Paul MacCready and John Langford, "Human-Powered Flight: Perspectives on Processes and Potentials” - MIT 1998 Gardner Lecture (4/27/1998)

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MODERATOR: The Gardner lecture given by the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. Lester Gardner was a friend of the department, was interested throughout his career in aeronautical engineering, and was instrumental in creating the Hunsaker professorship. He was mostly a publicist of the field of aerospace engineering as it's now called, and was the publisher for more than 10 years of aviation and aeronautical engineering, and was quite a noted contributor in his own right to aeronautical engineering in the middle of the century.

Today, for only the second time in the history of the lecture, we have two lecturers who will jointly, and in a somewhat coordinated fashion, give the lecture. This past week was the 10th anniversary of the flight of the Daedalus airplane, human powered airplane, from Crete to Santorini, perhaps recreating the mythical flight of Daedalus. Are you going to talk about the myth, John? You are. I won't take any more of John's ammunition.

And we thought it was an appropriate time to commemorate the entire history of human powered flight and asked two of the principals to come and be with us today to share their view of this history from the insider's view. I can recall, literally as a young man, that we had at MIT a series of I believe it was three symposia on low speed and motorless flight in the late '60s and early '70s, largely organized by the late Jim Nash Weber, and brought together at that time some of the leading figures and builders of human powered airplanes up to that point.

And my recollection of them was the last of them was in about 1974. Does anyone remember if that's-- '76. And that was still before any of the Kremer prizes had actually been won if my recollection serves me. Is that right? Yeah.

So we decided to make this, in some sense, a joint event, that there was today are organized by Mark Drela and Carolyn [? Thotusky, ?] the technical symposium on low speed and motorless flight, to bring together some of the ongoing technical efforts in that area and then followed by the lecture this afternoon.

Well, let me introduce very briefly our two lecturers. THey're, interestingly, both founders and chairmen of various small to medium size flight vehicle companies I guess you would say it.

Paul Macready is a figure who needs little introduction in the world of modern aerospace engineering. He's the founder and chairman of AeroVironment, Incorporated, a company that builds specialized aircraft with a particular emphasis on advanced electric power systems. He's a member of the National Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. And as you know, and probably will hear more about, is the father of the Gossamer family of lightweight human powered vehicles.

Jon Langford is the founder, president, and chairman of Aurora Flight Sciences, a company which specializes in flight vehicles specialized to the high altitude environment, and including the Perseus proof of concept vehicle. He was the program manager for the Daedalus project and the spark plug for several of the other previous human powered airplanes at MIT. And in the interim between two of those, left MIT where he received his degrees to go off and work on what became the F-117 stealth fighter at Lockheed Martin, or at that time the Lockheed Corporation.

So without further time delay, I'll introduce Paul MacCready who, as I understand it, will speak first.

[APPLAUSE]

MACCREADY: Thank you and good afternoon, friends of airplanes, human powered airplanes, challenges, and fun. This is a field that's been going on for a long time. There's been a huge amount written about it. In the short time we have this afternoon, there's no possible way of going over this huge history.

So one is referenced to a lot of books that exist. I've written up a version of my talk, a version that doesn't have much in the way of illustrations. I'm going to show lots of slides and videos here. So it'll be very different. But the written version does have a list of a lot of the publications that you can read that really give all the details on the facts of what happened in this field, how the field began, and events that have taken place until fairly recently.

Also, I will show towards the end, a video doing more with much less that shows Gossamer Condor and Gossamer Albatross very briefly, which you'll be hearing a lot about in the talk. But also it shows some of the things to which those have led fitting into a theme of the doing more with much less. And we give copies of that video to anybody who wants them. But I only have a couple of loose ones here.

But if any of you will sign your name over there or put a card in the little bowls on the far side of that table, apparently MIT has some way of magically seeing to it that you will receive one, because we'll just send them a bunch.

I wanted to not duplicate what's in the written literature but try and look a little broader perspectives. And the broadest perspective is start way back looking at what flight has meant to creatures on earth. Several hundred million years ago, it became obvious in evolutionary survival challenges that the air was a wonderful avenue to get up into away from the things that would eat you.

And instead of having to crawl over slimy things on the ground and fall rocks and so on, there is a nice, pure air to let you escape things, travel long distances, look for prey, et cetera. And there's such value in getting up into this added dimension in spite of all the difficulties associated with it where you have to have wings, and need light wing loadings.

And you're fragile and you have to have a good bit of energy and a lot of specialization. But the features are such that I think something like 3/4 of insects fly now. And obviously, other natural flyers-- birds, and bats, and pterosaurs were great success stories. And some of them still are.

To go through this very quickly, I want to start with the first slide, which shows the four arms-- one human, three belonging to other vertebrate creatures. And the three top ones fly. And because this ecological niche of flight requires the things that grow from little creatures' DNA requires either they flap something. They're flapping their arms.

And this slide shows that all of them have, including humans, have the same basic arm structure. So they started in the flight mode at different times so they accomplished it different ways. But if you follow all four of these back far enough, you come to certainly a common ancestor.

The top pterosaurs is very simple. And it's almost like a big hang glider. And the outer half of the wing spar is just the little finger that extended way out. And birds do it differently. Bats use their fingers as the control surfaces.

There are a lot of different insects, some old dragonflies I think were about 2 and 1/2 foot wingspan back in the old days. And even now, they are wonderful successes, nature's helicopters. Birds are similar. Hummingbirds are similar, nature's helicopters.

And the hummingbird looks very similar to the hawk moth, which occupies the same flight niche. They look the same but one's an insect. One's a bird.

The flyers that we're really in awe of are some of the more efficient birds. Here's an albatross. Just magnificent for going out over long distances over the ocean. And you'll notice very high wingspan. Looks almost like a sail plane. And essentially no tail. It can whip out a tail for some tight maneuvers, but most of the time, it does not use one.

Same is true of the frigate bird, which soars on very gentle up currents and convection over oceans, because it's using these weak thermals that are about a meter a second. It ends up as a superb low speed soarer with low sinking speed. The albatross using dynamic scoring is more like a bullet with wings. Goes a lot faster. Each one fitting their niche.

And then when you get over land, there are many other kinds of soaring creatures. And you start seeing ones that are very good at the low speed flight, maneuverability, all those feathers doing interesting and, we are beginning to learn, very efficient things in order to make flight work very well. And we just had a talk today on the way wings should join the body.

It turns out that resulted from a lot of advanced theory. And it turns out they look just like the vultures that have been around for 100 million years. So we're learning. We now can see bugs, birds, and bats fly. But we can't see the pterodactyls fly because they went extinct when the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago.

As they started, and the pterosaurs, they were rhamphorhynchoids with tails like you see here, actually rather small creatures, more sparrowlike than the awesome size that you see. And then as they got larger, as time went on, the larger ones began having no tails. It turned out an ounce of brains used an active control seemed to be much better than adding an extra pound of tail on the creature. So modern ones just flew like ordinary creatures.

And this is a static display model of the largest creature that ever flew, the QN pterodactyl, of which we made a flying model to be in a movie called On The Wing showing the evolution of natural flight, evolution of technological flight. And there were no pterodactyls around to take pictures of so we made a replica, only an 18 foot one rather than 36 foot one, because we only were able to get up through the temperamental overweight adolescent size by the time the project was done. But it worked.

And in the flights, it crashed often but never when the IMAX cameras were pointed at it. Somehow it knew what its mission was. But to have this thing fly is just amazing. It has no tail. Trying to keep it pointing forwards like trying to shoot narrow with the feathered end forward. And it makes you appreciate nature. So wonderful on active control.

And those other birds that I showed you aren't using the tail very often. It uses active control. Humans are edging toward that. But most of our planes have regular tails. I've got a video that will show this flying if you start with number one.

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- On January 15 this year, in [INAUDIBLE], California, the modern day pterodactyl flew for the cameras in the Smithsonian's widescreen film On the Wing. A part of history we had not witnessed more than 65 million years ago was brought to life. Can you imagine?

The most important thing on this is that it serves as a symbol and catalyst against people's minds [INAUDIBLE]. What it's done for us is ensure [INAUDIBLE] appreciate the wonderful job mother nature does as a design.

Man will not [INAUDIBLE] something this large can be propelled by biological power, by muscles. But nature shows that it was. But it's the same fact [INAUDIBLE] wanted across the planet and realized we didn't discover [INAUDIBLE] geography. [INAUDIBLE] design an airplane. It just changed the world, because it got people's [INAUDIBLE], I hope this will be a little bit the same way. Okay.

MACCREADY: Nature has a lot of different ways of having flying things, showing you the four real fliers. But then seeds are made so they have pretty good aerodynamics. Pollen is distributed through the air. Spiders on spiderwebs can be transported hundreds of miles.

And there are many different kinds of flight. And there are flying fish. And many of you won't believe it but there are actually flying squid. And they fly in groups and fly very beautifully. Not very far.

All this is to emphasize that all energy of creatures on earth really comes from sun with a few exceptions and with different time constants. So solar power up here, you get instantly. Fossil fuel is stored energy of sunlight, maybe from many millions of years ago.

Up here using wind and heat to make thermals and sail planes fly. But also there's food for muscles, which is the energy that creatures use to get around. And so a hawk will start with this energy. And then we'll use a lot that comes from wind and the heating of the ground making thermals.

So I've shown a spectrum of flying things that go from practically no weight up to that giant pterosaur. And the pterosaur probably weighed, or pterodactyl QN and probably weighed 180 pounds at about a 36 foot wingspan. It was the only one of that species, the large one, found and I doubt that one found the biggest. And you look at some scaling laws. And there's no reason why they couldn't have had one, say, 40 foot in size.

And there are some giant versions of that hawk or that vulture that I showed that probably got up to 180 pounds and flew about 6 million years ago. These began edging towards people type weight. And the giant vulture was probably around 20 foot wingspan, getting up towards span that involves real airplanes.

So there got to be, at the beginning of this century, some interest in human powered flight. A lot more interest at the very beginning because people didn't know about engines. But once engines began, the interest in human powered flight sort of evaporated. But an early prize was to see how far you could go just using the kinetic energy of your momentum as you got a bicycle and significant prize.

Competitions like this do help the field move along. There's another prize put up in the middle of the '30s. This is one of the planes that attempted to do it. And they're really very great pioneering airplanes. Person in there pedaling. Couldn't qu9ite climb, but could greatly extend the glide.

But I think it then sandbagged with the requirement of the government, I believe in Italy, that this had to meet all the strength requirements of regular commercial aircraft even though it would never fly higher than 10 feet. And that rather limited it. It was a great pioneering effort. And then a big moment in this field, there had been a man powered aircraft group associated with the Royal Aeronautical Society for a while.

Henry Kremer was a friend of some of those people. And after selling a division of one of his companies, he had a party to celebrate and asked one of these people how is that human powered airplane stuff going. And his friend replied it wasn't going anyplace. They're just sitting around talking to each other. It was going to take something like a prize to make it go to get that field going.

And Kremer, who was starting on his third martini, said I'll put up a prize. And that was the deep insight that went into what I think is one of-- you'll find from the consequence-- one of the most creative activities in the 20th century and does get you to think about the importance of ethanol as an energy producer or liberator. Anyhow, Kremer is short fellow right there.

And right after his prize came out, teams in England began focusing their attention on really getting stuff out. Not sure which plane this is. It might be the Puffin. But they built several large span quite sophisticated, though sophisticated-- one of the definitions of the dictionary is unnecessarily complicated. You wonder why so many ribs and so on. Well, it's easy to be judgmental long after the fact. This was a great pioneering activity.

At the time, illustrated some of the difficulties but illustrates some of the successes. And they were able to actually get the plane like this off into the air under the high power that a pilot can put out for a very short period of time. But it couldn't turn. And when it crashed, it would be six months or so before they'd be back flying again because of its complexity.

Ignore the Albatross that followed later. But there began being various planes that no need to go into. If you really want to get the history, there are bunch of books that give it in delightful fashion. But a bunch of groups did work on this.

But the surprising thing was after the first flush of success the first few years, it turned out people weren't getting any closer to winning that prize, which was ingeniously-- the rules were ingeniously put as a figure eight flight around two pylons half a mile apart.

Required something to be able to turn left, turn right, go up high enough the beginning and the end of the flight. So it couldn't be just some exaggerated ground effect. Machine. It took long enough so you couldn't get by on that anaerobic power, where a pilot can put out one and 1/2 horsepower for a few seconds. It had to be the aerobic continuous power where he's down to more like a third or half a horsepower.

I had no interest in the subject at all, but I had a background that was fairly useful to prepare me for this-- incidentally about the only interest I was-- like everybody in the [INAUDIBLE] activity-- I was aware of the competition. And I think in the 1974 MIT event I was back here and actually saw movies of one of those planes fly-- I think might have been Jupiter-- and it was very dramatic and that imprinted itself on my mind. But I had no interest in the whole topic.

But I did have a background in model airplane building when I was a youngster and I'd make these indoor models-- somebody else's, I'm not a youngster here. But thing like this would weigh about a gram for the model for a one meter wingspan, and the rubber band that powers another gram, and they've gotten up to one hour flight indoors with these. The propeller just slowly goes like that and it moves through the air like a fish gliding through an aquarium. It's a art form-- turns out to be amazingly analogous structurally and stability and control-wise to Gossamer airplane.

Is also familiar with hang gliders because with my sons we were playing with these as the sport is getting pioneered in Southern California in the first half of the 1975-- 1970s and, again, came to appreciate the virtues of tubes in compression, exterior wire bracing, simple sail construction. Well-- and I was also involved in streamlined bike activities. The International Human-powered Vehicle Association began getting going, then go as fast as you can with no rules. Rules stifled bike development for a long time now. Just go as fast as you can and great developments took place. And through that I was getting very familiar with exercise physiology, championship bicyclists, exercise training techniques, and so on.

And then on vacation trip my mind-- got away with my mind daydreaming. It's very hard to find any daydreaming time these days with so many pressures. But the only time I've ever gotten a big idea is when I been daydreaming-- mind thinks for itself, decides on what it wants to think about, and it was connecting some things in my mind-- one of which was-- gotten a debt because, as a good guy, guaranteed somebody's note at a bank for a $100,000 loan to start a company which didn't succeed. He couldn't pay it back. I was stuck with a note and didn't have the cash to do anything about it. But I assure you that was stuck in my mind some place even on vacation trips. Your unconscious would nibble away at that.

I was aware that-- had no interest in the Kremer prize which I had-- I did know was up to 50,000 pounds. But, once, in middle vacation going-- I looked the newspaper, I found the pound was worth $2 at that time, and suddenly this light bulb just glowed over my head. Why that's the same amount as my debt, how exciting and important human-powered flight is. So I began concentrating on it very hard and tried-- I'm an aerodynamicist, I should be able to figure things out. But every design I came up with were like those people in England that were not able to-- that didn't come close to succeeding with big teams, and big, complex, elegant airplanes, and I batted my head against that wall for a while-- gave up, went off did other things.

I was doing some studies of bird flight-- timing how long it takes for a bird to go around in a circle, look at the bank angle, you can tell it's flight speed, flight radius. And then I began comparing this bird with that bird, comparing-- doing the scaling laws that relate different size, and weights, and speed, compared that with a hang glider and the sail plane, and this hobby thing suddenly-- as often happens-- I thought back about human-powered flight and realized, hey, it's all solved. There was an easy way to do it which is if you make something large enough and light enough-- if the weight just doesn't go up and you can keep making a thing like a hang glider bigger, and bigger, and bigger-- no matter how ugly it is-- if it's big enough, you can fly it on very low power and so immediately made a model.

As soon as that vacation trip was done, you see here that tested how you make a very large wing. I had no knowledge of wing structure, but I had knowledge of indoor models and so on-- just used logic. This is the best way to make a lightweight structure. And that's the model. And about two months later we were flying the first version of the Gossamer Condor-- 55-pound weight with my 105-pound son flying at the time, who would fly as slowly as six miles an hour and had a lot of problems with it-- in everything. It exaggerated the problems so that you can identify and understand them.

But it had one great feature which is it was quick to repair, modify, alter, redesign. And if it crashed on landing-- you didn't grab it properly as it slid a little sideways-- because stability control was just awful-- and a tube broke, you'd get a broom handle and some duct tape and tape the broom handle back on. You'd be flying in five minutes. That accident would have kept those people in England not flying for something like six months. So we got huge amount of flight experience out of this. Learned all the difficulties. It's just so thin, fragile. It seems as though the shadow looks a little more solid than the airplane does.

Well, we began sensing the reason for some of these problems was an apparent mass effect that exists on all airplanes but completely negligible. The mass of air to which you're coupled on the plane and regular plane is negligible compared to the airplane here. It was much, much larger than the mass of the airplane and the person. And it was affecting what was going on, affecting the controllability, and the total energy during acceleration, during turning, why we couldn't turn.

We used advanced computer models on stability and control, trying to get answers about this. And all the computer models said is those flight observations you made-- which is there was nothing you could do to that wing in drag [INAUDIBLE], drag rotors-- that would make any difference, just keep flying straight and maybe sliding off on a side. And that's what we saw and that's what the computer said, yeah, that's right.

It didn't tell us what to do, so I put a couple of sticks together that had Gossamer Condor proportions, shoved it around in the swimming pool-- as you see here. Here's one of the sons doing it, with your hand just feeling like a force balance in a wind tunnel. But here, you're working the fluid almost a thousand times denser than air so that apparent mass effect is really emphasized.

And within five minutes, we had the main answers, what the inarticulate computers hadn't been able to tell us, and we came up with the final design. A lot of the designing in detail was done by friendly friends who I'd lured into the project. It was very much a team effort. They were experienced. They had built airplanes, boats, so on.

And this is the way the drawings were done. We never had a set of plans until after the prize was won. The prize was not for drawing plans. It was for doing the flight, and we didn't have to worry about numbering plans and storing them and so on. Yeah, we used computers on prop design and some airfoil and stuff like that when it was needed. When this was okay, that's what we did. And wind took care of erasing stuff when you were done. It was appropriate technology. It's not the way to design airliners, but that's what we did.

And a little bit on the construction-- aluminum tube. If the wall was too thick, you'd chemically mill down to the correct thickness. And looking in the wing, just a lot of pieces of tape-covered Mylar. Now we're making a double surface plane. And got my youngest son-- or middle son, Tyler. Another person had been doing the main test flying, but that person had to go off to Belgium.

So Tyler did a bunch of the test flying. Next, just working out on a [INAUDIBLE] to build himself up. The amount of power you have to put out is about proportional to your weight. And a young person-- older person can do it. And he had some flight skills and he works cheap, so we got him. And with a new version, it was flying beautifully right off the bat, but still a lot of little problems with it and structural and we needed to lighten its weight and so on.

But it was kind of going in the right way. We then decided we-- it was going okay and now we needed a real pilot, Bryan Allen. And here he is with some of his exercise training. We were very lucky to locate him. He's a gifted pilot, but also very good on stamina-- willing to fit into such a project, works on airplanes, and we were just so lucky. But the biggest-- the most important thing in this project was lots of luck, and getting him was a big part of that.

Now let's have the next video-- rather than showing you a lot of Gossamer Condor things, this video, taken from the kiosk at the National [AUDIO OUT] will show some of the flying.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- [INAUDIBLE] led by Dr. Paul MacCready of AeroVironment Incorporated. The development of the Gossamer Condor took a year and was a friends and family affair. The earliest version demonstrated the validity of the team's design approach-- a huge, feather-weight, slow flying aircraft.

- [INAUDIBLE], the air's speed is okay. Sock it to it.

- It's twisted a bit. Let's get up about 3 feet. Okay. [INAUDIBLE] 35.

- Let's go, [INAUDIBLE]!

- Stop pedalling! Stop pedalling. Pull a left!

- You go get him.

- Oh! The [INAUDIBLE]--

- Oh, yeah. Hold this up.

- Hold it up there. You look--

- Hold it up there--

- Get up--

[MUSIC PLAYING]

- The builders learned from both crashes and computer programs, and they made many changes to create the final airplane with a 96 foot wingspan and weighing only 70 pounds.

- Where are the nails?

- Six minutes and two turns later, the only obstacle left is the 10-foot finish pole.

[SHOUTING]

On his prize-winning flight, Bryan Allen landed with the words "we did it," a tribute to the teamwork that made the Gossamer Condor fly into aviation history.

[END PLAYBACK]

MACCREADY: This is a shot during that flight. The flight was great. The pressure was off. The prize was won. A good bit of it had been consumed. And expenses on the project-- and there was always a team. I'm sorry that the only way you'll get the idea of the teams on all of these projects is to read the publications. They were not a one-person effort at all. The team is very important.

Here's Kremer at the prize event in England. Wonderful for us. Prince Charles gave the actual trophy and check from the Royal Aeronautical Society. And setting it up in the National Air and Space Museum, where we have recently, last year, cleaned it all up. And we didn't think was going to last there more than two years, because it was also baggy and floppy and tape pulling out.

But now it's kind of cleaned up and we put a mannequin in that looks just like Bryan Allen so people can see which way it goes. And the kiosk video shows a lot of people flying it after the prize flight-- old ladies and little kids and so on-- to make people realize this was kind of a person-next-door project, not some big aerospace firm activity.

Kremer came out with a new prize, taking 18 years for somebody to go a mile. He thought it'd take another 18 years for somebody to go 23 miles across the English Channel. But we realized if we just cloned the Gossamer Condor, cut down the power required-- 20% or so-- and selected the right day, the pilot could fly much, much longer and do the job.

But now we use carbon-- now, no new ideas in the aerodynamics. It wasn't all that interesting a project. But in the structure, carbon tubing instead of the aluminum and many more ribs, much more accurately contoured airfoil and so on, and flew perfectly right off the bat. But like our previous ones, there were various-- there were some crashes.

And as we assess the situation, it looked as though to get enough testing on this, to get it over to England and back was going to cost a bunch of money. We were able to get the DuPont company to spring for sponsoring the project and letting us keep the prize money as a carrot out in front of us. And so the project charged ahead. Here doing some quick flights as we began building-- cleaning up the first plane.

We'd put my youngest son-- because he only weighed 80 pounds-- in it, and you could just push it around and nothing would get hurt if it hit hard. And then fix it up and Bryan Allen was doing a good job flying, but he was only able to fly about 20 minutes with this particular prop. And by going to a different prop that Jean Larrabee had designed and people at MIT here helped us with or actually did the detail design. Then we did the building.

This optimized the prop very elegantly for the crew's condition on the flight. And plane-- Bryan did a flight of about an hour and 20 minutes, landed and felt he could've gone on forever. So we were off to England miraculously. We didn't know how to get to England. But in the middle of the night, I get a phone call-- very muffled of all those airplanes at Nellis Air Force Base at 2:00 AM on Saturday. And that was the message.

And so there was a C-130 from the Royal Aeronautical Society. Three human-powered airplanes were all crammed inside it, and all our belongings, and so on. It was just another-- good luck is more important than anything.

Bryan Allen doing a lot of training in England, and training with Joe Mastropaolo in hot, humid conditions with no air blowing on him in order to get training for what it would be like in the plane during the flight. Then on the day when the weather looked as though it just might be okay, we're on the Warren near Dover getting ready for the flight to begin. Let's have the next.

Wait a minute, before the video begins-- the take off, because of that prop, was great for cruise but it was rather poor for takeoff when you're going very slowly. And we hadn't realized how bad. We'd always done it on big airports before.

Here we put out a little runway, a piece of plywood. The wing running wasn't done quite right, and the plane got just off the plywood, and the little toy 2-ounce wheel fell into the only little hole in that big acre of concrete, and snapped. And so there is the plane. That was our start.

And this is an audience participation exercise. You're asked to see if you can figure out who is the DuPont representative who is running the project. But about 10 minutes later, the plane started on what was the most fantastic journey, most fantastic physical stamina event that I've ever heard of.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

- Doing okay, Bryan. You're looking good, Bryan. You're looking good. Heading in there, good buddy. It's downhill from here.

- Numbly, Bryan pedals on, no longer counting time. His flight instruments no longer function and his water supply is exhausted. When at last he sights the French coast through the haze, his heart sinks. It is still three miles away.

- Go, Bryan.

- For Bryan, each moment now has become a victory. Dehydrated, suffering severe leg cramps, his judgment has begun to waver. Briefly, he considers crashing on the rocky point.

Instead, he fights to save the Albatross from the turbulence that [INAUDIBLE] added and nearly wrecks it a few feet offshore.

- Come on, Bryan.

- Then slowly, at last, he's done.

[CHEERING]

[END PLAYBACK]

MACCREADY: And a bigger team, but many of the same members from the first team on this project. We never had so much pressure, and I've never been so exhausted. And all the people, we were using psychokinetics or telekinesis or whatever for lifting Bryan during that whole thing, from the boat. It was tough.

This shows at Aerovironment, we're into a lot of different things. And when these human-powered airplanes began, it spawned a big list of projects that are ongoing now. And we're growing, I think 240 people. We're growing as fast as we can find really qualified people. And it relates to ground things and energy things, with a lot of commonality between all these.

There are many too many things to describe that the Gossamer aircraft led to. The important point is that it led to just so many things that I heartily recommend everybody should get $100,000 debt to get themselves moving. And also get some projects that don't require a product the next year, but let you really explore the frontiers of some technology.

Here's the first solar flight. They're 80-pound sun, still, because we didn't have many solar cells and that actually climbed a little bit just on the power of solar cells. This is Bionic Bat, that won two of the Kremer Speed Prizes. And here's a flying telephone pole that's very hard to describe. But it's amazing what things will fly out at El Mirage.

And well, I'll go back on this. As a human power-- this is the last of the human power slides. This is a human-powered airplane that our son's figured out how to do. And this kid can walk a whole city block with his hands in his pockets.

And just the up-current of the air going around his body and over his forehead will keep that airplane up there. We have not found this to be a marketable talent, unfortunately, and he's just home goofing off right now. Let's have the next videos. Made some big planes--

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

But also some little planes. Here you see a little thing weighs 1.8 grams zooming around the room, and under radio control. It's got a video camera in it, and all the telemetry, and so on.

Buddy will catch it on this one, which is the preferred landing technique. And then on the next go-around-- we've flown these inside auditoriums like this, and now you'll see what the airplanes saw. It was very crude camera. We have better ones now, color, and higher light level, and so on. But you are there. Okay, next video, please.

[END PLAYBACK]

The next video, I won't have time today to show you the Birdman contest. I'm showing you things that we did. Birdman contest in Japan, they have 70 human-power or glider aircraft fly that are just wonderful. It's a wonderful training aid.

It seems silly. They're all destroyed. They go out from a 10-meter platform over the water, and they all land in the water, and that's the end of them.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

But I can show you this-- "Doing More with Much Less" that you can get a free copy of.

- Doing more with less is a vital feature of a world that works, where our increasing demands are met, yet do not overwhelm the limits of the Earth. Some of the unusually efficient vehicles with which Aerovironment has been involved serve as visual metaphors for the theme. Most dramatic is the unmanned, 100-foot, solar-powered Pathfinder, here undergoing low-altitude tests in late 1993. Versions are aimed at eternal flight, or at least flights for months above 65,000 feet, to carry equipment for surveillance, stratospheric monitoring, and telecommunications.

MACCREADY: Last summer, it went 75,000 feet, higher than any--

- The fragile, 70-pound Gossamer Albatross was pedaled 23 miles across the English Channel in 1979 to win the largest prize in aviation history. It demonstrates what can be done with low power when new concepts of efficiency are unleashed by challenges not burdened by constraints from narrow rules or the need for commercial production. It is a catalyst for new perspectives that can lead to useful insights and products such as the Pathfinder. And incidentally, it was a tribute to the human spirit.

The more primitive and fragile Gossamer Condor was the first really successful human-powered airplane. The final version can be seen at the National Air and Space Museum, where it was installed after this 1977 flight won the first Kremer Prize. About this time, the International Human-powered Vehicle Association was starting to organize competitions for land vehicles, without the inhibiting effect of rules-- just go as fast as you can. The streamlined Gold Rush finally exceeded 65 miles per hour, and a two-person version averaged over 50 miles an hour on a 40-mile freeway trip.

Later competition started to include some less extreme practical vehicle categories, no match for our wonderful modern cars, but valuable in suggesting that some transportation need not involve large amounts of steel and oil, and can be healthy and fun. Pioneering for speed from human power has resulted in some amazing water vehicles. This Flying Fish hydrofoil lowers drag by flying on a submerged wing. It has been pedaled at 18 miles per hour, and can beat the best eight-oared racing shells.

In 1987, General Motors teamed with Aerovironment for the rapid development of the GM Sun Racer to be entered in the World Solar Challenge to cross Australia on energy from sunlight. It won, speeding 50% faster than the runner-up, and averaging 42 miles per hour on only a kilowatt of power. Batteries to store the intermittent energy from the sun for vehicle use are essential, and obviously, for non-race purposes, they can be charged from the utility grid without need for solar cells. This solar car race helped emphasize that battery-powered cars can make sense.

Next, the same team combined to create the battery-powered Impact demonstrator. To show that cars emitting no pollution can be part of our transportation future, it needed adequate range and snappy acceleration. Here, it zooms from 0 to 60 miles per hour in eight seconds.

Now many groups are increasing priorities on battery-powered vehicles, vehicle efficiency in general, and broader transportation issues. Impractical human-powered airplanes, streamlined bikes, and solar-powered cars now seem more valuable as some of the ideas they ignited evolve into socially desirable vehicles aimed at a mass market. Globally, bikes are widely employed for personal mobility, transport of goods, and recreation. For some uses, battery assist, a scaled-down version of electric car technology, makes sense.

You can get the help of a virtual peddler, here hidden in the saddlebags, who weighs only a few pounds and never talks back, not to turn your bicycle into a motorcycle, but to let you do for 30 minutes what your normal ability would let you do for only three minutes. You can extend your commuting range with his bionic hybrid that will never run out of gas. You can match performance between individuals or not be bothered by hills on a hot afternoon.

A tiny airplane, the AV Pointer, serves for surveillance, in effect a pair of roving eyeglasses, a cutting edge example of where miniaturization can lead if the operator is remote from the vehicle. It is convenient to carry, assemble, and launch by hand. Battery powered, it is silent and rarely noticed.

It sends high-resolution video pictures back to the operator. With onboard GPS, it can navigate autonomously. And it is rugged enough to self-land without damage.

The modern sailplane is superbly efficient. Some can glide as flat as 60 feet forward for every foot of descent. They are powered only by the energy they can extract from the atmosphere, an atmosphere Nature stirs up by solar energy. Humans and soaring birds have found Nature can be generous in providing replenishable energy. Sailplanes have flown over 1,000 miles, and the altitude record is over 50,000 feet.

The Solar Challenger was made to serve as a symbol that photovoltaic cells can produce real power and will be part of the world's energy future. In 1981, it flew 163 miles from Paris to England, solely on the power of sunbeams, and established a basis for the Pathfinder. The message from all these vehicles is that ideas and technology can be harnessed to produce remarkable gains in doing more with less, gains that can help us attain a desirable balance between technology and Nature.

The stakes are high as we speed toward a challenging future. Buckminster Fuller said it clearly. "There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth, only crew." We, the crew, can and must do more with less, much less.

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MACCREADY: Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]

John Langford takes over.

LANGFORD: Thank you very much, Paul. And I'd like to say thank you very much, too, to Ed Crawley for organizing this. This is a great opportunity and a great event to put two programs together here.

What I'd like to do, if we could bring the first slide up, bring the lights down and the first slide up, is to take up where Paul left off, in many ways, in the story of human-powered flight, and talk for a few minutes about the MIT side of it. And in particular, it's the Daedalus Project, obviously, that has epitomized this. But I'd like to speak as well about the whole history of this, with an emphasis on the role of these things as student teaching tools, because they have played a unique role in the department over the last 20 years or so.

This is the famous image of Daedalus 88 arriving at Santorini 10 years ago just last week, after about a four-hour flight over 72 miles, 115 kilometers, the product of a three-year program here at MIT and piloted by Kanellos Kanellopoulos. And it's a very great pleasure to have Kanellos here today. If you could stand up for a minute, Kanellos. This is his first time in the United--

[APPLAUSE]

This is the first time that Kanellos has returned to MIT since he was here before the flight training. And we're delighted to have him and so many other members of the Daedalus team back. So I mentioned the project really goes back 20 years or so.

And many of the themes that Paul was talking about a few minutes ago play right in in here. The Kremer prize served as the impetus for and the stimulus for a number of student projects beginning here in the early 1970s. This aircraft was one of two called the Biplane Ultralight Research Device, or BURD, which were built here in the Department by the two teams or several teams of students during the early 1970s.

This was what the finished configuration looked like. This was about a 60-foot span, two-person aircraft. And as Paul has just narrated the story of the Gossamer Condor, once the Condor won the Kremer Prize, the first one in 1977 for the figure-of-eight flight, interest in these projects languished somewhat.

As Paul mentioned, there was a subsequent prize offered for cross-channel flight. There had been a number of other activities here at MIT. The one that our group particularly came out of was the model aircraft group and the Model Rocket Society, which had been actually pioneering the techniques that Paul showed a few minutes ago in that micro air vehicle flying around inside, which is now a program supported by DARPA, the Defense Projects Agency.

And one of the big advances here at MIT in the late 1970s was the miniaturization of radio control technology and its application to these small, radio-controlled boost gliders, here flying for the US team in the World Championships in 1978, where Harold Guppy Youngren won the first World Championship in this event. We got involved in the activity of human-powered aircraft. Here you can see there's Guppy, the world champion on the right, and Professor Drela in the center, driven by the interest in this as student projects supposed to be fun and interesting.

As Paul alluded to, though, there were some very serious aspects of this, as well. And one of the first areas that the MIT group really was able to distinguish itself in was the design and the application of numerical methods to airfoils, and particularly to propellers. And as Paul mentioned, Gene Larrabee was influential in this, bringing the methods of Pranel and Betz and Gloward and updating them from for computer execution.

And it was really a generation of students there working under Gene that coded that up. And the propeller became the first real visible implementation of this. This is Mark hot-wiring a piece of that propeller, these large, four-meter diameter props built in little six-inch-long sections here.