Paul MacCready; The Economist obit (Designer of Flying Machines)
amelia...@gmail.com
September 8, 2007
U.S. Edition
Paul MacCready, designer of flying machines, died on August 28th, aged
81
ICARUS did it with feathers glued together with wax; he flew too near
the sun and plummetted into the sea. Giovanni Battista Danti tried it
with pinions of iron and feathers in 15th-century Perugia, hurtling
over the piazza and crash-landing on the church. Charles Bernouin in
1672 in Regensburg strapped a rocket to himself, as well as calico
wings. His novel jet propulsion merely meant that he broke his neck,
rather than his legs.
Paul MacCready's Gossamer Condor, which made the first successful
human-powered flight as recently as 1977, was some improvement on
these. It was made of aluminium tubing, Mylar and piano wire, with a
weird horizontal stabiliser poking from the front like the head of a
stork. It weighed 70lb (32kg), with a wingspan of 96 feet (29 metres),
and the engine inside it was a lean, determined cyclist called Bryan
Allen, pedalling for all he was worth. Sheer perseverance got him five
feet off the ground for about a mile (1.6km) round a figure-of-eight
course, and won Mr MacCready the first of many prizes.
Money was his only motivation, he said later. Because the prize
offered for this feat by Henry Kremer, a British industrialist,
exactly matched a debt Mr MacCready had to discharge, he had started
to think about flying machines and how to make them more efficient.
But this offhand explanation was not strictly true. He had been
fascinated by wings, and by flying, all his life.
It began with moths and butterflies. As a boy, he collected them on
the Connecticut shore and pored over the exquisite studies of John
Henry and Anna Botsford Comstock, two 19th-century naturalists, to
explore the evolution and the vein-structure of the wings of
lepidoptera. Nerdy already, small and unsporty, he then buried himself
in making and flying model aircraft: fixed-wing and flapping-wing, out
of a kit or out of his head, propelled with rubber bands or with tiny
petrol engines. Again, he won prizes. The boy who posed proudly for
the camera with a balsa-wood glider and a silver cup grew naturally
into the inventor whose chief joy was to make wings ever lighter and
ever larger.
Birds were always his chief instructors. Daydreaming in summer,
looking upwards, he noticed that the larger birds, hawks and eagles,
could stay aloft for longer, riding thermals with supreme elegance
without flapping their wings. When they needed to turn, they would
tilt their wings to bank higher, preserving the lift and using almost
no energy. Mr MacCready applied the same principles to his human-
powered machines. The wider the wingspan, he calculated, the less
power would be needed to fly; with wings of 100 feet or so, the 0.3 of
horsepower produced by a cyclist would get him airborne and keep him
there as long as his legs could last. Another such craft, the Gossamer
Albatross, all carbon fibre and polystyrene wrapped in polyester film,
flew 22 miles across the English Channel in 1979, barely clearing the
waves while Mr MacCready urged it on from a boat.
There were other ways, too, to fly. Mr MacCready fitted one of his
aircraft with an umbrella-panel of leftover photovoltaic cells; they
provided 400 watts of extra power. He then produced with DuPont the
first plane powered entirely by the sun, the Solar Challenger, which
in 1981 flew the 163 miles from Paris to Canterbury at a height of
11,000 feet. "Flying on sunbeams", he liked to call it. The folk at
NASA got interested, and for them he produced giant unmanned solar
wings, 200 feet across, which could stay above 50,000 feet for six
months at a time to track environmental changes or to spy. Spying
could be done, too, with the tiny "drones" he invented, based on
bumble bees, with a six-inch (15cm) wingspan and video cameras inside
them.
Realistic, businesslike and, according to friends, with a bit of a
Scottish streak, Mr MacCready knew that most of his inventions were
impractical. In his mind his company, AeroVironment, which he ran for
more than 30 years, was dealing mostly in ideas. People were not going
to pedal their planes themselves. Nor were they going to want solar-
powered cars, even though Mr MacCready's version, the Sunraycer, won a
race of almost 2,000 miles across the Australian desert. The point was
to set people thinking about energy efficiency, to inspire the young
to take up science, and to experiment for the joy of it.
At the end of his life, still fascinated by the potential of
everything, Mr MacCready began to dream about kites: big kites, kept
aloft indefinitely about 1,000 feet up, to extract the "huge energy"
from high-altitude winds, to monitor acoustic signals and perhaps even
to provide thrust to vehicles on the ground. For him, it was a return
to an old delight, soaring and sailing among the clouds. As a student,
he had studied the turbulence inside them; as a champion glider in the
1940s and 1950s he had learned to ride on ridges, waves and thermals
and had invented a gadget, the MacCready Ring, which showed the
optimum speed to fly to avoid losing height between them. After a
time, he had found the sport too risky. But at the age of 79 he spryly
announced that he would take it up again: still the nearest thing
humans have to the carefree flight of birds.
Designer of flying machines