The Last of the Great, Electronic Flying Lizard : However, IMAX Film ‘On the Wing’ Immortalizes Soaring Efforts of the Mechanical Pterodactyl, QN

It certainly wasn’t the first time--from King Kong through Godzilla to E.T.--that a special-effects star has failed to show for the premiere of its own movie.

Then again, it should have been expected.

After all, no publicity stunt has bombed quite so dramatically as the first public flight of QN, that latex rubber and Kevlar pterodactyl built to appear in “On the Wing,” an IMAX documentary opening Tuesday at the California Museum of Science and Industry.

QN, it will be remembered with much mischief, spun out of radio control and crashed before tens of thousands of spectators at last month’s Armed Forces Day at Andrews Air Force Base.

It was, smirked news writers, a pterrible ptragedy .

It was also, concluded its embarrassed builders and shaken sponsors, the end of QN’s flying days and any further public demonstrations of their $700,000 toy.

Even the designer of this inordinate primordial, Paul MacCready, physicist, aeronautical engineer and realizer of impossible dreams, has a revised description for his creation: “A temperamental, overweight adolescent . . . but a good actor.”

Ergo, when “On the Wing” was previewed last week for West Coast critics, movie makers and 60 preteens comprising the museum’s Summer Science Workshop, the electronic flying lizard was represented by a stand-in--QN II, a 36-foot, full-scale, but absolutely inert decorator version of the fun, all-flapping original.

It was rather like looking at a waxworks model of Marilyn Monroe. The coloring wasn’t quite right. The personality of the eyes was absent. QN II even shed fake fur on the sleeve of MacCready. “Goodness, it’s molting,” he said. “I guess you can’t have everything.”

The real QN, the only QN in the eyes of many, was 2,800 miles away. Dangling from the ceiling of an exhibition hall at the Smithsonian Institution. Battered and scarred. Gutted of batteries and other electronic salvageables. And, suddenly, just as extinct as the original Quetzalcoatlus northropi (QN), the largest of biological fliers and a victim of the Great Extinction of 64 million years ago.

Yet to its eternal credit, insists MacCready, QN was a true aviator.

Producers of “On the Wing,” a film that explores the interrelationship of natural and mechanical flight, needed no mirrors, no back projection, no miniatures to simulate prehistoric flight.

They had QN built by MacCready’s team of engineers and scientists at AirVironment Inc. of Simi Valley. It actually flew. QN flapped and soared. The beaked head hunted side to side. Filmed against the hot lifelessness of Death Valley, QN was no prop. It was the last of the pterodactyls scouting cretaceous America and we are there.

Man and Flight

In the 30-minute movie--funded by the Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum and Johnson Wax--there is a scene of a hang glider over France. Its pilot slows in flight to embark a passenger. An eagle lands on his wrist and audiences break into mid-movie applause at this delightful symbol of the tie between natural flight and man’s impersonation.

Earlier, there is QN. Shot from a helicopter, he banks and spirals into a desert canyon. There are no human sounds. Just the swoosh of leathery wings and a hissing. This time, the audience is stunned to silence by the eerie ancestry of it all.

It follows, that MacCready, past winner of several international awards for building whisker-weight solar- and human-powered airplanes, can get testy at implications that two years’ work was wasted and that QN was a dud.

He has even investigated QN’s crash and written a formal report of probable cause that makes the most of a career-closing performance.

It was caused, he said, by a flight within an area saturated by radio communications and a “spurious signal” that overrode QN’s human controller. The renegade signal jettisoned a stabilizing tail assembly. That set QN free for flight before its autopilot had been activated.

“For the first time, with more than 20 successful flights behind it, the creature was flying with its brain off,” MacCready explained. “That’s like blindfolding a kid on a unicycle.

“QN inevitably turned around backwards and began spinning down. The autopilot was switched on and miraculously it came out of the spin, which delighted us.

“But QN wasn’t made to do stunts. As it was straightening out in a dive, under control now, its head swung sharply back. The breakaway plate connecting neck to head . . . broke under the excessive air load from the very high speed. The head folded back and QN went into a spin again.”

The damage to QN was quite painful. Broken neck. Two broken legs. Smashed image.

The benefits?

“In some ways it (the crash) was more interesting to the public because they got to see the creature’s innards as we were fixing it,” MacCready said. “And we did get a lot of publicity for the movie out of it.”

Ever the environmentalist, always the altruist, MacCready has even drawn a parallel between the extinction of the pterodactyl and the crash and subsequent exiling of QN to the Smithsonian.

He said: “The fact that it flew so reliably during filming at remote sites but encountered a problem when it was required to fly amid the pressures of civilization . . . reminds us all to keep considering the balance we must continually seek between technology and nature.

“Nature is the design engineer . . . technology is our servant, not our master.”

“On the Wing” opens Tuesday at the Mitsubishi IMAX Theater, California Museum of Science and Industry, Exposition Boulevard and Figueroa Street, and will be shown daily at 10 a.m., noon, 2 p.m., 4 p.m., 6 p.m., and 8 p.m. Admission is $4 for adults and $2 for children under 12, seniors and students with ID. Information concerning special showings and accompanying features may be obtained from 744-2014.