He Gives Wings to Dreams

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.