We Can Fly

In 1988, myth became reality.

Although man has coveted the skies for thousands of years, he has never really flown. True, the Wright Brothers made the first successful powered flight in 1903, but that was by virtue of a gas-powered engine. It is also true that advances in aviation have made that historic event pale by comparison (the Wright Brother's plane, The Flyer, only flew 120 ft...shorter than the fuselage of a modern jumbo jet). Jets can travel faster than the speed of sound. We can circle the globe from space. We've gone to the moon...and beyond (unmanned, of course). But, how clever is that, when you really think about it? As a good friend of mine says, "You can make a brick can fly, if you attach a big enough engine to it."

Neither were Wilber and Orville the first to attempt flight. In the 15th century, Leonardo DaVinci proposed the "ornithopter," a bird-like aircraft with movable wings. (Unfortunately, it would have been too heavy to fly). He even sketched the first helicopter. But in 1799, Sir George Cayley sketched the first glider design, and 54 years later, his coachman flew Cayley's full-size glider 500 yards. The first working hang-glider, as we know it, was flown in the 1890's. Hot-air ballooning even became a somewhat elite sport of choice during the late 19th century. Yet for all these, man had still not flown...at least, not under his own power.

But consider the tragedy of Daedalus and Icarus. According to the Greek myth, they escaped from King Minos' Labyrinth on Crete by means of wings that Daedalus fashioned from feathers and wax. Unfortunately, Icarus ventured too near the sun. It melted the wax, and he fell to his death. The heart-broken father, however, flew all the way to the island of Santorini, 74 miles away.

Fast forward to 1977, when Paul MacCready built the Gossamer Condor, an unlikely looking ultra-light aircraft, basically powered by a large propeller attached to a bicycle. It successfully negotiated a 1-1/4 mile, figure-eight course, for which he and his pilot won 50,000 British pounds for the first man-powered aircraft to be able to fly a set course. Eleven years later, Greek cycling champion, Kanellos Kanellopoulos recreated the mythological flight, pedaling the 74 miles from Crete to Santorini in his ultra-light plane, named—what else?—The Daedalus.

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