles or captures.