Winging Into History

Three thousand five hundred years ago, when the legendary inventor Daedalus took flight from imprisonment on the island of Crete, he flew on wings he had painstakingly made of low-grade wax and feathers scrounged from molting sea birds. It was all very low-tech, very Greek, for he had only the old wax-and-feather technique to work with and knew nothing of high-modulus Thornel carbon fiber, polystyrene foam, Kevlar and Mylar. He did not have information about a glycogen-replacing fluid that might sustain him during the exhausting wing-flapping exertions of flight. Nor did he have access to a flight simulator for preflight practice or any inkling of what his maximum aerobic capacity (V02 max. for short) might be. Nor did Daedalus have assistance from physiologists, meteorologists, directors of flight operations, corporate sponsors, a Norwegian weather station, a dozen MIT undergraduates, an MIT professor of aerodynamics and a Yale professor of classics, to name a few. Operating nicely without all of this support, the mythological Daedalus flew over the Aegean Sea, although no one is sure how far he got from Crete or where he went or whether he landed safely.

Last week quite another kind of Daedalus—a frail, 70-pound, man-powered aircraft, half dragonfly and half bicycle, that had taken 15,000 hours and $1 million to build and had benefited enormously from all of the techniques, technology and technicians listed above—performed a historic flight, a magic merger of high-tech and classic Greek heroism that thrilled the world.

At 7:06 a.m. on Saturday, the pink-and-silver pedal-driven ultralight craft called Daedalus 88 was propelled down the runway of a military airfield in Heraklion, Crete's largest city, assistants running alongside to support the wings until the plane was airborne. It was bound for the volcanic island of Santorini 74 miles away. The pilot and the power of the plane was a suitably godlike Greek athlete, Kanellos Kanellopoulos, 31, an iron-muscled local hero who has won 14 Greek national cycling championships. His job was to keep Daedalus 88 aloft by endlessly pumping pedals that powered a drive train through two gearboxes, which, in turn, kept an 11-foot polystyrene foam propeller whirling.

Kanellopoulos and the 35-member support operation, which included four other pilots and two extra planes, had been hung up on Crete for three weeks waiting for optimum—and very rare—weather conditions: calm seas, southerly winds of three knots or less, temperatures under 70° F and visibility to the horizon. As it turned out, Saturday's weather came up beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Moving steadily, and at times almost swiftly, on energy produced by Kanellopoulos's churning legs—as well as by a lovely, blessed tailwind that got up to 10 knots—Daedalus 88 floated gallantly along 30 to 50 feet above the surface of Homer's wine-dark sea. A flotilla of Greek navy and coast guard vessels, spectator boats and motorized rubber rafts ready to pick up the pilot should the fragile craft suddenly plunge into the water, cruised below the silent plane. At one point, the project's command boat asked the ever-pumping, ever-perspiring cyclist how he felt, and Kanellopoulos replied, "I feel well, cold and cool." Every 15 minutes he radioed reports on how much he was sweating and how much fluid he was drinking.

Daedalus 88 was designed to maintain an average speed of 15 mph, but on this day the wind and Kanellopoulos combined to produce an average of 18.9 mph. Thus, as the plane advanced closer and closer to the black sand of Santorini's Perissa Beach, it was clear that the trip was going to take far less time than anyone had anticipated. Technical experts on the project had estimated that the journey might take as long as six hours, but as Kanellopoulos got to within 10 meters of the beach, it was just 11 a.m.—a mere three hours and 54 minutes after takeoff. A crowd of 500 shouted and waved from the sand as the giant, insectlike aircraft—its wingspan is 112 feet, four feet longer than that of a 727 jet—floated toward land. Then the cheers abruptly turned to cries of alarm.

A sudden head wind had come up, bringing the frail plane almost to a stall for a moment. Kanellopoulos banked until Daedalus 88 was parallel to the beach, but another gust battered the craft. To everyone's horror, the tail snapped off. Then both wings tilted upward, and the plane dropped into the sea.

There was only an instant of anxiety for the fallen pilot. Kanellopoulos's sandy head bobbed up in the waves, and he swam almost casually to shore. He emerged streaming water and grinning brightly. When everything was added up, Daedalus 88 and its Greek hero-pilot had set three records: 1) The 74-mile journey was the longest straight-line human-powered flight ever, beating the 22.3-mile crossing of the English Channel in 1979 by Bryan Allen in the Gossamer Albatross; 2) the trip broke the absolute distance record for human-powered flight set by fellow Daedalus Project member Glenn Tremml, 28, who used a Daedalus 88 prototype called Light Eagle to fly 36.4 miles at Edwards Air Force base in California in January 1987; 3) the trip broke the duration record for a human-powered flight. The old mark of two hours and 49 minutes had been set by Allen during his '79 Channel crossing.

The joyous, dripping Kanellopoulos told reporters and merrymakers at the beach, "This is a triumph for science, for man and for history." Indeed, it was a triumph of organization and innovation that was worthy of a space shot, altogether a remarkable achievement. As Steve Bussolari, the MIT professor of aeronautics who was in charge of flight operations on Crete, put it, "The flight was an unparalleled combination of theoretical, computational and experimental research in aerodynamic capabilities."

Suffice it to say that it was never simple. "We all used to build model airplanes and rockets," said John Langford, program manager for Daedalus, one day in March as he was supervising some of the last testing stages of the venture. "The models just got bigger and bigger." Langford was sitting in his office at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory Flight Facility in Concord, Mass.; the three clocks over his head were set for local time, California time and Athens time. Downstairs in a hangar a dozen engineers and helpers, who had been working night and day for months, were painstakingly piecing together Daedalus 88. Its twin craft, Daedalus 87, had recently been "tweaked" (that's MIT-speak for bent out of shape) in a crash on Rogers Dry Lake at Edwards Air Force Base and would need more than a few "kluges" (MIT for repairs) before being transported along with two other ultralights to Crete late in March.

Langford, 30, who is on leave from the Institute for Defense Analysis in Alexandria, Va., led the construction of two human-powered planes when he was an undergraduate at MIT. The first was called Chrysalis. The second, named Monarch, won first prize in the Royal Aeronautical Society's Kremer World Speed Competition in 1984. "I gave talks about the Monarch" said Langford, "and people kept asking me what we were going to do next. I said that I thought we now had the technology to duplicate Daedalus's flight, and if anyone was interested in financing the project, he could sign up in the back of the room. It was kind of a joke, really."