Group eyes human-powered flight record

Press, 7 January 1987, Page 4

Group eyes human-powered flight record

NZPA-AP Edwards Air Force Base California Practically on the heels of Voyager’s historic round-the-world flight, another private group has come to the Mojave Desert with another exotic airplane to assault an aviation record. v This time, a group of engineers and a part-time athlete hope to set a new record for humanpowered flight. Lois McCallin, aged 29, a financial analyst and triathlon competitor, plans to pedal an 40kg plane over a triangular, 48km course above a dry lake bed in southern California.

If successful, she will break the record set on June 12, 1979, when Bryan Allen pedalled the Gossamer Albatross 35km across the, English Channel.

The plane arrived at Edwards Air Force Base on December 23, coming in on a truck the same day the Voyager airplane landed after flying round the world without refuelling. The new effort, sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Smithsonian Institution and an American beer company, is called The Daedalus Project, after the figure in Greek mythology who flew after fixing wax and feathers to his arms.

As the Daedalus group works towards a January 14 flight, one of its biggest supporters is the man

whose plane set the record.

Paul McCready said his Gossamer Albatross wasn’t designed so much to set a permanent record as to prove a point, and to claim a 5NZ412,000 prize offered by a British industrialist, Henry Kremer. Mr McCready considers projects like Voyager and Daedalus a tonic for society. “It gets people’s minds broadened a bit,” he said. “.They see you can do things you didn’t do before.”

The plane Ms McCallin will fly is called the Light Eagle.

It has a wingspan of 31m, about the same as a DC9’s, and that will be extended to 34m when new wing tips are installed later this month. It has a skeleton of carbon fibres embedded in epoxy resin. Its front-mounted propeller is driven by a shaft and gears connected to bicycle pedals. Ms McCallin’s flight is intended as a sort of warm-up.

John Langford, a graduate student who heads the Massachusetts Institute team that built the Eagle and two previous peoplepowered planes, hopes to use the Edwards experience to design another craft capable of withstanding a 110 km flight from the island of Crete in the Mediterranean to the mainland of Greece.

The flight would follow the mythical flight plan of Daedalus as he and Icarus tried to escape from imprisonment in King Minos’ Labyrinth on Crete.