When the Method Becomes the Problem
How an amateur's trial-and-error approach outdid engineering professionals in the quest for human-powered flight.
The art of aircraft construction was well-advanced by 1976. That year, the Concorde became the first supersonic passenger aircraft to commence regular flight operations. It carried its passengers from London or Paris to New York at more than twice the speed of sound in a record time of 3 to 3.5 hours—twice as fast as before. Yet, a seemingly much simpler challenge of aircraft construction was still unsolved at this time.
In 1959—coincidentally also the year in which the preliminary developments for the Concorde began—the British industrialist Henry Kremer donated a prize of £5,000 for the first human-powered aircraft that could fly a horizontal figure eight around two posts at a distance of half a mile within 8 minutes. Four years later, Kremer doubled the prize money and finally increased it to £50,000 in 1973. Despite this impressive sum, equivalent to around US$ 780.000 in today's purchasing power, many teams failed to solve this problem for over a decade.
The American physicist Paul MacCready had a doctorate in atmospheric disturbances and was a passionate glider pilot but not an aircraft engineer. He only had some experience building indoor airplane models from his youth and hanging gliders with his sons. In the summer of 1976, he was US$ 100,000 in debt due to a guarantee for a friend's failed start-up. According to the exchange rate at the time, this sum corresponded almost precisely to the £50,000 of the Kremer Prize, which is why Paul MacCready became interested in the problem of human-powered flight.
Lacking prior knowledge of the "right" way to design airplanes and lacking the budget for a large team of experts and expensive equipment, Paul MacCready did not spend much time analyzing and planning like the other professional teams. Having studied the flight of vultures during his summer vacation, he came up with the idea of trying his luck with a lightweight "model aircraft" with an enormous wingspan of 29 meters, about the size of a DC‑9. Within just two months, the first version of the Gossamer Condor, consisting of aluminum tubes, wire ropes, and rigid foam covered with a polyester film, was ready for a test flight. It ended—like so many afterward—with a crash.
But that was precisely the point.
The Gossamer Condor was the naïve work of an amateur who did not care how professionals constructed airplanes according to the state-of-the-art at the time. This state-of-the-art technology used by the competitors led to very nice-looking and relatively fast airplanes. Still, it also made them quite complex and heavy—too heavy to be run solely by human muscle power in the long term. Yet, the real competitive advantage of Paul MacCready's design was not its lightness or other technical refinements but the fact that the Gossamer Condor was simple to build and repair, which allowed the team to learn from failures more quickly than the competition.
The success of this tactic was not long in coming. Within a few months, the small team around Paul MacCready was able to overtake the competition and improve the Gossamer Condor from failure to failure to such an extent that, with professional cyclist Brian Allen as pilot, they finally managed to fly the figure eight around the two posts half a mile apart in a relatively leisurely 7:25:05 minutes on August 23, 1977. And just two years later, on June 12, 1979, the same team crossed the English Channel with the Gossamer Albatross, the successor to the Condor, and was awarded the second Kremer Prize, worth £100,000. Paul MacCready was out of debt and went down in the annals of aviation.
The professional teams before him followed the rules of engineering. And for good reason: If this art made supersonic flight and landing on the moon possible, it should be able to solve this seemingly simple problem. However, the problem was more complex than initially thought. The same analytical approach to engineering that had continually improved aircraft construction over the decades could not deal with the complexity of human-powered flight. It was only through the empirical approach of trial and error that Paul MacCready, as a layman, achieved where so many experts before him failed for so long.
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