lined up a few cars and turned their 
headlights on. It is tempting to imag- 
ine what a passerby might have 
thought of this fragile dragon with 
its aluminum skeleton and plastic skin 
shimmering in the lights: the embryo 
of an airplane. 
The first job was to weigh the plane. 
MacCready had calculated its empty 
weight as forty-two pounds, but rain- 
water was already building up on the 
wing surface, and the first weight was 
fifty-eight pounds. While the team 
watched, the one-inch-diameter king 
post bowed more and more under the 
weight of the water, and then buckled. 
They hurriedly replaced it with a 1.5- 
inch diameter tube and rerigged the 
stays. MacCready decided to try glide 
tests in a grass parking field for the 
Rose Bowl, and the now-sodden group 
trundled the plane on a dolly across 
Seco Street to the field. 
For the next two hours the team 
slogged back and forth on their make- 
shift runway. Crew members steadied 
the Condor’s wing tips and bowsprit 
while MacCready held up the bottom 
post and tried to control the pitch 
angle with a clothesline attached to 
the stabilizer. By 1:00 a.m. the plane 
weighed eighty pounds, and all the 
participants agreed that an hour later 
its original weight had doubled. 
Finding agreement on what else 
happened that night is more difficult, 
an aeronautical Rashomon. Kirke 
Leonard was the most disparaging: “It 
was a very foggy night, and the fog 
turned to rain and condensed on the 
wings. There wasn’t any head wind, 
but when we tried to run, it wouldn’t 
fly at all. It never got off the ground.” 
Jack Lambie only saw the good 
parts: “Although the rain added a lot 
of weight, it was apparent that the 
craft was more like a balloon than 
an airplane. We walked with it at five 
miles per hour and it lifted easily, 
straining at the ropes we attached to 
the corners. Nothing broke in the 
flight tests.” 
For MacCready, despite the prob- 
lems, the test was a confirmation of 
his theories. “I mainly wanted to see 
whether the structure would work, and 
if the canard stabilizer would control 
the pitch. It did that, maybe not per- 
fectly, but enough so that it was worth 
going on. When the wing lifted, I hung 
on and became convinced that the de- 
sign was what we had hoped for.” 
By 2:00 a.m. the crew had made 
ten test runs. In his notes on these 
“flights” MacCready referred to the 
wing as a sail; the design was still 
an ultralight hang glider in his mind. 
On their way back to the Rosemont 
Pavilion the team discovered one of 
the drawbacks of an ultralight hang 
glider. As they crossed Seco Street, 
headed northeast, a gusty tailwind hit 
the plane. The trailing edge of the 
wing bent down sharply, the right wing 
snapped at the inboard joint, and then 
at others. A few moments later several 
ribs buckled, the right wing tip broke 
off, and tears began to spread across 
the Mylar covering. The scene was 
ludicrously similar to the old films 
of human-powered flight attempts that 
are shown as real-life cartoons. 
The team dragged the remains into 
the pavilion, disassembled them, and 
moved them into a storage bay. At 
2:20 a.m., the prototype Gossamer 
Condor was a pile of bent aluminum 
tubing, wire, and bedraggled Mylar 
that, in fact, had never flown at all. 
The next morning it was trucked up 
to Mojave Airport, to be made into 
the human-powered aircraft that 
would win the Kremer Prize. 
71 
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