People-Powered Flight

Bryan Allen takes off in the Gossamer Albatross, the human-powered aircraft designed by Paul MacCready (MS ’48, PhD ’52) that completed a successful Channel crossing in 1979.

The late aeronautics engineer Paul MacCready (MS ’48, PhD ’52) had already won a mile-long human-powered flight competition in 1977, claiming a  $100,000 Kremer Prize (part of a series of challenges set by industrialist Henry Kremer in 1959), with his aircraft the Gossamor Condor,  when two years later, he and his team completed a successful crossing of the English Channel to win a second Kremer Prize.

The aircraft that crossed the Channel was named Gossamer Albatross and was constructed from carbon fiber, polystyrene, and Mylar. It was designed to be powered like a bicycle, using pedals that drove a two-bladed propeller.

MacCready not only designed both aircraft but also selected the same man to pilot them: an amateur cyclist from Bakersfield named Bryan Allen, who, as MacCready explained in his 2003 Caltech Archives oral history, fit his list of requirements: “… somebody with light weight ... a good bike racer who could help build the plane, who had some experience in model airplane construction, and who was unemployed, so that he would be available.”

A little after dawn on June 12, 1979, Allen powered up the Albatross to 75 revolutions per minute and took off from Folkestone, England. “We knew that he could put out enough power to stay aloft for two hours,” MacCready said in his oral history interview, “and we were hoping that the wind would be nothing, or that there would even be a slight tail wind. But instead ... it became a headwind.”

That two-hour flight turned into almost three. “When his left leg would cramp, he’d pedal mostly with his right. When his right leg would cramp, he’d pedal mostly with his left. Both legs cramped toward the end, and he somehow just struggled through.” As the winds calmed again, Allen landed on the beach at Cape Gris-Nez in France, having completed the 22.2-mile crossing in two hours and 49 minutes, achieving a top speed of 18 miles per hour and an average altitude of 5 feet.

Allen would later set world records in distance and duration in a small pedal-powered blimp named White Dwarf. Allen worked for many years as a software engineer at JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA. He retired in February of 2019.