Gordon Pollock


Thanks to Bill Hannan and David Aronstein for discovering the work of Gordon Pollock, who sold a cool walkalong glider called the WonderWing in the 1980s. Gordon told me that he made the gliders from indoor balsa wood and condenser paper, both of which are very lightweight. As you can see from the illustration below, the front weight of the glider also acted as a canard. I've tried that on the foam gliders and it greatly inproves the pitch stability. The canard in front of the wing is set at more of a slant (higher angle of attack). So the canard stalls before the wing. With less lift from the canard, the wing pitches down before stalling. It's really fun to see the theory actually work in practice.


Gordon sent some pictures of some old Wonder Wings--well crafted and huge! (Click to enlarge.)

Here is a video play list of Gordon flying a Wonder Wing in 2017.
Video 1: Notice that it almost seems like the glider is flying backwards. But--just like the Wright Brother's first plane--the canard is in front.
Video 2: Gordon flying a small Wonder Wing with a board.
Video 3: The WonderWing Flies again!

 


Kouyou Nagamatsu, Thin Foam and Bio-Mimicry Pioneer

The author writes in the book that he filled the house with so many experimental designs that they started to crowd out everything else. something I can relate to!
 Click for a Bigger Image The book is not available outside Asia. I had to ask my brother-in-law to purchase and send it.

I followed Michael Thompson into making thin foam gliders. Tyler MacCready had been making sturdier, thicker Depron foam gliders that moved pretty fast. But I found that EPS foam sliced to about .5 mm is lighter than paper and it works very well for my students. I was very excited to discover that all the way back in 1996 a Japanese man by the name of Kouyou Nagamatsu wrote an extraordinary book about thin foam gliders, named Fantasy Wings. He made them into birds, butterflies, flying horses and lots of other mythical creatures. A whole industry has sprung up around this book. (Warning: The Google translation is a bit off, according to my Japanese-speaking wife.)

Here is the patent document for his foam slicing machine.

In March 2018 we corresponded with Mr. Matsunaga's son, and he shared the following:

About 20 years ago Mr. Matsunaga published Fantasy Wing ふわふわ不思議紙ヒコーキ.The book was a success and caught media attention. He become so busy presenting gliders on TV etc, that he hardly had time to sleep.

Ever since he was young, Mr. Matsunaga loved the sky. As a young man he pioneered hang gliding before hang glider design had evolved to be safer. When his glider crashed after he was blown around by strong gust of wind, he was seriously injured. He quit hang gliding after the accident but he could not give up his fascination of sky and flight.

He found an outlet for his passion in paper airplanes. After lots of trial and error his flying designs evolved to foam paper airplanes that are an order of magnitude lighter and slower-flying than regular paper. After building a foam slicer, he repeatedly tested to achieve ultimate thinness and lightness for ふわふわ flight (roughly translated as floaty flight) He experimented and discovered how weight position affected flight.( he used a sticker for a weight) He found something new about a foam glider and its flight almost daily.

Mr. Magamatsu does not seem to have known about walkalong gliding (air surfing) when he wrote the book, although he does have an illustration of a hang glider and thermal lift. People--particularly in Taiwan and Singapore where the book has been translated into Chinese--are now using the designs for walkalong flight.

When you buy the "book" (packaging is right, actual book in middle) you also get a couple dozen sheets of high quality foam (left). The red stickers are cut to become eyes and beaks, but also provide front weight.
 Click for a bigger image. He was already developing various tumblewing spinoffs similar to the Spinny Bug in the 1990s, as well as maple seeds(he called it dandelion), etc
Most of the foam measured at about .7 mm.thick and the size of A4 paper.

David Aronstein Walkalong Glider Interview

New: David wrote an really great article about walkalong gliders for the National Free Flight Society‘s (NFFS) Symposium.
David’s article is a hoot to read, right from the first paragraph. He writes from his extensive experience–not only designing and building walkalongs, but also organizing fun events.

NFFS retains the copyright to the article and I’m grateful that they and David are sharing it. It’s so hard to summarize what NFFS does because there are so many cool things. Maybe “crafted flying magic”! Just click and check them out. NFFS is friendly and welcoming of new people and you’ll love their YouTube channel.

Transcript

This video is an interview with one of the major innovators of surfing objects on waves or air, but first an introduction. David Aronstein is so modest that I corresponded with him for years before I knew that it was Dr. David Aronstein. He has made model airplanes forever and is now an aerospace engineer. He still makes magnificent model flying machines. Successful walkalong gliders had always been of the “flying wing” variety until David figured out what he had to do to get a traditional-looking plane with a tail section to fly as a walkalong glider. That opened up a whole new branch of flying. He also organized walkalong gliding events where people careened though obstacle courses or flew missions. He has been a mentor to Michael Thompson, the engineering student who developed thin foam jagwing gliders, and getting him an internship at the Hawker-Beechcraft aircraft company.

(in answer to a question about how he got airplanes with tails to fly as walkalong gliders when everybody else was using the “flying wing” design)

Well, first of all it’s worth mentioning that somebody [Joseph Grant] patented what are essentially walkalong gliders in 1955 and his sketches show a tail. We don’t know if his flew successfully. We only know he made sketches, we don’t know what he did with it. My path to doing what we do was that I heard of Tyler MacCready’s concept and invention sometime around 1990 and it sounded cool so I thought I’d try it.
I had been active building indoor and outdoor free flight—primarily rubber powered—models for most of my life. I knew the building technology that was familiar to me, which was balsa wood and tissue paper. Before I built anything I took an indoor hand-launch glider which is designed to be very stable in free flight but it has a long tail moment arm. I tried to fly it on a board and promptly planted it into the ground, very decisively—nose dive.
I realized that’s because the wing and the tail, flying in front of the board, the tail is getting more upwash than the wing because it’s closer to the board. The logical step was, “Ok, let’s try a flying wing.” I built a couple of stick and tissue flying wings with about a 16 inch wing span. I started taking them to indoor model airplane meets and people had a lot of fun with them. I could fly them with a board. Some guys learned to fly them on their forehead or with their hands.

That was it for me for a long time. That was around 1990. Early 2000 as my kids were getting old enough to enjoy model airplanes and were coming to meets with me, I thought, “To make this more fun for them it’s time to try this again.” So I built a couple of flying wings again and that was fun. They were kind of hard to steer, so I experimented with putting vertical surfaces on them. But kids like things that look like real airplanes.

I’d always thought that maybe one with a tail would work if you made the tail close-coupled to minimize the flow distance between where the wing is and where the tail is. And even high, like a Tee tail. So with a traditional free flight model with the wing and tail far apart, there’s no way to get a board under it and get the same amount of upflow in both places. But it makes sense that if you put the wing and the tail closer together, and maybe staggered vertically with the tail higher than the wing, the board is here. You get your wing a lot closer to the board and get much more equal upflow on both surfaces. That means much less trim change between free glide and gliding in front of a board.

That was just an idea that I had when I first did flying wings but it was worth a try. I built a semi-scale model of a Northrop Scorpion, a 1950s military jet with a small, close-coupled high tail. So it had all the right ingredients that I thought were necessary and—sure enough—it flew. It flew very well. I still have it. I built it around 2003 and now it’s 2010 it’s been through a lot, but the good thing about these scratch-built balsa wood models is that you turn them from a pile of sticks into an airplane once to build them. You can do it again if you have to to repair them.

There is a large hall next to the cafeteria where I work, which is Hawker Beechcraft company. I fly rubber powered models there but it’s a little bit frustrating because it’s drafty and if you get too close to the ceiling there are hanging-up hazards. When I took a walkalong glider there and spent my lunch break flying missions back and forth across this hall—strafing some of the constructs that are at one end, having fun, not winding up a rubber band for the whole time—I realized that there was something good here. Then I started inviting some of my friends and coworkers. Then we started having informal meets where we would have obstacle courses.

With rubber-powered free flight that I do is all about duration, but with walkalong gliding you can do more task oriented things that are fun. You can share models. It doesn’t matter who built them because the skill of flying them is a big part of it. They are low labor-hours to construct so you don’t mind if they get broken. And it’s just a lot of fun! My son Jesse would come to some of these meets and about the second season of coming he started winning all the events. We had to have an altitude contest just so that the grownups would have a chance. Now he’s getting tall enough I don’t think that will help anymore.

We’ve done a lot of creative things: obstacle course, passing the glider back and forth between two pilots seeing how many times you can do that in a minute, a strike mission where you fly the length of the hall, make target passes, fly back and make a carrier landing.

(I ask David’s son Jesse about his airplane adventures)

When I was really little I started flying rubber-powered model airplanes with my dad. Then he started making these walkalong gliders so I flew those. It took awhile but I eventually became ok at it. Now I suppose I can fly them pretty well. They’re very fun.

There also some contests that my dad has at his job. I go there and win most of them, which is fun. I like the long-range strike where you go and bomb the target, come back and land on the aircraft carrier. I think that’s very fun. I also like the one—I forget what it’s called—you have to stay up for two minutes. If you do, you qualify for the speed race. Basically I like all of them except the altitude contest. [David, off camera: You’re getting taller now, so maybe you’ll get your revenge.] Yeah, I’m still not as tall as most of the grownups, though. But in a little while maybe I will be.

The first airplane I made was a B-17. It has four propellers that spin and it flies pretty well. [David, off camera: Where did we get the ideas for the spinning propellers?] Mike Thompson. He made a little foamy with a little spiny propeller. Then I also made a 3 dimensional F9F Cougar. That one contest where you stay up for two minutes to qualify for the speed race, I flew that and it was kind of difficult because it’s so fast.

(I thank Jesse for helping at the St Louis Science Center during SciFest)

You’re welcome. Yeah, it was fun. I enjoyed teaching everyone how to fly. Hopefully at least one person that I taught can do it ok now.

(David and his younger son Zevi now on camera)

David: I’ll say a little about Zevi. When Jesse would come to the glider meets at work, Zevi would come too. Zevi liked to fly the Z surfer. It’s a stick and plastic covering, our version of the classic foam glider that Tyler MacCready was shown with on TV.  (End of interview)Aronstein Article NFFS Sympo 53

Beautiful Bird Walkalong Gliders from David Aronstein

Dr. David Aronstein is famous for his balsa and tissue walkalong glider creations. But it was a surprise when he made some foam gliders. And so worth the wait; check out his beautiful bird creations! ( Click for larger images)

Swift Plan - Aronstein
Condor Plan - Aronstein
Seagull Plan - Aronstein
Swift 1 - Aronstein
Swift 2 - Aronstein
Swift 3 - Aronstein
Condor 1 - Aronstein
Condor 2 - Aronstein
Condor 3 - Aronstein
Seagull 1 - Aronstein
Seagull 2 - Aronstein

Interview with Ben Shedd


The following is a 2011 interview with Mr. Ben Shedd, Director of The Flight of the Gossamer Condor. If you want to see why it is such an important work, then you can see the YouTube version. I have to warn you that — unlike the beautifully remastered DVD that Ben sells directly — the YouTube version has dreadful video and audio copied from an old damaged film.

Ben Shedd had the foresight to document Paul MacCready’s work with human-powered flight long before MacCready succeeded and stuck with him when things looked a little bleak. So we see the effort unfold as it happens: early attempts, the problems, the crashes —“Again, the crash is an opportunity to rebuild.”—and the ultimate triumph. I show the film to my students not just to get them excited about building/flying but also as a metaphor for how to live life.

Also during that creative period, Tyler MacCready invented walkalong gliding. And again, Ben recognized that it was worthwhile and provided us with the first images of air surfing. For his great work, Ben Shedd won an Academy Award, Short Documentary category. It’s a classic with relevance that will never get old.

I was just graduating from high school when Ben Shedd documented what Paul MacCready and his family had done. Having followed attempts at human-powered flight since was in 6 th grade, it a huge inspiration to me—changed the trajectory of my life. Now decades later, another gift from that era—walkalong gliding—allows me to give my students a real flying experience. It was another long shot, but I asked Ben whether he would be willing to talk about that extraordinary time. He was warm and accessible. He’s busy teaching university classes about film and pursuing various projects and I was not able to go out west to interview him myself, but I wrote down questions and his students Zach Voss and Glenn Landberg actually conducted the interview. Thanks guys.

When I have the time to do a really good job of editing the video with B-roll, I will. In the meantime, enjoy this draft transcript of his recollections of that historic, exciting time. My questions went beyond The Flight of the Gossamer Condor --fitting for someone who has led such an interesting life. Don't mind the numbers; just time code for when I edit the video.

(joking and laughing) Clapstick, take one.

Question about meeting Tyler MacCready

So we were working on the Gossamer Condor film and part of what was interesting was that it was—in many ways--a weekend family project. So Paul MacCready, who was designing and inventing it, brought his kids along. He had 3 sons: Parker, Tyler and Marshall and they were always there, part of the activity.

And so Tyler was the middle son. He had long blond hair at the time, I remember. And I remember Paul talking to me about the fact that he was working out and having his son work out on an exercise machine so he could get up his capacity to really cycle. Tyler and Parker, at the time, were both really experienced hang glider pilots and that was one of the reasons they knew how to fly the plane. They weren’t bicycle racers or anything like that, but that’s where they were in the piece.

So as we were filming the person who was the pilot in the beginning was Tyler MacCready and we became quite well acquainted just because we were working together closely. When we were making the film I always made sure that the pilot and Paul MacCready each had a radio mic on so we could get there conversations. So the primary conversations we got when we were first filming were always between Paul MacCready and his son talking back and forth.It was interesting that the project reached a point where Tyler wasn’t able to fly as long as he needed to or wanted to. The team decided that they needed a bicycle racer, somebody who had more power. One of the consultants who was helping Paul MacCready and the team brought in (a professional cyclist).

What was really interesting about the Gossamer Condor airplane was the maximum flying speed was 10 miles per hour. It was the slowest-flying plane in the world. It was usually flying about 7 or 8 miles per hour so the best times to film it were from 6 to 8 in the morning when there was no wind, or 6 to 8 in the evening when there was no wind. If there was a 3 to 5 mile per hour breeze that was like half the air speed, so it was down time. We all had a lot of time to stand around until the evening. 3:08 That was just the way it worked.

3:13 In the shop where they were building the Gossamer Condor there was all this stuff. There was a hanger and there was a huge table with chunks of Styrofoam, sticky tape, glue and people were just having fun building stuff. Somebody built a corrugated wing and it had a little dog house on it and Snoopy the dog from Charlie Brown sitting on it. And along the way Tyler MacCready built this shape—swept-back wings, tips at the end--which became the walkalong glider. And all of a sudden one day during the middle of the day I looked around and he was walking around with a piece of cardboard and he was pushing along (a glider in the air), making this air current. It’s something I knew nothing about. Air will go up the side of a mountain; he was basically making the whole mountain drift. Then if you flew it right you just walk along, you can guide it as smooth as could be. It was like, “Wow, look at that!” We had the camera there and we turned it on. In the movie there are two shots of Tyler MacCready, the only two shots we had, of him pushing that thing and making it go. There is was. 4:13 He was trying this thing out and I now see—looking back on it—that was like inventing the Gossamer Condor airplane. This was literally the first walkalong glider.

4:32 (Question about first seeing the walkalong glider)

(executive suggestion “tell me…)

5:20 When the walkalong glider happened everybody was thinking about things that were flying. We were trying to make the Gossamer Condor. One the who came in and was working on the project, Jack Lambie in a green shirt in the movie, he was one of the first people to put hang gliders together. He built them out of old plastic garbage bags and bamboo. That was the beginning of the structure of that sort of thing.

5:41 He kept coming in and out in a glider plane that popped up so he could take off by himself, he didn’t have to be towed into the air. The world of flight was what we were immersed in. My camera team was the observer, as it were, participating to a certain degree but mostly just watching them. Having this happen was just another events that wasn’t surprising at all. 6:03

As I think about it now it was a 14 year old kid walking around making this very finely shaped wing that would pick the air current up, stay level and fly at a very slow speed. Then about 10 years later I heard that Tyler had turned it into a toy that was being manufactured when he was in his mid twenties. I was not at all surprised about it. Very recently in 2007 when I saw Tyler, it was the 30 th anniversary of the human-powered airplane, there he was with his walkalong glider in his pocket.

6:48 Let me tell you how the video came to be because that ties together as part of the story. When we first make the film it was shot in 16mm. This is 16mm film. The soundtrack was on it and this was the major way it was distributed when it first came out. That was the way it came out in 1979 until the mid 1980s. About that time video started showing up. This is the VHS box and here’s the VHS video. We made a beta master out of the 16mm. It turns out that this cover was one of the very first covers made on a page making program. It was 1985, just after PCS were out. This was the way it was distributed for the longest time.

7:41 Then about 2006 I got this interesting phone call from Brett Handley who was a curriculum writer at Project Lead the Way. Project Lead the Way is engineering for middle schools, high schools and career programming to get people prepared for college engineering programs. He said that as a school teacher he’d been using the Gossamer Condor film for years in his class and he loved it. He wanted to know if he could write it into the curriculum if it was available in DVD. 8:05 My first answer was, “Of course.”

I went and got that original 1985 tape and I tranfered it into my computer, I took the cover and I started making these DVDs to distribute. These were made one at a time off my computer. We sent a bunch of them to the Project Lead the Way folks and they tested them. They said it worked very well.

8:30 At about the same time the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was having a an ongoing screening of Academy Award winning documentary films. They contacted me and said, your year 1979 is going to come up in October of 2007. We’d like to get your original negative, now 30 years old, and make a brand new print of it. We’ll do that at our archive. 8:55 I said, fabulous. I gave it to them. They make a perfectly clean, brand new print. It looked beautiful. About the same time Paul MacCready’s company called me and asked if they could have 600 copies of DVDs so they could give it out on the 30 th anniversary to all their staff and employees at Aerovironment.

9:15 With the Project Lead the Way wanting a DVD, Aerovironment wanting a DVD and the Academy making this print we said let’s just take the print master and get it transferred as a DVD. So the Motion Picture Academy actually did the transfer for me off their brand new print. I paid for the cost of the transfer.9:33 Now we were able to make a DVD, the 30 th anniversary DVD.

At the same time I was working on another film that was all about doing an environmentally friendly, green building. We were making covers of this thin cardboard and so we did the same thing here for the Gossamer Condor. Even with the design of this thing I always liked it because you had to open it up all the way. The plane’s so big you can’t see it on the front, you have to see it all the way around. 10:00 It turned out that within a month we were able to get the DVD out and Project Lead the Way is using it in all their classrooms.

As part of that Tyer MacCready and Brian Allen, who was the final pilot, came to the screening the Academy had, as well as Jacquelyn Phillips Shedd—who’s the producer with me and my daughter who was 5 years old at the time the plane flew (now 30 years later so she’s an adult so she came to the screening); plus two members of the plane team, one of my crew members and my narrator Roger Steffens all came to this wonderful screening we had. At the end of the screening Tyler MacCready had one of the walkalongs in his pocket and he walked all over the stage using the ?????????? 10:49 and flying it right along.

Then along the way I bumped into Slater Harrison and this whole sciencetoymaker.org webpage and found that a lot of people were making these things. I made a couple of them out of the pages from a phone book 11:05 ??????? They’re very cool to fly around.

Question ???????

11:32 I was working on the Nova series on public television. The series at the time was 3 years old. I actually worked on program number one. I was associate producer. I was part of the very first team, second employee in the Nova series. Six Novas later I was looking for another project. Start over

Question about why had the confidence to invest so much into following the MacCready human-powered flight story

Let me start this over12:12 I was working on the Nova series in 1976 I was the second employee when the Nova series started in 1973 and worked on program one as an associate producer. I had done 6 Nova programs doing science documentaries on PBS. I’d come from California to live in Boston, working at WGBH for that period of time. I was back in California on a holiday. One of my film making friends, as I was having lunch, said, “My next door neighbor is going to win the Kremer Prize.” That’s how I first learned about all of this.

12:43 I said, “What’s that?” He said, it’s for a human-powered airplane. This guy Paul MacCready has the plans already and he really thinks he’s going to be able to do it. My brain went, wow this is cool! I could immediately imagine something rickety on a runway and it could take off and it would land and they’d have to do something more with it. Already I knew I had a beginning, middle and an end. From a filmmaking point of view this was like a fabulous thing to have. 13:08

I was like, Wow, so I said I want to meet him, can we do that? So they arranged for me to meet him, Paul MacCready. He had just come back from a vacation where he’ dreamed up this idea. His kids were hang gliding pilots and he’d written a technical article about hang gliding safety. He knew that the power need for a hang glider in theory was like one horsepower. He realized that if he made the wing of the hang glider 3 times as wide you get 9 times the area, you only need a third of a horsepower. Paul MacCready, in the back of his head he knew that humans could just produce about a third of a horsepower. That’s the maximum we can do even when we think we’re going fast. 13:45

Oh look at that. If I could do it I could make a human powered airplane. He said he remembered reading about this contest called the Kremer Prize. A man named Henry Kremer had put together a fifty thousand pound (British currency) prized with the Royal Aeronautical Society in England. It had been around for 15 or 17 years at the time. Coincidentally with that—and this is a very important part of the story—is that Dr. MacCready had cosigned on a loan for his brother-in-law for a catamaran company. That company, unfortunately, had gone belly up and he owed a hundred thousand dollars against that loan.

14:16 He was thinking, how can I get a hundred thousand dollars quick? Well that Kremer Prize is worth like fifty thousand pounds, I wonder how much a pound is worth to the dollar? He tells the story about looking it up as soon as he could in a newspaper and it was two dollars to the pound. So he said a hundred thousand dollars, well I should make the first human-powered airplane in history. 14:41

This person, Paul MacCready had made huge leaps. As I started doing research with him I learned that among other things he was the 1955 international soaring champion. He was the first American to win that. He’s said often that he can’t fly a soaring plane very well, but when he was a grduate student at Cal Tech doing his PhD. in the late 1940s he’s written a formula that compared forward speed to sinking speed on a glider. Then he interpolated that into a ring that goes around the variometer. He could just make an adjustment and it would give him the optimal speed in between thermals to stay aloft. Then he won the championship in 1955 by the widest margin anybody had ever won it. It’s nicknamed the “MacCready Ring.” So I already knew this person made these giant leaps.

This wasn’t something he was casually going to do. Plus he had a really interesting crew team. The guy who designed the airfoil, Peter Lissaman, worked for his company Aerovironment and he was one of the world’s greatest airfoil designers. He later did the Americas Cups boats and stuff like that. Having him design the wing was going to be just right.

1600 Jack Lambie was one of the inventors of hang gliders. One of the other people

sorry I cannot remember his name ??????? worked in the jet propulsion laboratory and he was head of satellite programs. They all agreed to do this on weekends.

1615 MacCready showed me a bunch of his plans. I didn’t have justification to just say I’m going to do this project. I took the idea and I went back. I had to learn about flight; I didn’t know anything about airplane flight, I’m not a pilot. So I did my normal Nova research into a new topic. I steeped myself in how planes flew. I went back to the first gliders in the 1870s, 1880s Otto Lilienthal. I started learning what they were trying to do, and the similarities and differences to what MacCready wanted to do. Then I had an opportunity to do a research project where I was trying to figure out what the next NOVA program was. At the time I was going to do methadone maintenance and/or addiction to coffee or car safety--I watched lots of crash films. Or human-powered flight. Because I had 3 of them it took me on a research circuit so I could spend a day with Paul MacCready.

He showed me his sketches that he had drawn of all of these things and explained what the idea was. He told me exactly how motivated he was: because he needed the money. As he’s said over the years, that’s a really good thing! High motivation, you don’t stop casually. The other part of it was one of the plans he showed me—and he explained it—was called wing loading: the area of the wing vs. the weight 1721

All the human-powered airplanes that had been built up until the Gossamer Condor had a wing loading of about 1 pound per square foot. The issue is you have to build a huge wing because you have such a small amount of power. Airplanes had always been built with all this internal structure inside the wings. So that was the puzzle. To make a big wing it gets heavier and heavier. MacCready’s idea was to use a hang glider design, which was basically a tall strut this way 1753 (vertical) and a cross bar and then these triangulated wires. If you think about triangles if it was sitting on the ground this triangle would hold the wing. Then there was a ?????? blue triangle beneath the wing, so there was like no weight. All of a sudden the plans said point 2 (.2) pounds per square foot.

I saw this huge leap. Nothing before had .2 lbs per sqauare foot. I said this is a really cool film to be made here and I should follow him as long as I can. If it eventually fails, well, it’s going to be the best attempt ever. I was able to raise money on that. 1825

I’m a documentary film maker and I write the whole script in advance and I wrote a whole script. It actually starts with the plane winning the Kremer prize then went back in time. I wrote the whole script as if it had already happened. Based on my research it had a crash in the middle. When you actually watch the film it has 3 crashes in the middle! There were more crashes than I had in the script but they were inventing something brand new.1856

So I knew it was something really worthwhile to do. I went back to public television and got a contract to go. I left NOVA to start this movie by myself and start my brand new company, Shedd Productions. Off we went.

1910 We had a guarantee in the contract that at a point in February, it would last 6 months after we started. Past that point we would have to finish the film. I called my mentor who was the guy I’d worked with at NOVA the very first year Simon Campbell-Jones. He was a BBC senior producer. He came to the ‘States to teach us Americans in how to do these kinds of programs which was very helpful. He went back to the BBC and he was running the science series over there, Horizon, which was like NOVA.

1942 I called him up and asked if he’d made any movies about human-powered airplanes, there’s this English prize? He said yeah, we have a bunch of them on the shelf but none of them ever work so we just keep waiting. So I said ok. I didn’t tell him at the time what I was doing because I wanted to make sure I could do a much with MacCready as I could.

1953 S we went to work making a movie. I hired Boyd Estus Boyd was a senior camera person at public television where NOVA was coming from, WGBH. This was his first independent project and with the guarantee he bought a brand new camera and came out to California to start shooting. We had done 4 NOVAs together so we really knew how to work with each other.

2014 Then we hired a local out of California. We were based in Los Angelis. The airplane, the Gossamer Condor, was originally flying at the Mohave Airport. It was an hour and a half drive to get out there. On some mornings MacCready would call us and say, we’re flying today. I’d call Boyd and say we’re flying today. I’d drive there and we’d have all the camera equipment and off we’d go. We’d get there just about the time they were starting. We’d film, then they’d sit around when the wind was blowing 3 or 4 miles per hour, until evening time. Then it cooled down and we could fly a little more. That was our routine that went on and on. They decided that the wind was too high at Mohave and so they moved it all to the Shafter Airport.

Question 2140

When I started this project I had a lot of experience by then doing documentaries. I’d done 6 NOVAs, pieces and educational films before that on .…… start over

When 2208 I jumped into the Gossamer Condor film, up until that point I’d worked for other companies making movies. I worked for public television, I worked for Churchill Films Educational House. I’d been a graduate student making films in graduate school. When this project came along I recognized that we were going to have to cinéma vérité : film it as it happened. We were going to always be alert and ready to go, something I’d already learned how to do in some ways. In my professional background I’d started as an editor. I was thinking about what the editing pieces are you need to put it together, which helps me a lot when I’m trying to direct something. We’ve got the wide shots, get the close ups and the different angles.

Boyd Estus 2248 and I had done a couple of very vérité sequences in the NOVA series and we’d them up and we’d set them up and film things as they happened along the way. So we both knew how to do this independently and together. 2257

When MacCready and his team started they figured it was a 4 month project. They were going to use the square-shaped wing. When you look at that picture of the airplane it’s got a very much slanted back wing but this is the second generation that they had to build. They had to learn along the way. 2318 We had to make sure we were filming the bits and pieces going on.

My original plan was that this was going to be an hour-long PBS show. Then we were there filming and filming. As we did a count and they did a count at the end there were over 400 test flights. We filmed almost all of them because we couldn’t miss it as it happened. While we were shooting any given day they were doing something. We’re working with Boyd, always getting different angles so we could have one angle with the plane taking off and another angle with the plane flying and we could—later—cut it together even though they were different flights. That was our habit. We knew we were going to be rolling through film. That was part of the goal, that was in the budget. We budgeted for 4 months of crew time. I think we budgeted for 20 or 25 days of shooting. I knew that was part of the thing I had to take on. 2411

As it became apparent to both MacCready and to me that it was going to take longer we had to keep finding ways to put it together. There’s one credit section at the end of the film where it’s additional photography and there’s a whole bunch of photographers 2424 We used some stock footage that we got. I shot some of the footage. Boyd shot as much of the footage as he could until we absolutely ran out of money and then we had to keep filming anyway. My company was a complete startup. This was doing business as Shedd Productions. As we started going along we actually passed the cutoff date. We had it in the contract that it couldn’t be cancelled. Then Jacquelyn—Jacquelyn Phillips Shedd who was the producer with me—was doing a lot of the phone negotiating with WGBH and PBS, trying to make this work together. We figured out that from the PBS side this invention wasn’t going to happen in time for the air-date. So they wrote the project off at public television, not surprising from their side. I’m looking back at this from many years now, 3 decades plus, but at the time it was very stressing. 2520

Then we actually negotiated a deal with my colleague Simon Campbell-Jones of the BBC because I talked to him about the project. If he would license stock footage rights, he could make the whole show. Then he could license it to public television and public television would make sure all the rights went to Shedd Productions. That’s the triangle that happened. So in the course of giving you this answer …

Jump 2600 Making the movie was going along fine. We were editing, it was coming together. There’s a sequence in the film where Greg Miller, who was the second pilot, made this very long flight. It was like a 4 minute flight and it happened in the afternoon. That actually occurred in part because I needed to show the funders that the plane could do long flights. For the purpose of the research they could do short flights and they could tell what was going on just fine. On that particular flight while they were getting ready it was dusk. I was helping with the dolly and pulling the plane back while we were getting ready. I walked all the way to the other end of the runway while the conversation was going on. I quietly said to Gregg Miller, “I’ll give you 50 bucks to fly it to the other end of the runway.” I knew he was a bicycle racer and he needed a prize and all of a sudden there was the world’s longest flight happened as a result of that! It excited every there and it also gave me a piece of footage to show everybody that the plane was really very significant. 2700

Unfortunately the air-date still wasn’t going to happen and we did negotiate that out and figure it out. In the long run we went from just making a movie to suddenly being very business savvy about what we needed to do to get the movie finished. All the rights were given over to Shedd Productions. I license a whole bunch of material to the BBC which game me enough money to continue making the movie, to finish it. Then it was licensed to public. It was shown as a 2724 ?????? children on the NOVA series. In the mean time I went back to Churchill films where I’d worked out Educational Film House and said I have all this footage and I’d like to make a half-hour film out of it for the educational film market. They got very enthusiastic, gave me an editing room and a slight advance which gave me a different way to get the film finished. That’s the Flight of the Gossamer Condor the 27 minute movie that’s the finished movie. From my side there’s also this hour version that was on PBS that cycled around for a little while.2756

Following that I’ve gone on and made many other films. Jacquelyn went on to law school and become a lawyer because she was so good at doing the negotiating. We all sort of found our niches. This was the first independent project I’d ever done. The thing that I knew while I was making the film was how motivated MacCready was, how creative he was and what kinds of leaps he’d done before. There were orders of magnitude leaps. So I had a hundred percent confidence that it would happen. MacCready would say on any given day, we have ninety-nine percent chance of it happening. And I learned that one percent is big enough to drive a Mack truck through! 2838

I also learned in the process was, because this was a flight that had to win the Kremer Prize, it was a very official course. It was two pylons a half-mile apart; the plane had to be 10 feet high at the start and end, there had to be observers who were outside the team. So the first couple of times they tried the flight I realized very quickly the plane probably wasn’t going to complete the flight then. The point was to get the course in place and get the observers coming out. That happened over and over and made sense. 2905

It was clear to me from a couple of conversations with MacCready and the like that they weren’t going to stop. They had that motivation. It took them almost a year and we were able to find the funds to put it all together.

One of the things I had to do when I was putting the movie together and finishing it—there’s a title card at the beginning that says this actually happened. In some ways this is old history, it’s getting further and further back in time so part of the puzzle is how to keep it current. When we were making the film we were writing the narration. I remember exactly when it happened: I was under the weather and one of my old San Francisco State filmmaking roommates buddies of mine. We were working on the narration. It was all written in the past tense. This happened, that happened. We went through and took every “was” and turned it into an “is”. We took out everything that was in the past. Documentaries often tell you something that happened in the past. 3008

There’s a point in the movie where the propeller is put on the airplane. First you see it being pushed then it starts flying on its own. The narration is a grammatically incorrect sentence. It said, “And the then the Gossamer Condor is born!” and after that all the narration is written in the present tense. So we’re all traveling along together, not really sure how it’s going to happen. The narration was all written very carefully so it doesn’t tell you what’s going to happen. 3032

Something I learned on NOVA, to write what’s in the picture and be observing about it. So the narrator has maybe just a little bit of knowledge, slightly different than I do a a viewer, but we’re kind of sitting together listening to it and watching it happen. So that part of it makes the story very present again. Pretty soon your completely lost…you’re not quite sure when it’s going to happen, if it’s going to happen. The plane has a couple of fairly major crashes, so just when you think it’s really working well it breaks again. 3058

It turns out that every time it breaks ….

One of the things that’s really useful about the airplane and about MacCready’s style that I learned quite early on is that if something broke that meant it was just beyond the threshold of flyability—that’s what I called it. They had to tune it back a little bit. So if the tube would bend and break they’d just make a sleeve to fit over it and back it off, back it off. Then in early August of ’77 when it really crashed because a control wire slipped off a pulley they had to rebuild the whole plane. In the course of rebuilding the plane they took off 7 pounds. It was 70 pound plane at the end; they basically took ten percent of the weight off.3137just by taking off all the extra tape off and all these repair pieces. That gave it better wing loading and made it more flyable. 3145

In the mean time Bryan Allen, who was the third pilot, he was a hang glider pilot and a bicycle racer. He was bicycling 30 or 40 miles a day. He got this job was because he was Sam Duran--who was one of the guys building the plane--he was his roommate and he was out of work. He just happened to be standing around. There he was, the right size, the right weight, the right skills, the right ability to fly and he became the pilot. And all of a sudden the plane got better and better as well. The second pilot, Greg Miller, was a bicycle racer and he had to get back to his bicycle racing. 3222

One of the really interesting series of things that happened when different people showed up and added some new skills that they took advantage of and make it work together.

3246What was really cool about Tyler MacCready, he had his piece of cardboard and he was pushing the wind over the top of it and making the walkalong fly. What’s interesting about that whole project is the one thing that makes it work is the mass of air, something you can’t see. What I had to learn along the way is that we swim in ocean of air. It’s much less dense than the ocean of water, but this is thick, heavy stuff here. I had to learn about that. 3315

There’s a sequence in the Gossamer Condor film where the plane is flying along. It’s the first big attempt and it starts tipping to one side. It tips and it tips and eventually it crumples into the ground because they can’t get it to tip back. What I learned about that is that there’s this process, this phenomenon called “apparent mass.” So a plane wing flies and the mass of the wing is very key but it’s also the mass of the air around it—this bubble of air, as it were—that’s part of the mass of the whole movement. Jets and propeller planes, they fly so fast that they basically push through it and don’t create so much of a problem with apparent mass. 2356 The issue with the Gossamer Condor is it was flying so slow that the weight of the air, the mass of the air is so heavy that once it starts going you can’t easily push it back.

Eventually to make it turn they end up putting lift on the inside wing which starts dragging it backwards and doesn’t let the wing drop. It drags it backwards and that’s what turns it, which is exactly how the Wright brothers did their turning as well. MacCready called me one day and said we did this test on the wing. We took the balsa wood model and we put it under water and I could feel it was the wrong shape. I‘m going to redo that. I clearly didn’t have a crew there to shoot that but I also realized that it would be very cool to shoot that and be able to take the camera under water because the mass that’s analogous to the mass of the air, you could see it. So that one sequence was the one we recreated later. Paul MacCready and Tyler are outside in their swimming pool. It was actually in late fall or early winter and it was freezing cold. We went and rented a waterproof camera housing. That camera man was Fred Elmes who shot a number of features and he was working on independent films like this and I hired him for the day. He had a wet suit on so he could stay warm. We knew we had to do this angle of MacCready putting it under water. Then we did this one were we actually submerge under the water with it so you can see the mass. I had tried to give this invisible thing visibility.

I have now watched the film hundreds of times. 3534 I’ve discovered that if I watch the sequence where the plane is making this attempt and it starts gradually tipping to the side and imagining that there’s a mass of air you can virtually see the mass of air in your brain. And it’s the same mass of air that Tyler MacCready was creating, or pushing with this piece of cardboard, making that shift. I remember bicycling one day where there was a slight breeze blowing on me and I suddenly could really feel the mass of air. Bicycling is one of those ways you can feel it slipping by you. The whole movie is predicated on the fact that the plane is flying in the ocean of air, which you can’t see. Our eyes don’t pick it up, cameras don’t pick it up. So I had to find every was I could to indicate it. 3620

In the movie itself at the very beginning they had a bunch of streamers on the plane. You can see them moving in the wind. Every time there was some kind of effect like that those were the sequences that I as and editor pulled in so we could begin to imagine the air. 3635

There’s one still shot… When we were shooting we didn’t have any tome to shoot any stills of the plane. We also knew that we had to stay away from the wires. We didn’t want to interfere with their research project. 3651 But also I wanted to get a shot of Boyd Estus shooting a piece. There’s one still where Bryan Allen is flying right by the camera crew. If you look at the still there’re two shadows on the ground. One of them is me taking the still. And it turns out that is also a shop we used in the movie because it was this great shot where the plane came very close and flew right by us. That didn’t happen very often we were normally because we wanted to make sure we were away from the wires, which were piano wires we could get tangled in. but we made that shot work…very carefully. 3724

Another thing that was very interesting was … the Kremer Prize was to fly the plane a mile. That’s a long distance. As the plane kept getting better and better we had to keep finding ways to track along and follow the plane. At the beginning we had what we call a “doorway dolly.” The camera was sitting on a milk crate there was like a flat wagon. I was pulling it along and running as fast as I could as Boyd was shooting. 3745

Then pretty soon the plane started going longer distances so we went to a rent-a-wreck place that was near Shafter Airport and we rented this convertible car for like ten dollars a day. It was a Dodge Dart. We took the back seat out of it and put the tripod in so we could drive along. Sometimes we would borrow somebody’s station wagon so we could sit and stand on the back bumper and drive along. That became part of the challenge was to stay close enough to the plane so you could see it while it was covering huge long distances. It was one of these growing processes that I as a filmmaker had to figure out on the go. We had enough budget for it more or less.3825

At one point when the plane actually crinkles and bends the first time you see it in the movie and they say, let’s drag it back to the hanger. They use our camera dolly as the dolly to tow it back because they’d never expected to do that. Then they eventually built their own dolly so they could move the plane around.

Question 3900 about progression of technology

I’ve been making movies since I was a kid. My dad, I started acting in his movies…3917 I’ve been making movies literally since I was a kid. My dad who was a sign painter wanted to tell stories and teach us history. He actually made my brother and me knight’s outfits, Prince Valiant outfits. All the kids in the neighborhood wanted them. The next door neighbor owned a camera shop and he brought home an 8mm camera. We made our first movie which was Knights of the Square Table and I was Prince Valiant. 3939

Over the years then I moved into 16mm when I was working as a professional. Then video shows up along the way. And as video was growing I made a shift and I worked in IMAX. IMAX is 70mm film, it’s this size film, it’s big. You edit this in 35mm, you have it printed down. I was doing that and now we’ve moved into the digital age. There are actually some cameras that can shoot this much data. It’s a lot of data. It’s like 4000 by 4000 pixels. It’s a huge amount of information and it’s just now coming of age probably 25 years after this came out. Now we can actually do this in digital as well. Those changes are all interesting. 4020

The other thing I did as a kid is I was a magician. My oldest memory is 2 years old and seeing my uncle doing a magic show in my back yard. Then I learned to do some magic tricks when I was 5 or 6 and I was a working magician.

So I’m always creating these illusions of reality and that’s about juxtaposing things together. So the audience goes on a time line and thinks they’re on this interesting adventure.

The technology keeps changing along the way and we now have capacities on our computers to do the editing. We have cameras that are very cost effective to capture lots of high-resolution data. On one hand it’s like everybody can make a movie; on the other hand you have to have the experience to know what to do with the material and how to put it together. 4058

I find that sometimes it’s easier now to work with smaller teams. But the big puzzle, it’s still a puzzle, you have an audience for amount of linear time. You have to have a beginning and an end. You have to have juxtapositions and make sure there’s an interesting summary at the end. Then it’s always important to give everybody credit at the end because a lot of people have to come together. It’s not done usually by one person.

Question 4141

I have two college degrees in filmmaking: An undergraduate at San Francisco State which is very much a documentary, art film-making school; then a graduate degree from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts which is much more about theatrical filmmaking. After I graduated from USC my intention was—my degree was in making movies—and I made movies all the way through the Gossamer Condor film. When that film was over I was trying to figure out what to do next.

Pickup 4220 As I was finishing the Gossamer Condor film one of my good friends in Los Angeles, Mitchell Block and I wanted to do a class in how to produce films. We submitted it to USC where I graduated and they said, well, we can’t do that right now but a professor I’d taken my beginning filmmaking class from, Mel Sloan, invited me to co-teach the class with him. So my very first time teaching was in the same classroom that I’d taken a class about making films, and with the same professor. It turned out to be very interesting. I really enjoyed doing the teaching. My background was not in teaching but in the same way not in science but I learned very quickly about the processes I needed to do. During that semester—this was January 1979—that was the semester the Gossamer Condor film got the Oscar . That of course was wonderful at school. I asked if we could teach that other class on producing with Mitch Block and we started that summer. We did that for 30 semesters at USC, 10 years 1979 to ’89. We also started teaching at Cal Arts 1985 to ’89 and at Cal Arts there these students like John Lasseter and the folks at Pixar. 4344

Question

My background in filmmaking…

In the process of making films I’ve always had to work with groups and having a classroom of people is also a group. In many ways I’ve set up a class that’s very much like a professional production. We’re able to let it be a professional seminar. There’s a bunch of structure to it. This class about producing has worked very well. It was wonderful when I was teaching at USC film school, some of the students are about 20 years into their careers. Dan Roach ?????Do you mean Jay Roach has done all the ?????????? and the Austin Powers movies was in one of my classes. Bud Shcaetzle has done piles and piles of music videos, everybody from Tina Turner to Garth Brooks was in the class. Bob Weide was in the class. He did Curb Your Enthusiasm. 4431 They were all students.

Then in 1989 I got offered a really interesting year to be an endowed fellow, professor at University of New Mexico. They had an arts professorship that moved around. So I ended up teaching 6 film classes for a year. I moved to Albuquerque from Los Angeles. At the same time I was making IMAX movies so I was able to do both. 4507

My wife got an invitation to a mid-career fellowship at Princeton University. I went back to Princeton and was making some IMAX movies when I bumped into 18 foot by 16 foot by 6 foot ??????? computer screen they were doing with a lot of little screens put together. It was a research project at the time. We’re seeing more of those these days but at the time I said wow, an IMAX film sized screen. We could teach a design class in there. I ended up teaching at Princeton as a Senior Research Scholar for 6 years with a design screen. 4537

Then we came to Boise Idaho where Janine is the director of the Discovery Center here, the science museum here. It was really wonderful to be able to slip onto the faculty here and teach at Boise State. 4607

Question about why Boise State

I’m currently based in Boise Idaho. This is the Sixth city I’ve lived in. I grew up in California, lived in San Francisco and Los Angeles. I went to Boston when I was working for WGBH. Came back to Los Angeles for 17 years. I moved to Albuquerque New Mexico for 8 years then Princeton for 6 years and now I’m living in Boise Idaho. I keep finding these really interesting places to live that usually have skiing, which I love to do, and lots of outdoor activities. They are interesting university places where I can find libraries and I love being in the environment where people are thinking of new ideas. 4642

When I was working on the NOVA series the thing we did all the time was go to universities where scientists and professors were working. I went to Princeton University originally on the NOVA series years before I ever went there as a faculty member interviewing some of the professors there. When I was working at the NOVA series we determined right at the beginning that the series had to go all over the United States because it was a national series. In the course of the three years I was working at NOVA I traveled to 46 states because that’s were people were doing their work. 4723

Then when I started doing IMAX films with the huge screens, those are also pieces that take audiences all around the world. One of the films I did was on tropical rainforests. It ended up that we got to do this in a very interesting trip around the equator. We shot in Costa Rica, Malaysia, and Australia. 4750

There’s a wonderful university where I’m based now in Boise Idaho, fabulous ski area and a very good, active film community. One of the projects we’ve done here … 4823

I’ve taught basic production, advance production here and am now teaching the production class. I’ve been finding a rather interesting community of professionals and a number of students have lots of experience. A couple of years ago the Make-A-Wish Foundation approached my daughter’s school to work with a12 year old kid named Mitch Kohler who had degenerative spinal atrophy and he wanted to be Luke in Star Wars. I came in and started helping and pretty soon it got to be a fairly big project. A friend of mine named Doug 4849 Cole worked with 6 th graders and wrote the script. We did this project called Star Waiters, which you can find on YouTube under Mitch’s Make a Wish or Star Waiters. It’s a 35 minute Star Wars fan film. 4903

On the production we shot for 3 days and edited for 3 weeks with a number of professional folks who all volunteered their time—it was an all-volunteer project. Lucas Films donated all the music and actually sent the sound editor and the real sound effects from Star Wars to edit into the sound track. 4820

Star Waiters got the Best Comedy Short at the Idaho Film Festival. It made me laugh a lot because here’s a very slick project with 12 year old kids, much like I was a 12 year old kid making movies.

For me it was no surprise that later the Make a Wish Foundation of America chose it in 2009 out of 13,200 wishes as the Wish of the Year which best showed how a community comes together to grant a child’s wish. It made me realize that every time I make a movie you bring a bunch of specialists together and bring a community together to make a movie. It’s just what you do and it was lovely to have that language and to hear about it from the national foundation.

Question about deliver a message to youth 50:33

As I’ve moved through my professional career making films and teaching career I’ve discovered it’s interesting to look in 5 year chunks. At any point in time I’ve just finished a 5-year period of work, I’m just starting another 5-year period, and I’m in the middle of a 5-year period as well. I kind of see those as different kinds of changes and transitions that happen. The more I understand subjects as I make my movies, the more I understand the bottom-line content. That’s why I can do science films well. Learn what the reality is then figure out how to tell stories. 5116

I set some very specific criteria for myself about what my stories want to be like. They’re gender-neutral, multi-cultural, intergenerational—grandparents and grandchildren should be able to watch them together. Nobody should get fidgety. I find that as I set those criteria for myself as a maker of movies, I’m also a viewer of movies—as we all are—and I hear stories. I think stories are really wonderful in our culture. They become the way we understand things. It’s lovely that the Gossamer Condor story, which is now 34years old, has this longevity. People are constantly able to come to it fresh. 51:57

I see that there are a number of stories in our culture that we have for hundreds of years and thousands of years. One of the IMAX films I worked on, Tropical Rainforests, is all about evolution. I had to think millions and tens of millions and hundreds of millions of years and how to get these numbers in mind. I came across this quote that John McPhee, the Pulitzer Prize winning writer put in one of his books Basin and Range5221 in which he put this little section in that said five-thousand years, fifty-thousand years will have a nearly equal effect on all the imagination, to the point paralysis. As a filmmaker I’d like to awe people’s imaginations but I don’t want to awe them to the point of paralysis. When I was making my IMAX movie on hundreds of millions of years, I found how to get people to think about that. I started the narration using one of John MacPhee’s words, which was imagine we’re travelers in time, it’s four hundred million years ago. 5252

I’ve been able to teach myself to think like that and then be able to use movies to collapse time. That’s what’s so cool about the Gossamer Condor film. In 27 minutes it does a year. The tropical rainforest film in 33 minutes does 400,000,000 years. Once I got used to collapsing time where you just jump along and view things it all make sense. I keep finding the really valuable stories have long time longevity. They give me ways of thinking about my future and about my past. 5325

I keep trying to make those kinds of stories. They’re the ones where you look around and put some filters on and say, what’s that story that will have some longevity to it? It won’t have a 10 year shelf life. That’s not only from having a vision of what the story can do over time; it’s also very practical. It means people will keep watching it and watching it, so you get more money to make movies in the future. 5357

I think about what stories come along. Looking at my life and career I started making movies when I was 7 and it’s all I’ve ever done. When I was a kid they were my dad’s movies. And much like Tyler MacCready who was making this walkalong glider when he was a kid, he was just doing what his dad did, which was go and invent airplanes. As adults we have both kind of ended up just naturally doing what we’ve always done along the course of our lives. 5428

When one is a kid one tends to things that parents or family or grandparents or people around you are doing, and you end up with this collection of abilities. I know how to make movies naturally. I cut one of the movies my dad made when I was 12 years old. I didn’t necessarily know right from wrong, but I learned right away what was working and wasn’t working. Some of it was trial and error but it’s just naturally what we do. 5457 It’s interesting to—not necessarily pay attention to what we’re doing when we’re kids, but to not forget that we’re actually building pieces of experience that we draw on all through out life.

Question 5526

IMAX theatres until about 5 years ago were mostly in science museums. I’ve spent a lot of time in science museums. My wife is the director of a science museum. The Discovery Center here in Boise, Idaho held an alternative energy festival in 2005 or 6. I went and I heard this guy—

Gary Christensen--talking about this building he was going to build. It was going to be efficient at all levels. I went and introduced myself because it sounded like a great story. They were literally pouring the cement for the building, the Banner Bank building in Boise. His goal was to build a LEED ® Platinum building. The U.S. Green Building Council has come up with their criteria, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. 5619

We started really following it. I was taking still pictures. It was kind of the opposite of the Gossamer Condor. We didn’t have any money at the beginning so I was doing stills, which we ended up animating. 5633

When I heard Gary Christensen’s goals for his building it was obvious that this was also someone who was taking a big leap because of his ambitions and how he was supporting his group. We ended up making this documentar--and this is Gary’s title--Green is the Color of Money. This was the 18 th LEED ® Platinium Building in the world at the time. It was the first LEAD Platinum building ever built by a private developer with a goal to make money. He wasn’t a green guy at the beginning trying to show off environmental stuff. He was a banker and appraiser. He realized that when he brought his energy costs way down, the value of his building went way up. It was a wonderful story. Plus, it was a whole bunch of local people, local colleges, local training who were given the goal to make this thing work.

There’s a wonderful book called Natural Capitalism that Paul Hawken and Amory and Hunter Lovins wrote that Gary Christensen read at the very beginning that outlined how to make this happen. I coincidentally had read that book about 5 years ago and I brought my copy in and showed Gary. He had given copies of Natural Capitalism to his entire design team and said, build me that building. They did it and it’s an example of how you can make a highly energy efficient building using normal materials, normal cost. That’s what’s really cool about this story. 5758

When I was finishing this piece I wanted to write some kind of a one liner. I asked the architects, can I say that this is one of the most energy efficient buildings in the world? They said that it’s easy to say it’s one of the 50 most energy efficient buildings in the entire world, probably in the top 5 or 10 actually, even now. Wow, how cool is that! 5821

In any movie you watch, some kind of change happens from the beginning to the end. In the course of the 30 minutes here the whole issue about should I do this and could I do it cost effectively all goes away. You discover you can make much more money with it, and do it with a bunch of smart, local people and bring it together. 5907

Question family credits

When we were working on the Gossamer Condor film, we went way past the cutoff date on the contract and went way past our money. More and more we had to call in friends and family. I called in my brother who was a river guide and very good with his hands. He came and worked on the airplane for awhile in between his other projects. Then pretty soon I needed to borrow some family money. I got support form my parents and in-laws. At the time my older daughter was 5 years old. She was always there in the editing room and always working around—so they all got credits at the end of the movie. Yes indeed it was a family production. 5948

When I first started the company I had to get going right away. One of the things you can do is use your name, so it was Shedd Productions. It wasn’t like we spent any time thinking about it. We had to write a contract and move.

Questions about being a magician.

My oldest memory as a child is watching my great uncle doing a magic show. He was from a magic convention and he came through our neighborhood in California. He stopped and did a show. I was two or two and a half and if I stop and think about it there are still two or three tricks I can see him doing: turning water into wine, making a card come up…and so by the time I was 5 one of my cousins taught me how to do a magic trick. The trick was here’s the coin and you go like that [Ben does the trick, it’s impressive]And it’s gone here. And it comes back here. This has been with me since I was tiny. 10039

As an adult I’ve had a very long career making documentaries. The documentaries that people really want to pay attention to, I’ve realized, use magic techniques. I’m creating an illusion of reality. Documentaries are not reality. Their time is compressed and all these kinds of things have to happen, and they are in many ways wonderful illusions. They make you suspend your disbelief and you watch them. I’ve looked back and said, oh look they’re magic tricks.

intro

I’m Ben Shedd. I’m a director, producer, writer and editor. I make movies, I make videos. I now make digital—I call it moving image media. I’ve worked in everything from 8mm to IMAX.

Thomas Buchwald Walkalong Glider Interview

Thomas Buchwald is a "Technik" teacher of students in grades 6 to 10 in Germany He is a great friend, though I have yet to meet him in person. Thomas and his students make wonderfully creative engineering projects. Lately he has turned his attention to creating bionic walkalong gliders: pterodactyls (pterosaurs), manta rays and other sea creatures. I particularlyy like the sea creatures.

Thomas is a great innovator. He discovered the best source of foam for slicing into thin sheets (seafood packaging). His insight of using an old spinning glider design let directly to the Big Mouth Tumblewing and Spinny Bug designs.

The video above is the interview (I sent questions) and extraordinary pictures and video of his work.

Here is Thomas' amazing YouTube Channel.

Bionic Gliders

Click to Enlarge images

Several of Thomas' creation, the full Manta and Pterasaur, use an interesting wing that bends up, then down, then (at the tip) up again. I'd never seen a glider lide that. I thought it looked cool, but I wasn't sure it would actually fly. It did fly, with great stability and very responsive to turning.

I asked Thomas about it and he said, " Dear Slater, I am very happy that you like the pteranodon. The mountain folds on the wings produce an airfoil similar to the jedelsky airfoils ( Jedelsky was an austrian model aerodynamics pioneer who tried to get close to bird`s wings ) which work well at low reynolds numbers. ( They are bad at higher speeds but that is not important for walkalong gliding ). At the same time the mountain folds produce a kind of downwash, which adds flight stability. If they are behind the centre of gravity, they work as elevons, as well."

Here you can watch his students flying manta ray, sunfish, and pteranodon walkalong gliders.

Here you can find the PDF file, including four patterns. It is written in German. "Bergfalte" means "mountain fold"; "talfalte" means "valley fold"; "oben" means "top"; "hochbiegen" means "bend up" and "leicht hochbiegen" means "slightly bend up."

So much more

Flying superheroes! Student designed Biplane! Flying angels! Robots, rockets, RC flying machines...check out Thomas' web page and archive. Extraordinary!

John Collins (AKA The Paper Airplane Guy) Walkalong Glider Interview

Links

Also,

This video is an interview with one of the major innovators of surfing objects on waves or air, but first an introduction. The first object I ever surfed on air was a piece of telephone book paper, folded to turn like a paddle wheel as it flies. The design was simple and elegant, the perfect glider to start with. It turned out that the tumbling wing’s inventor was John Collins, AKA The Paper Airplane Guy. John travels to science museums throughout the world to reveal the science behind his remarkable paper airplane designs. When the St. Louis Science Center hosted a group of walkalong gliding innovators I wanted the tumbling wing’s inventor to join us. He dazzled everyone with his skill. Somebody said, “I bet if we gave him a brick he could make it fly.”

Although I conducted a rushed interview with John in St. Louis, I lost it because of technical difficulties. It was the best mistake I ever made, because I pestered him to re-record a deeper, more wide-ranging interview with a long list of questions I sent. The result that follows exemplifies what Louis Pasteur said about chance favoring the prepared mind.There's some good stuff in the text transcript below that didn't relate as much to walkalong gliding, so I could not fit into the edited video interview above. It's interesting nevertheless.

The complete interview

Hey Slater, so what I'm going to do is run through these questions and explain who I am and what's going on. I'm the paper airplane guy. Hi, how're you doing? Normally this would be easier if Slater were here to actually ask me questions, but [delivered deadpan] the dog ate his homework, so I'm going to take these questions of the sheet you were kind enough to provide, Slater. Although I can remember hundreds of steps for paper airplanes I can't remember 8 questions in a row, so I'm going to be looking down at the questions.

About his job

So, my day job: what I do for a living is really interesting, at least to me. I am a television producer, director, editor and writer. All those little bits of TV nobody wants to watch, those are the ones I do. Commercials, infomercials, stuff like that. That's what I've been doing recently.

I've been lucky enough to be at the same station for almost 27 years now. I started out as technical director and director. I've always done voiceover work, I had a radio shift...lots of experience in the entertainment world, so maybe that's the tie-in for working a crowd and being comfortable in front of a crowd. It's easy when you have a notion about what you're trying to communicate.

So, as a kid I loved math, loved science, loved outdoor stuff, and--for as long as I can remember--I was fascinated with flight. It's just amazing that anything can fly: a bird, a butterfly, an insect. All those things fly in different ways. We've replicated that with flying machines, which is just endlessly cool to me.

Paper airplanes were an easy way into that; inexpensive, easy to replicate, fun to work on and fun to invent your own stuff. For about 10 years I studied origami. I found that was an incredible pastime. All kinds of great things happening with origami that are not obvious: economy of resource, health care professionals will tell you it's great for small motor coordination, memorization skills (it's used in some cognitive therapies), they work with Down's Syndrome kids with paper folding exercises. So there are a number of great things about paper-folding that get your brain engaged that would be difficult to do otherwise--and certainly not as fun.

For me, paper-folding always struck a chord. I liked the accuracy required, the precision. And I liked the idea that you could take something really simple--just a piece of paper--to create amazing things, and an endless array of amazing things without cutting or ????.

I was one of the first people to take those tricks back to paper airplane making. When I wrote my first book, at that time, almost no one had done just high-performance folded paper airplanes. That was back in 1989 when I first published the Gliding Flight. People had done books that had things that sort of looked like a flying nun [editors note: yes, you read that correctly. The Flying Nun was a 1960s TV show. You can see clips on YouTube. Nuff said] or a flying fish something like that. It represented those objects well and sort of flew...a little bit.

I went the other way entirely. My things didn't look so much like objects that should fly, but they flew exceedingly well. One of the keys to the success of that book, in fact, was working at a TV station. I had a 60 foot television studio and one of the requisites was that the planes would make it all the way across that studio and hit the opposite wall with a resounding snap. Planes that did not make that did not make the cut for the book. So (laughing) my profession had a very direct impact on my paper airplane career. It upped the game.

About paper airplane activities as a kid

We lived in a really rural area. People in California will recognize Humboldt county for any number of nefarious reasons. It's become infamous for certain agricultural products. I grew up kind of on the coast in a little town called McKinleyville. It was a great place to be a kid. You could run around in the woods which was really fun. I grew up with all sorts of outdoor activities: fishing, backpacking, camping... all sorts of outdoor activities. Just a great place to be a kid. (laughing) Not a great place to be an adult. All you could do was fish or work in the woods and I wasn't physically or temperamentally suited for either one of those jobs, so I went into TV.

But as a kid the wind would come over our house from the back yard, over the roof and go whipping through the front yard. We came up with this technique of throwing paper airplanes. You'd be in the wind shadow just on the front yard side of the house and throw the plane up the face of the house and let it get caught in the wind coming off the roof. It would head out across the front yard over the street. If you had a really good throw you could get it halfway into the pasture across the road. If you had an excellent, really lucky throw it would get all the way out to this tree line that was on the far side of this pasture. That pasture was probably 3 or 4 acres so it had to get maybe a hundred yards or more to the other side of this pasture.

Then sometimes on the occasional super lucky throw we'd get out over this field and hit a thermal that was being generated from the sun hitting the dry ground and creating an updraft. The plane could occasionally make it over this really tall row of trees and it would seem like it would fly forever. That was just amazing! We started out flying a plane that was kind of a flat-bed design with a water bomb base and kind of a triangular weight system in the nose. Then I started inventing my own planes. I can remember to this day--it was a really big moment for me--inventing my own plane that got caught in a thermal and went out over the trees. From that moment on I was irreparably hooked on the idea of building and flying my own paper airplanes. I was going to be an airplane inventor from then on. I must have been 9 years old--10 at the most--when that plane went sailing completely out of site, It was a small dot, then a pin point, then completely disappeared. Just amazing! It sends chill up my spine now how far that went. Of course it had little to do with that design. Just about anything that hit that thermal was going to go that far, but that doesn't matter when you're a kid. It's all magic and it was really great.

About acting

Well I did do some acting and I was a competitive speech person in high school and college a little bit. I've always liked to that part of what I get to do. Performing has always been fun. And being the paper airplane guy is just another extension of having fun in front of a crowd. I don't work with notes. I just work with a power point that's basically a bunch of pictures and I get to start talking about my planes and how they work and how I invented them, what my process was.

I'm always excited to explain how flight works, how paper airplanes work, how you can experience the scientific method with just a single piece of paper. Getting kids revved up about that is an amazing experience. You can tell when you're connecting with them, when it's working, and when it's not working and when it's time to move on and when it's time to tell them and when it's time to tell a bit more of the story. It's the best job that I wish that I had full-time. What I do is satisfying, creative and fun--I'm lucky to have it, but if there's room in the world for one paper airplane guy, I volunteer! I would do that full time. (anybody if you give out grants, if you’re listening...

About motivation

I think if you're interested in what you're trying to teach, if you have a level of expertise and you're just jazzed about it, nothing succeeds like that, and I am jazzed about paper airplanes. When I get in front of a crowd, show them what I've learned and encourage people to work on their own designs, I treasure the opportunity every time. If I had a philosophy of motivation it would be, be present when you get that opportunity to share what you know. And the energy that comes back from that, what comes back from the crowd, is a hundred times what you put out. I'm lucky, I get to do that sometimes. Really lucky.

About inventing the tumbling wing

Until Slater and others started doing research I had no idea that I was the first person to do this walkalong wing notion with a tumbling piece of paper. As far as I knew, I had invented it, but I had by no means researched it.

As a kid we would play with little wooden slats that came from lattice work that would come from a trellis. It was great fun to find a broken piece of trellis and throw it. If you really threw it hard it would make this really cool buzzing sound. Then it would flutter down to the ground. And the harder you threw it, the pitch would change, it would make a great sound then reach an equilibrium and tumble--if you had the right shaped piece--pretty much tumble in a straight line to the ground. But as a kid I wasn't thinking about inventing a paper airplane design out of that. It was just really fun to throw a stick (laughs)!

So perhaps the embryo of the idea was hatched doing what any kid would do, pick up that slat, throw it and be happy with that it buzzed and tumbled down. Fast forward 20 years or so. I had learned some origami, I had written my first book when I came across

(and it was really cool to finally meet Tyler MacCready at the St. Louis SciFest--thanks for helping out with that, Slater--it's probably why I'm sitting in front of a camera in a room where nobody else is, talking into it!)

Tyler published this little article in a science magazine. It was just a little tiny article about a technology called walkalong wings. It looked impossible--super cool--and so I got one. I put it together and spent 3 months learning to fly this thing. You use this piece of cardboard and push this Styrofoam wing, generating an updraft which the plane rises in. So it took awhile. It wasn't easy, it's a skill to learn how to fly this walkalong wing that Tyler invented. Then I did a version out of paper which I put into my next book, Fantastic Flight. I played with a whole lot of designs. I did a design where you tie a strip of paper into a knot, the wing knot, which is a workable version of the walkalong wing.

I call them follow foils. I just that I decided to call them something else rather than steal Tyler's thunder. Then I was having a telephone conversation with my brother, who worked for Boeing Aerospace at the time. It occurred to me that the basic idea of the follow foil is that you're just counteracting sink rate. So I was actually thinking about a way to demonstrate that. I'm always interested in pulling apart concepts and coming up with a demonstration that really shows you how one aspect of aerodynamic theory works. To me it was interesting to separate glide ratio and sink rate, and do it in such a way that you could really get the point across.

So I thought, well, what about something that doesn't really fly but just falls slowly. As first I thought of parachutes, and then I thought "tumbling wing." That tumbling piece of wood would fly pretty much in a straight line...what about a piece of paper? And then turn one end up and one end down so it would fly in even a straighter fashion. So I was actually on the phone talking to my brother kicking around this idea. I folded a piece of paper, just regular paper, and it tumbled in a straight line. And I'm on the phone with him and I say, "Hang on a second." I got the phone book, ripped out a sheet of paper and came up with what has remained essentially unchanged. I don't think I toyed with the width very much before I put it into the Fantastic Flight manuscript.

I came up width and about the right proportions of folds for structural integrity, and flew it holding the phone to one ear (mimes using his shoulder to cradle the phone) and going with a piece of cardboard, and it flew. I remember telling ???I just invented this really cool thing, I wish you could see this. He's used to me being insane on the phone so it didn't faze him.

About his message at the end of every presentation

I have this thing that I do at the end of every presentation. The idea that you can teach science to someone and get them interested in science is an amazing idea to me. To my way of thinking we have a number of serious and real global issues that are only going to be solved with technological answers. There are global energy shortages, water shortages, this little thing called global warming and we need the best and brightest working on that stuff. Paper airplanes are a really simple way into science. The whole scientific method is right there in a paper airplane. You take a guess about what an adjustment will do, you do the adjustment--that's the experiment--you throw it, generate results, analyze what went wrong and repeat. So you've got in the simplest of flying machines the most accessible you've got the scientific method. And whether kids realize it or not, they're doing science just by folding and flying a paper airplane and experimenting with it. So I try to parlay that into an interest in science. I like to think I have an impact by that this is science, need you to think about science and we have no spare brains anywhere on the planet. We need everybody working together to solve this stuff. I would love to think that some person who comes to one of my paper airplane shows is going to invents a breakthrough in energy or resource usage or any number of those fields. I feel strongly (solving these problems) could happen but only if we act like we don't have any spare minds, that everybody's though process is valuable. If I can help do that just once, all the paper airplane presentations will have been worth it. All the traveling around, all the folding and (starts laughing) blow drying airplanes in Singapore between presentations... [John had related the rest of this anecdote to me earlier: The air conditioner failed at the Science Center in Singapore--where there is tropical humidity. He saved the day by using a hair dryer to blow dry the planes, then kept them covered until their flights!]


Phil Rossoni Walkalong Glider Interview

With walkalong gliding you touch the air with the paddle, you are really connecting with flight. I think human kind is a flying species. We need tools to fly, but we have the knowledge and people should learn how to fly in a safe environment. That’s what walkalong gliding is about. You take to the air. -  Phil Rossoni

Phil Rossoni​ literally wrote the book about walkalong gliders.
He also has several YouTube Channels, including zsurfer.


If YouTube is blocked at your school, try this SchoolTube version

Tanscript

This video is an interview with one of the major educators and innovators of surfing objects on waves of air, but first an introduction. One day my brother had taken his family to the Museum of Science in Boston. He could not contain his excitement about a person he had seen mysteriously levitating things—and teaching museum visitors how to do it. It wasn’t a magic show; it was some kind of new science activity that looked like science fiction. That museum person turned out to be Phil Rossoni, whom I call the evangelizer of walkalong gliding.

Harnessing the power of —at the time he started--a new thing called the internet, Phil has shown tens of thousands of people how to fly—including me. He created a good paper walkalong glider design and he’s the only other person I know who is keeping track of air surfing developments throughout the world. When I started flying with my students, he and his wife traveled to Pennsylvania, visited my school and documented what we were doing. Phil was the first person I am aware of to use a helmet camera to record what walkalong flight looks like from the pilot's view.

When I was invited to teach at the Science Center in St. Louis, I asked this science museum veteran to help me there. I’m paraphrasing, but I’ve heard Phil put into words things I’ve thought, like, “With walkalong gliding you touch the air, you’re really connecting with flight. I believe mankind is a flying species. We need tools, we have to be safe, but we know how to do it, so kids should learn how to fly.

His beginnings with walkalong gliders

Well, my first opportunity was a missed opportunity. I bought a walkalong glider [for his nephew] and I had no idea what to do with it. The directions were a bit sketchy so we never really learned how to use it. I only really learned what to do with a walkalong glider when Paul MacCready came to the science center and demonstrated for them how walkalong gliding works. Then I found out from a briefing as a volunteer. Then my supervisor said, “Go forth and learn how to fly it.” The rest is history. I started doing an “interpretation” which means you go onto the museum floor and fly. People come up to you and ask questions: can I try it, how can I build one, do they sell them in the gift shop (laughs).

They were fairly expensive when they first came out, thirty dollars each. That’s what they were going for at the time and I heard that they’d stopped making them, so there was a rush to be able to recreate them, reverse engineer. So, since I was learning how to make them myself it was a good opportunity to share with everybody. I started a messy website, it continues to be out there for those who are willing to dig through it.

I then expanded into paper airplanes. I like to keep things as simple as possible. The tumblewing was introduced to me by Michael Thompson [who learned it from John Collins. See the interview about the his invention of the tumbling wing]. It was the best way to get people flying as fast a possible. It seemed to have all the amazement, all the entertainment value of a walkalong glider, yet be something we could make on the spot in less than a minute. It was hassle-free and can be made from recycled material.

The holy grail was to get a paper airplane that would flew like a walkalong glider. One of the big problems was something called “tip stall.” It’s caused because the wing presents the same angle of attack to the wind throughout. I changed the angle of attack of the wing tips of a particular paper airplane design. It responded much better to roll commands from the controlled slope. That turned out to be a wonderfully popular activity on the internet for people who were coming from the paper airplane building side. This is a paper airplane design that you can sustain and control as a walkalong glider.

About flying insects

The museum was installing a butterfly garden at the time. The butterfly garden generates a lot of dead butterflies. The live butterflies don’t last forever. So he [one of the entomologists at the museum] challenged me to fly a dead butterfly. We tried it and—lo and behold—they worked very well. The only problem was they were flying upside down. It took about a year to develop a method to get them flying right side up. After that year I started flying them in the museum. It was sort of a double interpretation because we were advertising the butterfly garden as well as an aviation activity.

(text quote) With walkalong gliding you touch the air with the paddle, you are really connecting with flight. I think human kind is a flying species. We need tools to fly, but we have the knowledge and people should learn how to fly in a safe environment. That’s what walkalong gliding is about. You take to the air.


Michael Thompson Walkalong Glider Interview

In the summer of 2015 Mike Thompson traveled east and visited our homestead. I have long admired Mike's amazing walkalong gliders with propellers and asked him to share it with the world on camera. He did, and showed how to make modular gliders as well.

Mike Thompson's YouTube Channel

How to fly a Thompson Jagwing, including a shout-out to Mike one minute in.

How to Make the Thompson Jagwing.


Transcript

Intruduction

This video is an interview with one of the major innovators of surfing objects on waves or air, but first an introduction. Michael Thompson is a college student finishing up an engineering degree in Wisconsin.(now he is a mechanical engineer.) He has developed very thin, and very slow-flying foam gliders, which is a whole new branch of walkalong gliding. He does extraordinary feats like one glider towing another. And he has a sense of humor. He painted one of his famous Jagwings with faux blood stains—the thin foam it’s made from couldn’t hurt a mosquito.

I owe a huge debt to Mike for many things. First, I was able to design a paper walkalong glider, but only after using one of Mike’s early designs as a starting point. Throughout the process I showered him with questions about flight theory and how flying wings maintain flight stability. He patiently explained in ways even I could understand. In 2010 I was invited to demonstrate walkalong gliders at the St. Louis Science Center. I realized that the only way I could quickly show museum visitors how to make and fly them was with the foam gliders that Mike had developed. I asked him to come help me and the Science Center was happy to host him. So finally I was able to meet him at the museum, where he got lots of people flying, from kids to adults. I interviewed him right outside the front door of the St. Louis Science Center.

How he became interested in walkalong glider

I saw a TV show on Discovery Channel called Next Step and during one segment I saw somebody flying a paper airplane around in circles. I later learned the guy was John Collins (The Paper Airplane Guy). He was flying a paper airplane around with a piece of cardboard under it. I wanted to do that so I started practicing. I’d learned how to make Styrofoam airplanes around 2001. I was making Styrofoam gliders with balsa wood fuselages, wings and tail of foam. I could not get them to fly right over cardboard. They would fly great and slow with a free glide from a hand launch, but when I put them over cardboard they would nose-dive to the ground.

I threw one of my gliders hard and the tail broke off. I decided I would try to fly it again, just as a flying wing. It actually flew that way—upside down, mind you—I bent the wing tips up the other way to compensate, and I was flying around this upside down broken glider with a piece of cardboard under it. I could only go a few feet at a time but it was starting to work. So that was my introduction to walkalong gliders around 2001.

 How he got started with thin foam gliders

I got into thin Styrofoam gliders around the same time. My interest was driven by my desire to make extremely lightweight, elegant, slow-flying gliders that would stay in the air as long as possible. My dad had a bandsaw down in his basement so I figured I’d try slicing Styrofoam on this bandsaw. I looked for a big block of wood to set up a barrier, a jig so to speak. I tried a few cuts and it was pretty good, less than an eighth of an inch. I knew I could do better, and I found he had a nice ninety degree metal plate that you could fit into the guide slot of the bandsaw table. I ended up using that. I could adjust it very precisely, to a sixteenth of an inch or less. That’s pretty much the magic thickness for a very slow, easy to fly glider of any sort; whether for hand launch, or as a walkalong (which is what it’s best suited for).

Styrofoam has advantages and disadvantages. It’s very light; anything made from it will go extremely slowly. However it has lots of holes and the surface is pretty rough from the bandsaw cuts. The lift to drag ratio of foam cut that way is fairly low. People are developing ways to get around that by methods like hot-wire cutting. An idea that was suggested by a an employee of Hawker Beechcraft [Mike was an intern there] is to try a deli meat slicer. I’ve not tried it yet, but it’s going to be the next experiment when I have the time.

How he developed the Jagwing design

I had learned about how certain kinds of real aircraft get lift. Most people have heard the explanation about how a typical wing redirects the airflow downward to get its lift. There’s a related, yet different principle that’s involved with a “delta wing” aircraft like the Concord or a French Mirage fighter jet. Those have a delta wing, a very sharp triangle, with the angle in the middle no more than about sixty degrees. That’s about the maximum you can go. So it’s like having a wingtip and a wingtip right together with no wing in the middle. The wingtips on a normal airplane can get vortices, those little swirling tornados at the wingtips that you sometimes see in good photographs. On a delta wing aircraft, those are the dominant mode for lift when it’s going at slow speed and high angle of attack. The air spills around that pointed leading edge and you get the tornados on top which have low pressure and that’s where you get your lift. I figured, “Maybe I should try something like this.”

I had already come up with Styrofoam “plank” wing gliders. They flew well enough: turned well, fairly stable, but they weren’t quite as slow as I wanted. I had one that was particularly good. It was one of the earliest I’d made and all the subsequent ones flew faster. I could not get something to fly as slow as that first lucky glider. It even had some camber which helped form the airfoil. But I could not get any more to fly as slow. So, on a hunch, I decided, “I’m going to take advantage of this vortex lift.” In my experience any successful walkalong glider has to have a long overall wing span and a short width so it stays within the narrow zone of lift over the cardboard.

To combine the two ideas, I cannot have one big delta wing. It would either be too long; it would stick too far forward and the aircraft would nosedive due to the difference in lift. Or, if I swept it out so the angle was a lot wider it would not get the vortex lift. It would simply be like a swept-back wing, which would not work. So to combine the two I figured, “All right, I’ll have lots of points. I’ll have two or three or four.” So I tried three on the first little glider on a hunch. I tried it out and I was amazed at how mushy and easy it flew. The stall was incredibly gentle and it was very slow even with the extra weight on the nose.

I’ve taken the idea further. I first took my plank flying wings and cut serrations on the leading edge—about one fourth of the overall cord depth. That gave it much-improved low-speed handling, stability and stall resistance. It was just about win-win all the way around. The only disadvantage was a slightly worse lift to drag ratio, but I can handle that. The important thing was getting good slow-speed handling and having something that can take turbulence well. That’s what the jagwing concept allows. The final refinement to it was an overall taper, making the wingtip points shorter. This improves handling because there’s less weight out at the tips to steer and control when maneuvering it. Most of the weight’s in the middle, so there’s a low moment of inertia is critical to any sort of airplane, model or otherwise.


Tyler MacCready Walkalong Glider Interview

"We eventually realized that we could follow the airplane all the way across the living room with a board underneath it, making an up current just like the slope lift that we had been flying in outside" - Tyler MacCready

Introduction

It’s said that there’s nothing new under the sun, but the first time I saw someone levitating a glider, I couldn't believe it.. The person was Dr. Tyler MacCready, on the PBS program Scientific American Frontiers, demonstrating to host Alan Alda, who was also wowed. Ten years later I was building and flying walkalong gliders with my students. I was asked to demonstrate and teach with some walkalong flying innovators at the St Louis Science Center. It was a long shot, but why not ask the inventor of walkalong gliding to join us? He came, taught museum visitors how to fly and spoke about the origins of walkalong gliding.

The process of inventing walkalong gliding was wrapped up with being one of Dr. Paul MacCready's sons. When I was a young man, reading about Paul's creative use of science and technology inspired me so much it changed the trajectory of my own life. Thanks to Academy and Peabody Award winning director Ben Shedd I was able to illustrate some parts of the interview with images from Flight of the Gossamer Condor, which has been remastered and is available as a DVD It documents not only the trials of Paul MacCready as he developed human-powered flight, but also captures the beginning of walkalong gliding.


Interview

Part 1 covers how Tyler's early hang gliding and paper airplane flying combined with being exposed to people who were inventing human powered flight led to walkalong gliding.

Most of the stills are from the Academy Award winning documentary Flight of the Gossamer Condor. It' one of my favorites and it was inspiring to my middle school students as well.

Part 2 covers how the opportunity of the PBS program Scientific American Frontiers about flight prompted Tyler to manufacture and distribute foam walkalong gliders--as well as the trials and tribulations thereof. Also, the process of Aerovironment patenting their walkalong glider brought to light a previous patent about walkalong gliding and the mystery that persists.

Part 3 is about how Tyler turned over manufacturing and distribution to a toy company, and the ironies and puzzles therein.


Complete Transcript

There'a a lot of good stuff not in the video

Although there is over half an hour within the 3 parts directly related to walkalong gliders, there is also a lot of good material not in the videos. You can read it, though, below. For example, Tyler talks at length about his work of looking to the oceans for Aerovironment's future. He talks about the twists and turns in his own life, from a college degree in philosophy to a PhD in Geology. He talks about things he learned from his father, like not being afraid to call up and talk to experts--his father Paul "would actually talk to professors who wouldn't talk to each other, but they would all be willing to talk to a college student who was just asking questions." He talks about not even being able to find "the box" that most people are trying to think outside of. Tyler opines about his father's sense of humor, which itself is hilarious. That and more, it's a good read, the entire transcript below.

 

(I asked him to introduce himself)

Sure, I’m Tyler MacCready, the son of Paul MacCready who is the father of human powered flight. He started a company called Aerovironment that has a long history of making one-of-a-kind airplanes. I work at that company now building prototypes for ocean projects. We’re trying to get the company to look into the ocean: ocean wave power, ocean current power, unmanned ocean vehicles. Back to human powered flight, I was the test pilot for our first human-powered airplane because my father needed someone who was very light weight—I was only 14 at the time. He needed someone who was very light weight, available to work and knew how to fly. I knew how to fly because he’d had us flying hang gliders from when I was 10 years old, so I was familiar with flying. I practiced pedaling a lot. Then I worked on all our other different airplanes over the years: human powered, solar powered, flapping planes…

Our company, our main revenue these days comes from small, unmanned aircraft—little drones, basically spy planes, 4 foot wing span, radio controlled planes with a camera on them that can fly up to 5 miles away, for two hours and send back a beautiful video image. (question about what powers the planes) Lithium batteries. That’s a field we were in for a long time and then once lithium batteries became a viable option, that really changed the possibilities for aviation (model airplanes and drones). There’s even the possibility of an eternal plane, a solar powered airplane that can get enough energy during the day, store it in batteries and stay up all night. The battery technology is not quite at the stage to have the energy density to achieve that but it’s getting close. I think we’ll be there sometime soon. In our company we have a lot of talent that’s able to make these unmanned airplanes, which is having to fit a whole lot of technology into a very energy efficient, autonomous vehicle.

All that talent should be equally applicable to ocean vehicles. Even though we came from the aircraft side of things, we’ve been thinking that the ocean is going to be a bigger market ultimately for unmanned vehicles. You can send up one airplane and it can see everywhere but in the ocean see right where you are. So if you want to know what’s going on everywhere you need a vehicle everywhere. We’re hoping that’s going to be a big future for the company but right now there are just two or three of us working on that. We build prototypes and put them in the water. We’re also working on ocean power because our company has been involved in wind power for several decades now. So we’ve been starting to say, what can we do in the ocean—which is a difficult environment, but full of power.

(answering a question about the origins of walkalong gliding)

Ever since we were little kids we were building model airplanes and paper airplanes, doing a lot of flying. Then we got involved in hang gliding when that was beginning around 1971, ’72. My father thought, “Well, this will be interesting.” He got us involved in hang gliding. We started making a lot of paper airplanes that looked like hang gliders and doing a lot of slope flying where the wind goes up a slope. It make an up current and we’d go down to a local hillside and fly our paper airplanes in the slopes. Between my older brother, I and various friends, we’d get competitive about who can make the best plane, who can get the longest flight on the slope, who can make a plane that’s going to fly at the flattest glide angle.

I remember my older brother and I, we were particularly competitive with this at home. (we) were flying—we had a good space between the couches in the living room and could fly our paper airplanes, glide them from one side and see how far they’d go across the living room. As we made them better and better we got them to hit the wall on the other side of the living room and we’d see how high can we get our planes to hit the wall? We eventually realized that if the goal is just to hit the wall as high as possible on the other side—with your gliding plane, not just crumpling and throwing a piece of paper, although that would win—that you could launch the plane and then run around the couch and just before the plane hits the wall give it a little swoop of air. It would hit the wall a foot higher and you’d say, “I won.” (laughs) We started looking into other ways, “How can we get that plane to hit the wall higher on the other side?” We eventually realized that we could follow the airplane all the way across the living room with a board underneath it, making an up current just like the slope lift that we had been flying in outside

(I had never flown paper airplanes outside in updrafts so I ask Tyler to elaborate)

Yes, we’d fly hang gliders in slope lift but also fly all our models on slopes. We’d be on the slope, and wind is coming up, so we’ve got the lift there. It was a more fun place to fly your paper airplanes because you could get flights for a minute or more. Sometimes with just the right design it almost seemed like the plane would go back and forth all on its own, and sometimes even catch a thermal and fly away. So we had a great time flying our planes outside in lift rather than just indoors. But then we found that we could create our own lift and keep them up as long as we followed around behind them with a board. Once we found that we could do that with our paper airplanes—and this was…my father has it written down…I was about 13 at the time and my older brother would have been 15.

It was right around then that we started working on our first solar powered airplane that ended up flying a one mile figure-8 course to win a competition. While we were working on that we had a lot of time to spend out at a very lonely airport in a big, empty hanger waiting for the wind to die down so we could fly the human plane. We had a lot of very light weight material to work with, all the scissors and tape and everything that we could want, and a bunch of people who knew about aerodynamics. So we started building every design we could possibly think of to see what kind of design could fly the best, especially making the walkalong glider. We called it the walkalong glider because you’d walk along behind it to keep it up in the air. We’d see how slowly we could make them fly, how maneuverable, we’ d make fast ones to fly outside in the wind. Normally they don’t handle turbulence very well when they fly very slowly. We make outdoor version, indoor versions, really big ones, really skinny bitty ones… we just did a lot of experimenting to see how well we could make these fly.

It was always just for our own entertainment because it didn’t seem to have the universal appeal of something like a Frisbee which anybody can fly. You can go out on any kind of even windy day and still always fly a Frisbee, whereas these gliders were a little bit more delicate and needed just the right conditions. They’re best when they’re flown indoors. It’s actually hard to find large indoor spaces. Usually in a house the rooms are too small. You start and get to the other side too quickly. Hallways are too narrow. Schools have big spaces. Being in a gymnasium or classroom is great to fly. When people see us flying walkalong gliders a lot of people want to try and do it and a lot of people want to figure out how to make them themselves or would like to know where they can get one. Because it’s made out of unusually lightweight material it’s not the kind of thing that’s easy to go to a store and buy the materials. So even though the plane itself is very simple, finding the material and putting into the right shape is difficult to show somebody how to do.

It looks like a fun toy, so this idea of, “Can we market this” always comes up. I know back in the 1970s we sold a few for $2 US each. Back then 2 dollars was a lot of money so people would grumble. We’d sell them to hang glider pilots. We were these young kids—14, 16—hanging out with all the hang glider pilots and I got them to buy some of our planes. There have been numerous attempts to get toy companies interested in the glider but it’s really difficult to get a toy company interested in something that’s different, especially something they don’t know how to advertise. It’s interesting to see, actually, how un-creative the toy companies are (laughs).

People at the company (Aerovironment) went through the effort of patenting the idea. It was at that time that we found out that—although we had come up with this all on our own when we were kids—and we found out that we weren’t the first people to think of this idea. There’s a patent that shows almost exactly what we were doing, a slightly different design, but a similar idea from 1955. (question about if Tyler knows any more about the 1955 patent other than what’s written in the patent) No, I don’t really know anything about it. It doesn’t seem that it ever became a toy. I’ve never heard of anybody coming across one. I would also imagine that people have probably come up with it before. This wasn’t based on any new technology.'

(question about why did the idea go extinct instead of spreading)

I think it might be that issue of when somebody shows it, it looks really interesting but it’s very difficult for other people to start doing it. Now it seems to have been able to spread because of the internet. That made the idea accessible. You need to see it. If somebody just describes it, it’s like “Whatever?” But when you see it, people tend to think, “Wow! I want to do that!” So the internet really helps. It makes it easy to see how it’s done. It’s also one of those things where you can have all the directions you want on the box, but to see it done you go, “Oh, I get it!” We in the company were trying to get Mattel interested in it, and other toy companies, and just couldn’t generate any interest.

Then there was a Scientific American Frontiers show—I guess it was the late 1990s. It’s a show that Alan Alda hosts and they were going to do it on flight. I think they went and spoke with my father and he sort of convinced them that, “Well, we’ve got a whole show’s worth of material. He also pushed this idea of, “You want to do a segment on the walkalong glider.” They came out and we did the filming so I was able to show Alan Alda how to fly the glider. It’s funny actually, while we were doing that filming it was outdoors, very calm early morning. Right in the middle of the flight when they had the cameras on a little bit of lift (a thermal?) came through and the plane was flying several feet above —and I’m staying underneath it with my hands up as though I still have control of this, I know what I’m doing! That’s one of these things I actually learned from my father: when things are going right, pretend that you meant for that to happen. It ended up making a nice segment, but also that TV show has a website associated with it.

They asked if they wrote in questions, would I be able to answer some questions on the website? I said I would, but I also knew what the main question was going to be, which is, “Where can I get one?” They aren’t available anywhere. I also thought, “Well, this just might be the opportunity. I could build these myself because now I’ve got a free marketing opportunity.” This is another key thing I’ve learned from watching my father develop things. As you make some progress or succeed in something, other opportunities will show up. You go a long way if you keep taking advantage of that next opportunity that shows up and you wind up following a development path that you couldn’t have planned out, couldn’t have predicted. It’s not even something that you necessarily wanted to do to begin with, but when a success happens new opportunities are going to present themselves. At that point you have this choice to say either, “I did this, let me just stop at this success. I’ve achieved what I wanted to do.” Or you can say, “Let’s take this unique opportunity and see where it takes me.” So I had this opportunity for some great free advertising. The internet was around now, so I could actually do all of this by myself because I could take orders on the internet. I could even have my directions and video on the internet showing how to do this. So I decided, “OK, I’m going to do this.”

I figured the first thing I needed was a website so I got myself some software. I didn’t know what I was doing but I figured, “I can make a website, I’m sure I can do this.” Just looking at other websites I started to put something together. I must have asked someone or searched the internet to find out, “How can I take people’s credit card orders? How can I get money from this website? I got that linked in. Then it was like, “OK, but now I also have to figure out how do I make these gliders?” Actually the very first thing I did before I decided I was going to go into business I did enough prototyping to convince myself that I could make these gliders myself. So this was going to be my business model. I was going to be building these, I was going to be doing everything myself. That way I don’t have to coordinate with anybody else. I’m going to sell them on the internet and figured out what I was going to charge for these. I knew I was going to get tired of making them really quick unless I was making a big profit. They cost me 5 dollars make and to ship, but I sold them for fifteen dollars so every time I make one I’m making ten dollars. “OK, that’s enough money to keep me motivated.” The shipping was another thing. “What sort of box am I going to put these in?” So I found some cheap boxes. I sort of knew how I was going to make the planes, but I also said on my website—like I’d always heard when I was a kid—you have to wait 6 to 8 weeks for delivery.

So I figured, I’ve got a nice window of time here. I remember waiting at home, waiting for the TV show to air. I had my website up and running, the show aired and by the end of it I think I had orders for 200. By the next day I had orders for 600. I knew how to make them but I hadn’t actually made them yet, at least my real production setup. So that’s when the panic started! I was going to buy pre-sliced foam and cut out these wing shapes. I made 10 little aluminum molds that I could make myself to squeeze the wings in. I went to Sears to buy a convection oven to blow air around for even heat throughout the oven and found that the convection oven wouldn’t cook at low enough temperature. So I went back and returned the oven. I ended up having to buy a $2000, very expensive oven that would hold its temperature within one degree throughout because the foam had to be cooked hot enough to mold it but not hot enough to melt it. There’s just a few degree difference there. (question about expanding polystyrene beads into an enclosed mold) Well I didn’t have a mold to expand into. I didn’t have a real production thing but I can bend aluminum. Also, I wouldn’t want to make a very expensive finish mold because it might not be the right shape. Then I’d have to make a whole new mold. So I made something that I was going to be able to keep modifying. I figured out how I was going to produce these, set up sort of a mass production system at home.

I had to figure out how to get labels on them. I had to figure out how to get nose weights that used a special washer that I got from a certain chain of hardware stores in Los Angeles. They were the only ones selling just these right washers so I had to go around to all their different outlets and buy all the washers they had. I was making these things, putting them in boxes and sending them. People started writing back, saying the box arrived but it was destroyed. Most of them made it OK. The ones that didn’t make it successfully I immediately refunded the money and send them a new one. That’s when I started realizing that customer service is a big time consuming part of a business, as is packaging and shipping. Those ended up taking as much time as my manufacturing. I also wanted to make sure I was selling a good product so I’d test-fly every one. I had to write up directions and copy them to put in each box.

I was using another technique that I learned from my dad that you don’t have to know what you’re doing to go ahead and do something. The best way to learn is by doing it. So I was going to be running my own business and I didn’t know anything about running my own business, so I just did it. One scary part was a day or two after I had gotten these initial orders I had the credit card thing set up so I was actually taking the money from people right when they placed the order, and the credit card company called me up. And they said, “Hey, we see you’re a new business. You look like you’re doing a great business. We just want to make sure that you’re shipping within 24 hours.” It turns out that the law is you have to ship within 24 hours of actually taking somebody’s money. If you can’t ship that quickly you get an authorization to take that money but don’t actually charge that credit card until you actually deliver. I told her, “No, I’m not shipping in 24 hours. “ I said 6 to 8 weeks, but it’s the law that you can’t take the money and say 6 to 8 weeks later—with credit cards at least. But she was very nice. She said, “Well, just get them out as soon as you can.” I started learning a lot about credit card companies and why Visa and Mastercard are the two main ones and how to deal with a slightly irate person who checks their credit card statement and says, “Hey, I’ve been charged for this and it hasn’t been delivered.” I’m like, “Oops, ok, that person goes up to the top of my list of who to send to.” So I had all these difficulties. And then the issue with the boxes. What I really needed was custom-made boxes, which are more expensive but are exactly the right size for my gliders. So I kept that business going for a few months and ended up selling about 2000 planes, making about 20,000 dollars profit and I still have a nice $2000 dollar oven left over.

Since I wasn’t doing any more advertising, eventually the orders started dwindling to where there’d be a dozen in a week or less. Then I found I could keep up (laughs) but by then I was really tired of taping boxes together, filling up my car with boxes and going to the post office. The post office didn’t like me. They said I was filling up all their bins, could I go to the main post office. Then I got a call from a toy company. It’s a Canadian business but they do all their business out of Hong Kong. The guy said, “I bet you’re making these by the thousands. Would you like to sell them by the millions?” I thought about that. I knew it would be a lot less money. I wouldn’t be making $10 on each glider anymore, but I thought, “That would be nice.” They said, “All right, let’s do it.” It turned out to be a really high-energy toy company called WowWee with a lot of dynamic guys who know how to get stuff done really quick. They were owned by Hasbro at the time so they had a big company behind them. So the next thing I know they’re flying me over to Hong Kong with me bringing some of my gliders. We meet with manufacturers. I started showing them how to make the glider so it’ll do what I think it’s supposed to do. They were figuring out how to advertise. It was a couple days a few different times. I went over once to show them how to make everything then again when they had the finished product to make sure it was actually being done right. Since it’s a flying toy, it’s not like a figurine that’s the right shape. It really has to function well. That was really nice because I didn’t have to make them anymore.

I kept up my website for awhile, but I ended up so confused by this whole thing that I failed to renew my website. Somebody who snaps up websites that get a lot of clicks took my website. And I was absolutely happy about that. “All right, I’m out of business! I do not sell these things anymore. I don’t have to respond to anything.” I was kind of tired of it at that point.

(question about how much the toy company bought rights for)

That was another thing. Now I’m dealing with a toy company. I don’t know about dealing with a toy company. I found out the deal is royalties. You get a percentage of their sales. This is another important thing. I think the reason this toy company was because there was a guy who was sort of a robotics expert who had recently started working with them. I had some interest in robotics. He was working at Los Alamos. This was before I was going into business. I just had some robotics ideas and he seemed to be the only person who was thinking along similar lines. I’d built some things and driven all the way out to Los Alamos New Mexico just to meet with him and talk about some of this stuff. He wound up with a toy company, I wound up making a toy, so I wound up at the toy company as well because of this connection. I’ve always thought it’s another very important thing to actually know people. Not necessarily power people, but just to know people who can connect you with other opportunities. You want to do something, you want to know about something, there’s somebody you can call or there’s somebody who calls you. I think they did sell a million or something gliders. I didn’t know anything about how to negotiate a contract with them, so I just said, “I want whatever contract this other guy has. That percentage.“ They said OK. Then I’m trying to figure out how to sign a contract with a toy company. I don’t trust these guys but I knew somebody who can read contracts. He was kind enough to review it and had some suggestions. So I was getting a lot of help from other people. The toy ended up getting produced pretty well, went on the market, then at some point went off the market for no reason whatsoever. I could never figure out why. I found dealing with the toy business that if I asked two people I get two answers, so after awhile I gave up asking why anything happens.

Another one of these taking the opportunity, they liked these gliders, but they were selling in the ten to twenty dollar range. What they really like is to sell a fifty dollar product. So they said, “Can you make a radio controlled version?” This was before lithium batteries. It was still hard to make a toy-grade radio controlled airplane, but I put together something. They got it working. They got some great marketing behind it. I ended up just in one more year making more money from that than I had from the walkalong glider. I was actually able to put a big down payment on my house just because I was always willing to go to that next step, keep going with the opportunities. There would have been even an opportunity to spend more time in Hong Kong. Personally I decided I didn’t like Hong Kong or the toy business. It’s kind of tense. But it was interesting to go to a toy fair in New York. They were selling my gliders in Macy's.

(question about why he stopped hang gliding and studied geology)

My father used to be a world champion sailplane pilot. He stopped flying around the time he started having kids but he knew a lot of people who were into flying. In 1971there was a little impromptu get together of people who decided to build their own hang gliders. The sport really didn’t exist prior to that but some people put out some plans, people got together and said, “Hey, we can do this!” By 1972 when I was 10 years old we had built our first hang glider. We bought some plans for $25, bought a bunch of bamboo, black plastic sheet, tape, wire and built a hang glider. We’d go out to the beach—sand dunes—to fly. That was great because the glider was basically uncontrollable but you could crash it into the sand anywhere and when you’re 10 years old survive. My brother was 2 ½ years older than me, he was also flying. The sport of hang gliding was developing at that time from the more triangle shaped gliders (delta, Rogallo) to the more slender wing, higher performance gliders that we have today. It was funny, we were little kids in amongst…it was a bunch of hippies, the hang gliding crowd, mostly in their twenties. There weren’t all that many people hang gliding. So we were able to participate in a lot of the early development of that sport.

My father just let us go hang out with these other people and go off on trips Yosemite, mountains or hills in Malibu or wherever. I had a lot of great flights and even went to the national competition once but didn’t quite make it in—wasn’t quite good enough that day. But the sport was sort of dangerous back then. It’s gotten much safer. They’ve figured out how to make the gliders very safe, and they used to not be safe. And because it’s flying and you’re a pilot it’s a matter of judgment. You need judgment to fly and I did not have good judgment. I used to crash every now and then and destroyed a couple of gliders. Once I had a mix-up flying along some cliffs on the coast and ended up landing on a ten by ten foot rock all covered with mussels (like clams) out in the ocean because it was the only place left to land. It was the best landing of my life! But still I should not have let myself get into that position. I’d make mistakes like that on a regular basis. By the time I was 16 I was in high school and not flying as much. But I sort of realized that I don’t have good judgment as a pilot, I shouldn’t be flying the way I am. I stopped hang gliding at that time. I started getting much more interested in radio control models. With radio control models I’m still a terrible pilot and I crash all the time, but you can walk away from even a spectacular crash. More often than not I run into myself with my own airplane. I’m not quite sure why…I have poor judgement!

I went to high school, went to college and majored in philosophy because I couldn’t think of anything else to major in. I went to work at my father’s company where I’d been working starting in high school and through college in the summers, building solar planes, solar cars, a flapping pterodactyl model. I also used to like traveling around the country, especially the western U.S. Incredible places. I’d always wanted to know about the geology of places more than caring about the history of the area or the plant life. I wanted to know about the rocks. At some point I was on a camping trip and I looked up at this beautiful rocky face and thought, “You know, I could quit my job and go study geology.” I didn’t know anything about geology so the first thing I did was take a night class, Geology 101 at UC Northridge to see if I could handle being back at college. Are the nightmares going to come back from unfinished homework? I discovered from Geology 101 that geology was even way more interesting than I thought it could be. I went off the University of New Mexico for two years of undergraduate classes because I didn’t know anything. Then I went to the University of Wyoming for a master’s thesis. The reason I was there was a great supervisor who I could work with.

Then I went to Monash University in Australia for the PhD because after the master’s thesis I thought, “What could be more fun than going to another country where they speak English. There are big deserts and I love deserts. So got to spend 4 years with a field area in the outback, and kangaroos and all that kind of stuff. Lots of fun. Another interesting aspect of getting an education in geology is the money side. I’ve come to think there’s a lot of money in the world and it’s good to figure out how to ask for it because there are a lot of people giving away a lot of money one way or another. The National Science Foundation gave me a great scholarship and then the Australian government gave me the scholarship to do work there. When it comes to applying to get money to get a scholarship or collage application or anything, the goal is to sell yourself. Don’t be too humble. Talk about how great and how interesting you are. If there’s somebody who looks like they might be giving money away ask them for it because they’re going to give it to somebody. It might as well be you. There are also positions in school, job opportunities…you just go and ask for it and see if they’ll give it to you. If you keep asking a lot somebody’s going give you something that’s pretty good (laughs).

(question about not being discouraged when some says no)

No, I actually expect everybody to say no, and am amazed that they say yes (laughs). Another thing my father would always talk about is, if there’s somebody you want to talk to—it doesn’t matter if it’s a famous person or someone you’ve seen on TV or have some very important position in a company, or whatever—it doesn’t matter. Call them up or go visit. A lot of people might seem very famous or be at the top of their field or something, but they’re really just people. They love to talk to…especially to students, an interested student. People love to talk. That’s how my father got a lot of his best insights was by going and talking. He would actually talk to professors who wouldn’t talk to each other, but they would all be willing to talk to a college student who was just asking questions. By talking to people there are a lot more people you know. Don’t think there are any barriers out there, already set.

One other thing that seems to characterize people in our family and certainly my father is the idea of not following a linear career path. I know it’s not for everybody because there’s something very nice about knowing where you’re headed, what you’re trying to accomplish, knowing what field you’re studying and knowing what kind of work you’re going to be doing. But my father found for himself and I found for myself that our interests change. They go across different fields. So we kind of go with whatever it is that seems like the interesting thing to do. So I majored in philosophy in college because I didn’t have any idea what I wanted to do. I didn’t even understand people who had an idea of what they wanted to do. Said incredulously, “You actually know what you want to do? I’m just here in college. I like philosophy classes more than any other classes so I’m going to major in philosophy and I get to take more philosophy classes." Then I worked at the company. I was untrained, labor building things, something I knew how to do. Then I learned geology, actually spent 10 years altogether studying geology. I was expecting that I would be working in geology afterward, but I picked a really bad time—the late 1990s was a bad time for geologists. There were so many unemployed geologists with a lot more talent than me. So I ended up at the company, but in a different position now. Also when I studied geology I didn’t intend to get a PhD. I went through that far because after my masters I couldn’t imagine anything more fun than another big geology project, so I got a PhD. I went back to the company, and now I had this degree that put me in a different place in the company. They pay people with a PhD at a certain level because you have a PhD. So even though I wasn’t working as a geologist for the company I had a PhD. So I took a pay raise. It was another example of people giving money for something I didn’t expect.

At the company we’ve been working on ocean projects because it seems like a really interesting area. While the company makes a lot of flying things and that’s its main business, we’re exploring what fields we might want to work on in the future. So now my work is mostly engineering. And along with that I do mechanical engineering, which at the level I do it is a bunch of algebra. You’ve got to know the math and know how to draw and build. When I finished my doctorate I started getting some interesting ideas about robotics. There’s something about self-organizing systems and chaos. I thought this might be something applicable to geology but geology is a very messy subject to study. I wanted something much more rigorous where I could really measure all the energy going through a system. So I thought about electronics and robotics. I went to RadioShack and bought their simplest (starter kits). How do you wire an LED? How do you make it flash? How do you make a beeper? I started wiring those things together with the simplest manuals, learning how to do electronics. I burned up a lot of LEDs and frying a lot of things and eventually got to where I could start making circuits and they wouldn’t fry anymore. There weren’t any hot parts (laughs). It turns out once you do your electronics correctly they don’t get hot, it just sort of works. I was able to teach myself enough electronics for what I wanted to do. Later, for some stuff at work I needed to program chips and I didn’t know how to program chips. I’d never take a class on how to program chips. But it turns out that just sitting there and working though it—I’m not doing things like someone who’s trained as an electrical engineer or computer programmer but I can do it enough to make it work. There are so many easily accessible educational materials, especially on the internet, anything!

I’ve just started learning how to play the piano and I don’t want to take lessons. I just want to enjoy myself playing the piano, so I think of a song I want to learn how to play and go on YouTube videos of other people playing that song. I realize (gesturing) I don’t have to claw the piano; it’s actually possible to do it like this. And now I know how it’s supposed to sound. So it’s really fun to, whatever subject you might want to look into, it’s pretty easy to learn enough to be able to do things. So we’re learning about the ocean, learning about oceanography, how to waterproof things and trying to get energy out of ocean waves. That’s one of the projects I work on a lot these days, which has required learning a lot about ocean waves. How do you get energy out of the environment? It’s a really interesting subject, and a really fun one because nobody’s figured this out. Nobody is making large amounts of power from ocean waves. There isn’t any ocean wave powered device where you go and look at it and think, “Oh, that’s the obvious answer.” With wind turbines there’s an obvious answer and it’s working—looks good. But with wave power, not. It’s a field that nobody has figured out yet. People might say they’ve figured it out, formed companies but nobody’s actually succeeded. So it’s fun. And I have no idea if we’ll succeed. The ocean’s a rough place. It destroys everything we put in it. In the air everything has to be a light as possible. In the ocean everything has to be strong and waterproof. It’s nice to be able to make things where it doesn’t matter how much they weigh.

(question about the family)

We were talking about how my father’s been an inspirational figure because he was so creative. He came up with a lot of unique ideas for things. With the human powered airplane wasn’t to advance human-powered flight. It was to make money. [Paul MacCready co-signed a loan for a friend starting a business. The business failed, leaving MacCready to pay the debt] There was a large cash prize, about a hundred thousand dollars for flying a one mile figure-8 course]. It was intriguing to my father because the prize had been around for 18 years and no one had achieved it even thought they’d spent a lot of money and some incredible engineering. They made really amazing airplanes but they couldn’t make it around this course. My father came up with an idea that cost almost nothing—just some aluminum tubes, plastic sheet…almost like our first hang glider. Lots of wires, tape, string. It was a little bit more than that but it was a very crude airplane, especially through all the prototyping stages. But it was based on a fundamentally different approach. My father was drawing on his experience with very lightweight indoor models and hang gliders, which were a wire-braced structure. Other people were making thiers more like high performance, really light sailplanes. They were trying to make these amazing, really good planes. My dad was like, “You know, what we need has just got to be light. It has to be so light and fly at only 6 miles per hour. But it’s easy to build. You bend tubes around your knees to make an airfoil.”

The key to his success was that he didn’t do things the way everybody else was doing them. I always think back to one of the children’s books that we had when we were growing up. It was called Artie the Smarty, which is a book about fish. There’s a whole school of fish swimming in one direction and there’s Artie the smarty swimming in the other direction. That’s something my dad could relate to and he got us to relate to that same idea. Whatever direction everybody else was going, it’s fun to go the other way. I wound up a lot like my father. I’ve ended up thinking very similarly. In fact, I’ve even developed the same sense of humor, which I found disturbing because I did not think he was very funny when I was growing up. And now that’s me, so I know I’m not funny! But I wound up thinking the same way he thinks. I do wind up always looking for the different way of doing things, the opposite way, or asking what are people missing? Just because everybody’s doing something the same way doesn’t mean that’s the right way or the best way. Not everything’s been done yet. A lot of people talk about trying to think outside the box. It’s always felt to me like I’ve spent my whole life trying to find that box that people are talking about because I’d like to spend some time inside that box, being like other people, thinking the same way other people think and feel like I just one of the guys (laughs). I keep finding my mind goes off in different directions and it’s very interesting but I often think I’m kind of crazy or something.

I have two brothers, and older brother and younger brother. My older brother has succeed in getting a more regular lifestyle. We do a lot of creative things, and he’s still very creative, but he’s a professor of oceanography at the University of Washington. I think he likes the stability of having the same job for years and years. My younger brother is constantly doing different things. Not so much engineering creativity but more like traveling and business development. He’s always looking for something different to do.

(question about if his mother is living)

Yes. My mom, I’m not sure how she did it, she was the one who would keep my father socially acceptable. She’d make sure his clothes were OK, make sure they knew enough people around town, make it to parties and things. I’m not sure how she did it but she would allow us to go out hang gliding when we were so young. Somehow she maintained her sanity and sort of kept us in society, or otherwise we might have drifted (laughs).


Joseph E. Grant: Walkalong Glider Inventor

Above are pictures from the 1950s of Joseph Grant flying his invention.
It looks like he invented spinning props for the gliders, too – truly a man ahead of his time.


Here are some more photographs that Whitney Grant found and scanned. She said, "Here are the two photos that I found recently. They are similar to the others that I shared with you but fun to see different versions. Ironically, these were taken December 11, 1950 ..... 67 years ago - almost to the day!"

It shows clearly a prototype launcher that puts everything at the right place and the correct angle. I am speculating that the open part in the middle might create more efficient turning--I'll experiment with it. The pictures also show his vertical tips. They also strengthen turning ability.

 

I am fascinated by the history of science. It's interesting to see how scientific ideas originate and develop, so naturally I wanted to know the creation story of walkalong gliding. I learned that the concept was not invented once, but twice.

On a separate page and video interview, Dr. Tyler MacCready recounts how he and his brothers invented and developed the basic concept of walkalong gliding in the late1970s while his father and friends were inventing human-powered flight. But when the family filed for a patent, the patent search revealed that one Joseph E. Grant had filed a patent for a walkalong glider almost 3 decades earlier. The following is an attempt to understand who Joseph Grant was, how he came to invent walkalong flight and why it was not commercially viable at the time.


Finding Joseph Grant

That Joseph Grant conceived the concept of walkalong flight is remarkable achievement. A lot of brilliant people in aviation history—kite makers starting in China, Leonardo da Vinci, Tito Livio Burattini, Jean-Marie Le Bris, Otto Lilienthal, the Wright brothers and countless others—grappled with the components of flight, yet there is no record of the walkaong concept until Grant's patent. It is logical that the MacCreadys would re-invent walkalong gliders in the ferment of inventing human-powered flight. Also, they were all experts at hang gliding, which uses "ridge-lift": wind that hits a mountain and is forced to go up, which keeps the hang glider up. With walkalong gliding, you "move the mountain" so to speak—the deflecting board—and direct apparent or relative wind up. It's not hard to see that hang gliders and walkalong gliders are similar in that way. But inventing the later from the former is still a giant step.

I looked up the patent and started looking for Joseph Grant. And looked. For years I tried genealogy sites. Finally, my friend Erik Herman took a shot and made the big breakthrough right away. Erik and I were working on a project at the New York City branch campus of Cornell University. Erik left a message at a telephone number that might be associated with Joseph Grant. That evening we were at a pub soaking in some live Celtic music when we got a return call, and after years of searching for more information about this mysterious inventor of walkalong gliding, I was suddenly talking to Whitney, his daughter! We had a wonderful conversation. Whitney remembered her father flying the glider in the yard. However, she was unaware of the renewed interest in walkalong flight. Subsequently, I also had terrific conversations with Joseph Grant's other daughter Stephanie and his son Greg. At last I could learn more about the inventor of walkalong flight.

Diverse Interests

Joseph Grant was born in 1912 in Los Angeles, a few months after the Titanic sank. He passed away in 1988. His wife Hortense was born 1917 and passed away in 2012. In all the conversations with his children, two characteristics emerged immediately. First, he was a wonderful father: devoted, encouraging, working on projects and traveling with his kids. Second, his interests were spectacularly diverse. I hardly know where to begin or how to contain them all in a cohesive essay.

Son Greg Grant had a long career in the airline industry with TWA. Shown here about to go skydiving, he has flown in gliders as well.
Daughter Whitney Grant was friends and played tennis with astronaut and great science educator Sally Ride.
Daughter Stephanie Grant eventually played at Wimbledon.

So, they remembered doing everything with him from fly fishing to finding fossils; from Heathkit electronics projects to history—particularly Greek and Roman. He had an ancient coin collection.He got his daughters started playing tennis and took them all around the country as they played competitively. Whitney earned 6 national tennis titles and Stephanie played at Wimbledon.

Son Greg Grant, a history and genealogy buff, might write about the family ancestors. But the drift I got from conversations was that generations of the family worked hard, saved, made wise investments, became prosperous, took some hits but kept going even in adversity. The generations also recognized the value of education. Joseph was one of the early graduates of UCLA. But he was clear that that did not just value formal education; he was a lifelong learner.

Stephanie Grant Phillips with grandson

A Sailor

By 1939 Joseph E. Grant was filing for patents. He was also an accomplished sailor and navigator from an early age. When World War II broke out he enlisted as an officer. There were no boats available at first, so for a couple of years he sailed his own boat off the coast of California, spotting for submarines. When a U-boat chaser boat became available he was given command, based near the Panama Canal and protecting merchant ships in the Caribbean. Later in life he used his skills as the navigator for the big Transpac race between California and Hawaii in his brother's sail boat. During the 1955 race he fell overboard, but in 1959 his team won the Transpac. He was one of the first to experiment with home computers (TRS) and create software relating to longitude and latitude. Beyond the practical use of stars for navigation, he loved astronomy.

A Business Man

Joseph Grant was not successful in every business venture, but enough of them worked out that the family was well to do, living in Beverly Hills. There was a hotel that he owned, but a resident was smoking in bed and started a fire. He bred orchids, racing pigeons and tropical fish. He spent his last years establishing a farm in Santa Ynez for raising and training racing horses, working side by side with his daughter Whitney, who is still continuing that today. The earlier orchid farm was not profitable, but the land he bought for it—in Malibu—appreciated remarkably. He was astute at real estate, which supported his family and his many interests. Only after his death did his children learn about the extent of his philanthropy, including people whose education he paid for and support of Native American causes.

Although he got a patent for a walkalong glider, he was not able to market the idea. He did meet with representatives from the Milton Bradley Company but they did not take it up. Joseph Grant was ahead of his time. If he had access to the modern materials of today, perhaps he would have created a commercially viable product.

Joseph Grant loved to raise and train racing horses, work which his daughter Whitney took over and continues.
Joseph and Hortense Grant at daughter Stephanie's wedding.

Hortense Grant

Joseph Grant's wife Hortense was as accomplished and interesting as he was. During WWII opportunities opened up for women. She learned to pilot airplanes and had a close call when the engine in her plane stopped. She glided it down to a safe landing. She actually helped design airplanes as well, such as the C-47, for the Douglas Aircraft Company. She was a liaison between the various engineering and design teams. She traveled to England on the Queen Mary Ship just before the bombing of London. She volunteered with the Red Cross there to help in medical facilities and at a gathering saw Winston Churchill. At the war's end she drove a convoy truck into Germany.

Reason for the Invention

Some of Joseph E. Grant's earliest patents relate to filmstrips and he maintained his interest in photography and home movies. There is a tantalizing possibility that there might be a historic home movie of the first walkalong glider being flown by its inventor.

Sailing is the closest I have been able to get to finding a cause and effect that led to inventing walklong gliding. Obviously he thought about how air interacts with surfaces. And son Greg Grant mentioned that in the Transpac race they did not head directly for Hawaii, but instead diverted their route a little so they could sail downwind with spinnaker sails and surf down the swells. Air-surfing is another name for walkalong gliding and it's apt. You actually do surf on the leading edge of an invisible swell of air. It's a long way from surfing on water to surfing on air, but it's the closest I can come to a direct logical reason for his invention.

In the end, the invention of walkalong gliding remains a mystery. I went searching for Joseph Grant's "ah ha" moment. I had delightful conversations with his son and daughters and serendipitously discovered a Renaissance man who was interested in and tinkered with EVERYTHING! Joseph E. Grant embodies the Pasteur quote that, "Chance favors a prepared mind". And ultimately that is a more useful, satisfying and still wonderfully mysterious answer.