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Icarus hang glider processed wood12/19/2023 ![]() When the plane thudded down three hours later onto the small Mermaid Beach near the Cap Gris Nez lighthouse on the northern French coast, the exhausted pilot was mobbed by a small crowd of helpers, observers, onlookers and reporters. This time, Allen, cycling frantically against a slight headwind to generate the 1/3 horsepower that propels the plane, got it airborne. failed when the plane, rolling on tiny wheels down a wooden runway, toppled over onto the concrete quayside.īut neither the plane nor Allen - in his shorts, crash helmet, cycling shoes and lifejacket - was hurt, so another takeoff was tried just before 6 a.m. When conditions finally seemed promising this morning, the portable plane was assembled two hours before dawn. MacCready, known as the father of man-powered flight, brought the Gossamer Albatross, Allen and the crew to Britain last month to train and wait for the right weather: light wind and a calm channel. Today's flight was carefully monitored by Royal Aeronautical Society observers on the Folkstone dock used for the takeoff, in boats following the plane across the Channel and at the Calais beach landing site. The rules for the cross-channel competition won today were that the craft be heavier-than-air, ruling out balloons take off from the ground, eliminating gliders and soaring planes and be powered only by human muscle, barring motors, propellants, gases or pushes from the ground. Like Icarus of Greek mythology, who flew too close the sun and melted his wax-and-feather wings, many attempts over the centuries ended in tragedy - or at least ignominy -as people with homemade wings attached to their arms jumped off cliffs and bridges only to crash to the ground. There is no immediate application of the technology in MacCready's craft as far as anyone knows, except publicity, but man has been fascinated with the notion of flying under his own power throughout history. That prize had gone unclaimed for 18 years. The 22-mile flight broke his own world distance record for muscle-powered flight and won for Allen and the plastic pedal plane's inventor, California aeronautical designer Paul Mac Cready, a $200,000 prize from a British industrial and the Royal Aeronautical Society here.īusinessman Henry Kremer put up the money for the cross-channel competition after Allen, MacCready and their team of helpers won the $100,000 Kremer Prize for the first sustained human-powered flight in a prototype of the Gossamer Albatross in the California desert in 1977. ![]() "It only seemed that way when I was only halfway across the Channel." "It wasn't as tough as we expected." Allen told reporters who gathered around him on the sandy French beach where he landed, about 10 miles from Calais. The crossing took just under three hours, a little longer than expected because Allen had to veer around a supertanker in his path. ![]() Pumping furiously inside a transparent cockpit under the 96-foot wingspan of the 60-pound plane, Bryan Allen kept the plastic propeller behind him turning fast enough to skim 10 to 30 feet above the calm Channel waters at about 8 miles per hours. ![]() A lean, 26-year-old biologist, cyclist and hang-glider from California made the first man-powered flight across the English Channel today by pedaling the flimsy, polyester-bodied Gossamer Albatross from Folkestone to Cap Gris Nez. ![]()
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