TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/061190/0611520.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 12.4 KB | 255 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 52

He Gives Wings to Dreams


PAUL MACCREADY'S creative mind, having spawned weird and
wonderful vehicles, now focuses on the global environment

By LEON JAROFF


    A few blocks away from the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif.,
a slight, bespectacled, gray-haired man sits motionless in a
reclining chair in his study, staring vacantly into space. Paul
MacCready is engaged in his most productive activity,
daydreaming.

    His chin is cupped in one hand, a ball-point pen in the
other, and opened on his lap is a large notebook with lined
pages. Occasionally he stirs, his eyes focus, and in tidy,
cramped handwriting he adds a sentence or two to the notebook,
already largely filled. To a visitor the pages look vaguely
familiar. Then realization dawns. The black-inked notations and
tidy sketches of winged and wheeled vehicles, streamlined
contours and odd mechanisms are startlingly reminiscent of the
famous illustrated notes penned by Leonardo da Vinci five
centuries ago.

    Self-effacing and at 64 still somewhat shy, MacCready would
cringe at any comparison with the original Renaissance man. Yet
he has created what Da Vinci dreamed of and designed, but
literally never got off the ground -- flying machines propelled
solely by human muscle power. These and other unique MacCready
airborne contraptions have made aviation history, and his
innovative electric-car designs could help usher in a new era
in ground transportation.

    Such accomplishments would be fulfillment enough for most
humans. But they attest to only a few of MacCready's many
skills. He has piloted conventional aircraft as well as
sailplanes and hang gliders, is an ardent environmentalist and
a successful entrepreneur, the founder and president of
AeroVironment Inc., a small, innovative firm that specializes
in monitoring and cleansing the environment, alternative energy
and energy-efficient vehicles. He also frequently dons the hat
of an educator, lecturing at schools, universities and business
meetings, urging the formal teaching of the kinds of "thinking
skills" he feels are necessary to meet growing environmental
and social challenges.

    MacCready's own thinking skills have served him well. He
first won national acclaim in 1977 when his Gossamer Condor,
a kitelike affair propelled only by a furiously pedaling
cyclist-pilot, flew in controlled flight for more than a mile
around a figure-eight course. For that feat, unsuccessfully
attempted by dozens of others over the previous 18 years,
MacCready won a $95,000 prize from British industrialist Henry
Kremer. Two years later the same pilot pedaled an improved
version of the ephemeral craft, the Gossamer Albatross, all the
way across the English Channel to earn MacCready a second
Kremer prize of $213,000.

    MacCready had already been named Engineer of the Century by
the American Society of Mechanical Engineers when, in 1981, he
unveiled another of his pioneering vehicles. Carrying a single
pilot, the Solar Challenger took off, climbed to 11,000 ft. and
flew 163 miles from France to an R.A.F. base in England, its
electric motor powered solely by the 16,128 solar cells mounted
on its wings.

    It has been all uphill ever since. In 1986 another MacCready
creation, perhaps his most remarkable, swooped high over Death
Valley while being photographed for the Smithsonian
Institution's IMAX film On the Wing. It was an awesomely
realistic, radio-controlled, computer-brained, wing-flapping
replica of the largest creature ever to have flown, the
pterodactyl, which vanished with its dinosaur cousins some 65
million years ago.

    The list of MacCready's brainchildren goes on and on: the
General Motors Sunraycer, a solar-powered electric car that in
1987 won a 1,867-mile race across Australia against 23
competitors, averaging 41 m.p.h. and beating the second-place
finisher by two days; the Pointer, a 9 lb., battery-powered,
TV-equipped observation aircraft that can be launched by hand,
remain aloft for 75 minutes, transmitting back to the ground
whatever it sees, and then make a soft landing; the General
Motors Impact, a sleek, battery-powered electric car that can
accelerate from 0 to 60 m.p.h. in 8 sec.

    What makes MacCready a font of creativity? Nobel laureate
physicist Murray Gell-Mann, a Pasadena neighbor and close
friend, attributes that quality to MacCready's outlook: "He
approaches nature and daily life with an innocent sense of
wonder. He approaches problems and learning about new things
in the same way, without strongly held, preconceived notions.
When he sees something in daily life, when he sees something
in nature, he takes a fresh view of it."

    Ivar Tombach, an AeroVironment vice president, marvels at
MacCready's "intense curiosity and incredible capacity to take
little fragments of information and synthesize something
totally unexpected out of them. A news clipping, a little thing
on the evening news, something that he sees while going down
the street." Often, while driving with Tombach, MacCready will
suddenly look out the window and exclaim, "Look at the bird.
See what he's doing!"

    MacCready waves away any praise. "There is less here than
meets the eye," he insists. While many off-the-wall concepts
arise in his mind, he says, most of them could not have been
translated into reality without the talented scientists and
engineers among his 200 employees. And, he insists, without the
automotive savvy and financial backing of General Motors (which
owns 15% of AeroVironment), the Sunraycer and Impact might
still be on the drawing boards.

    When pressed, however, MacCready credits daydreaming for
much of his success. As an example, he cites a month-long
vacation in the summer of 1976, when he, his wife Judy and
their three young sons drove 7,000 miles from California to the
East Coast and back again. Rolling along in the family van,
away from work, MacCready let his mind wander.

    Random thoughts occurred: the $100,000 note he had co-signed
to help a relative and now must repay. The news item about the
value of the British pound rising to two dollars. The unclaimed
50,000 pounds Kremer prize awaiting the first person to achieve
a mile-long, controlled, human-powered flight. "Suddenly this
light bulb just glowed over my head," MacCready recalls. "Fifty
thousand pounds was worth $100,000, which would pay off the
debt."

    Back in his daydreaming mode, MacCready drove on, watching
a red-tailed hawk circling above. Estimating the bird's bank
angle and timing its circles, he calculated its speed, then did
the same with a black vulture. His mind drifted to hang gliders
and sailplanes, conjured up scaling laws to compare their
flying characteristics with those of the birds, and suddenly
focused on man-powered flight.

    "This was really the great `aha' moment," MacCready says.
Stopping along the way in Aspen to visit Murray Gell-Mann, who
was vacationing there, MacCready announced that he had figured
out how to win the Kremer prize. "He was that definite,"
Gell-Mann recalls.

    The solution, in retrospect, was simple. "If you start with
a hang-glider-size plane and triple its size up to a 90-ft.
wingspan while keeping its weight the same," MacCready
explains, "the power needed to fly it goes down by a factor of
three" -- to only about 0.4 horsepower, in fact, which a
trained cyclist can generate for many minutes at a time.

    Two months later, with the help of his sons, friends and a
few colleagues from AeroVironment, MacCready had assembled the
first flimsy version of the Gossamer Condor out of aluminum
tubes, piano wire, Mylar film, a propeller and bicycle parts.
With a wingspan of 96 ft., it weighed only 55 lbs., and
MacCready's two older sons, Parker and Tyler, were soon flying
it for short distances, rising a few feet above the ground.
After another ten months and many crashes and revisions, Bryan
Allen, a bicycle racer and hang-glider pilot, successfully flew
the Condor around the Kremer course, ensuring MacCready's place
in history.

    The Gossamer Condor now hangs in a permanent spot next to
the Wright brothers' first airplane at the Smithsonian
Institution's Air and Space Museum, where the Solar Challenger
and the pterodactyl have been displayed. The Smithsonian has
also acquired the Gossamer Albatross and the Sunraycer.

    Pretty heady stuff for someone who in his New Haven, Conn.,
school was always the smallest, least noticed kid in the class.
"I was a lousy athlete, not coordinated and socially pretty
shy," MacCready says. To compensate, he turned to solitary
hobbies, largely involving flying creatures and flight. He
collected butterflies and moths, began assembling model
airplanes from kits and soon was designing his own autogyros,
helicopters and ornithopters. At 15, he was already winning
national model-airplane contests. "At the time I wished that I
could be a football hero and a smooth character," he says. "But
I now realize that if I had been, I'd be just an overage
football jock instead of still plying my trade as a scientist
and an engineer."

    Before long, MacCready followed his models into the sky,
taking flying lessons and soloing at 16. He studied mechanical
engineering at Yale, enrolled in the Navy during World War II
and took fighter-pilot training at the Pensacola Naval Air
Station. Returning to Yale, he switched his major to physics
and with a few friends bought an Army surplus glider. Soon he
was totally absorbed in soaring, which he continued while
earning his master's degree in physics and a doctorate in
aeronautics at California Institute of Technology.

    While still in school, MacCready managed to win three U.S.
National Soaring Championships, and rode the updrafts east of
the Sierra Nevada range to a then record 29,500-ft. altitude.
After graduation, he went on to become the first American to
win the International Soaring Championship, at St. Yan, France
in 1956. While soaring, and daydreaming, he also conceived the
MacCready speed ring, a simple indicator now universally used
by glider pilots to determine the optimum speed they should use
in flying between thermals, or updrafts.

    For all of MacCready's fascination with flight, aircraft
account for only a small fraction of the total business of
AeroVironment Inc. The company, which he founded in 1971 with
fellow Caltech aeronautical engineers Tombach and Peter
Lissaman, derives most of its annual $17 million revenue from
the monitoring and control of air pollution and hazardous
wastes. One current contract, for example, involves determining
the contribution of Arizona's giant coal-fired Navajo power
plant to the haze that sometimes hampers visibility around the
nearby Grand Canyon.

    The company's emphasis on environment reflects MacCready's
most passionate concern. "My goal," he says, "is to have
mankind reach a comfortable accommodation with the flora, fauna
and resources of the earth. And that requires equilibrium after
a while, not population increase, not consumption of
irreplaceable resources, and certainly not wiping out all the
flora and fauna as we are now doing."

    Although he is heartened by the recent upsurge in the
environmental movement, MacCready remains gloomy about the
future, especially if population growth continues unabated.
"There are cultures and religions that just keep wanting more
people," he says. "So population keeps going up, arable acres
keep going down, and in a couple of more decades, we are going
to hit the wall."

    One way to delay that impact, MacCready says, is to seek a
better balance between nature and technology. And a unique way
to dramatize that concept, he firmly believes, is to achieve
another of his goals: animal-powered flight. What kind of
animal? MacCready has already drawn up some formulas and
tentative contest rules that would permit use of any creature
from a hippopotamus to a goldfish. He has even considered using
a hissing cockroach. ("It has a little longer power cycle than
the ordinary roach.") But he may settle for a dog. "There are
already cases of dogs that love to join their masters in hang
gliders," he muses, leaning back and staring into space.
"There are dogs that happily get exercise on a treadmill."
Pause. "Dog-powered flight would complete the link." Paul
MacCready is daydreaming again.