Legacy of the Albatross

We are attending one of the hoariest rituals in Southern California. A new plane has been rolled out at Edwards Air Force Base, and we are standing in the freezing dawn, waiting to see if it will fly.

Frankly, the prospects don’t look so good. The airplane sits on the desert floor about a mile away. It consists of a huge wing with 14 propellers and no tail. The wing itself is so gossamer that its tips droop toward the ground. The whole assembly looks like it would break if you sneezed on it.

Then the propellers begin to beat lazily, like windmills. And it lifts off. The plane flies about 100 feet off the ground, proceeding with all the dignity of a Zeppelin. It turns this way and that, never exceeding the speed of a man riding on a bicycle.

Edwards, of course, is the place where Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier. Where the fastest fighter jets in the world get tested. Edwards is not accustomed to rolling out bicycle-speed airplanes. But still, the sight of this plane is extraordinary. When it passes over our heads, we cheer.

The plane is called Centurion. If successful, it will eventually soar through the upper atmosphere for months at a time using solar-powered motors. NASA, which is paying for its development, sees all kinds of commercial applications for Centurion, from data-gathering to communication relays.

After the plane lands, the ritual ends with an appearance by officials from AeroVironment, the company that designed and built Centurion. A successful flight test always contains a kind of magic--a heavy machine, after all, has just lifted itself off the ground--and the designers appear a little giddy. They congratulate each other and everyone goes home, satisfied.

In all this, the name of Paul MacCready has hardly been mentioned. MacCready, after all, is now 74 years old and did not play a major role in the design of Centurion.

But MacCready’s signature is all over the airplane. He founded AeroVironment 27 years ago and now stands as one of the last of a breed in Southern California: the designer of quirky, brilliant flying machines.

If you do not recognize MacCready’s name, you will recognize the names of his airplanes. In 1977 he designed and built the Gossamer Albatross, the first and only human-powered plane to fly across the English Channel. Next came the Solar Challenger, which duplicated the feat but used a sun-powered motor. In the 1980s, for an IMAX movie, he built a life-size Pterosaur that flapped its wings and flew on its own.

Occasionally, MacCready branched out into other kinds of solar-powered machines. His Sunraycer won the first international race for solar-powered cars between Darwin and Adelaide, Australia, in 1987. The design for that racer helped inspire General Motors’ first electric car, the EV1.

Once, long ago, Southern California was thick with designers like MacCready. From John Northrop’s Flying Wing to the sleek fighters that flowed from Lockheed’s Skunk Works in Burbank, the airplanes born in Southern California were the fastest, the most beautiful, the best in the world.

No more, of course. The Skunk Works has long moved away from Burbank. New fighter jets are rare. But the love of airplanes, and of flight itself, still thrives in the guise of MacCready and his cohorts.

Centurion, for example, borrows heavily from the Gossamer Albatross. “The whole thing is a legacy of Albatross,” Ray Morgan, vice president of AeroVironment, said during last week’s test flight. “When Paul MacCready built Albatross he faced the problems of low-speed aerodynamics and extreme lightness of weight. Those are the problems we face with Centurion.”

In fact, you could say that MacCready’s designs represent an abandonment of the old obsession with speed and muscle in flying machines. In their place he has substituted whimsy and fun.

Last week, as Centurion was being readied to fly, I met MacCready at the Santa Monica airport. He was talking to a group of schoolchildren and, as might be expected, his message was not exactly ordinary.

Don’t spend all your time getting an education from books, he told them. Search for the answers yourself. Build your own experiments. Trust no one’s conclusions but your own.

Even as the children’s teachers all looked on, MacCready said, “You will find that your teachers are sometimes wrong. Your parents will be wrong. Your schools will be wrong. If you look for the answers yourself, you will find that you can do better.”

After the children had left, MacCready said he has grave doubts about the education most schools offer to children. “Wolves and revolutionaries, that’s what we need intellectually. What we produce are sheep. I was trying to tell them that they didn’t need to depend on their elders for every answer to every question.”

MacCready no longer involves himself in the day-to-day business of AeroVironment. Instead, he has begun to explore another whimsical niche of aviation: miniature, remote-controlled airplanes.

“No one pays much attention to this area,” he said. “Ever since I began building model airplanes as a kid, I have been fascinated by them. I think there’s a great potential there.”

MacCready’s miniatures, of course, hardly resemble the planes you can buy at your neighborhood hobby store. Some of them fly in ways you never thought possible. And perform unlikely tasks. A couple of them are downright frightening.

During his talk to the schoolchildren, MacCready and Matt Keennon, an engineer from AeroVironment, demonstrated several. One, resembling a tiny Centurion, droned over the children and broadcast a television image of the scene back to a monitor onstage. The television camera in the plane weighed about an ounce.

Then came the ornithopter. About the size of a man’s hand, it flies and hovers by flapping wings like a bird. In flight, it seems more like a large bug than a bird and makes virtually no sound.

“The great thing about the ornithopter is its ability to hover and move horizontally. If we can put a television camera in an ornithopter, it could serve many useful purposes,” MacCready said.

Among those purposes is military observation. And that’s what makes the ornithopter a little creepy. One executive at AeroVironment described a future ornithopter floating through buildings in a war-torn city, silent as a ghost, seeking out enemy soldiers and broadcasting their images to distant monitors.

In truth, the great airplane designers have often served the purposes of the military. At least, in MacCready’s case, his planes will never carry guns.

In the meantime, MacCready has other pursuits to follow. He once tried, and failed, to build a small airplane powered by a hamster. The failure has always haunted him and he is thinking about trying again, only this time with a rat.

“Hamsters are lazy,” he says. “A rat may do the trick.”

Or maybe it will be something else. At 74, MacCready stays so busy that he could not attend the test flight of Centurion last week. He stayed in the city instead, talking to more groups of schoolchildren, telling them to ask their own questions, find their answers.

Creating more wolves and revolutionaries, no doubt. That has always been MacCready’s way, and there’s no reason to turn back now.