Paul MacCready

Key takeaways

Paul MacCready belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Paul MacCready to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Paul MacCready from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Paul Beattie MacCready Jr. (September 25, 1925 – August 28, 2007) was an American aeronautical engineer. He was the founder of AeroVironment and the designer of the human-powered aircraft that won the first Kremer prize. He devoted his life to developing more efficient transportation vehicles that could "do more with less".

Early life and education Born in New Haven, Connecticut, to a medical family, MacCready was an inventor from an early age and won a national contest building a model flying machine at the age of 15. "I was always the smallest kid in the class ... by a good bit, and was not especially coordinated, and certainly not the athlete type, who enjoyed running around outside, and was socially kind of immature, not the comfortable leader, teenager type. And so, when I began getting into model airplanes, and getting into contests and creating new things, I probably got more psychological benefit from that than I would have from some of the other typical school things." MacCready graduated from Hopkins School in 1943 and then trained as a US Navy pilot before the end of World War II. He received a BS in physics from Yale University in 1947, an MS in physics from Caltech in 1948, and a PhD in aeronautics from Caltech in 1952. His doctoral dissertation Investigation of Atmospheric Turbulence was supervised by Homer Joseph Stewart. In 1951, MacCready founded his first company, Meteorology Research Inc, to do atmospheric research. Some of MacCready's work as a graduate student involved cloud seeding, and he was an early pioneer of the use of aircraft to study meteorological phenomena.

Career and achievements He started gliding after World War II and was a three-time winner (1948, 1949, 1953) of the Richard C. du Pont Memorial Trophy, awarded annually to the U.S. National Open Class Soaring Champion. In 1956, he became the first American pilot to become the World Soaring Champion in the World Championships at St Yan in France. He invented a device that told pilots the best speed to fly a glider, based on the predicted rate of climb in the next thermal and the glider's rate of sink at different air-speeds. Sailplane pilots still use the "MacCready speed ring", on their rate-of-climb instrument to optimize their flying speed between areas of "lift". In the 1970s, he guaranteed a business loan for a friend, which subsequently failed, leaving him with a $100,000 debt. This was the motivation he needed to compete for the £50,000 Kremer prize for human-powered flight, which had been on offer for 18 years. With Dr. Peter B.S. Lissaman, he created a human-powered aircraft, the Gossamer Condor. The Condor stayed aloft for seven minutes while it completed the required figure eight course, thereby winning the first Kremer prize in August 1977. The award-winning plane was constructed of aluminium tubing, plastic foam, piano wire, bicycle parts, and mylar foil for covering.

Kremer then offered another £100,000 for the first human-powered crossing of the English Channel. MacCready took up the challenge and in 1979, he built the Condor's successor, the Gossamer Albatross, and won the second Kremer prize, flown by Bryan Allen (a pilot and athlete who could pedal better than most pilots) from England to France. He also received the Collier Trophy, which is awarded annually for the greatest achievement in aeronautics or astronautics, for his design and construction of the Albatross. He later created solar-powered aircraft such as the Gossamer Penguin and the Solar Challenger. He was involved in the development of NASA's solar-powered flying wings such as the Helios, which surpassed the SR-71's altitude records and could theoretically fly on Mars (where the atmosphere is thin, with little oxygen). MacCready also collaborated with General Motors on the design of the Sunraycer, a solar-powered car, and then on the EV1 electric car. In 1985, he was commissioned to build a halfscale working replica of the pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus for the Smithsonian Institution, following a workshop in 1984, which concluded that such a replica was feasible. The completed remote-controlled flying reptile, with a wingspan of 18 feet, was filmed over Death Valley, California in 1986 for the Smithsonian's IMAX film On the Wing. It flew successfully several times before being severely damaged in a crash at an airshow at Andrews AFB in Maryland. The launch of the pterosaur model came off well but the radio transmitter link failed, perhaps because of the interference from some of the many base communications devices. The model nosed over and crashed at the runway side, breaking at the neck from the force of impact. MacCready helped to sponsor the Nissan Dempsey/MacCready Prize which has helped to motivate developments in racing-bicycle technology, applying aerodynamics and new materials to allow for faster human-powered vehicles. He was the founder (in 1971) and Chairman of AeroVironment Inc., a public company (AVAV) that develops unmanned surveillance aircraft and advanced power systems. AV flew a prototype of the first airplane to be powered by hydrogen fuel cells, the Global Observer. MacCready died on August 28, 2007, from metastatic melanoma. He was an atheist and a skeptic. He was survived by his wife Judy, his three sons Parker, Tyler and Marshall and two grandchildren.

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Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Paul MacCready

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Paul MacCready claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Paul MacCready before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Paul MacCready ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Paul MacCready

In research: Paul MacCready appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Paul MacCready in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Paul MacCready is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1925 births, 2007 deaths, 20th-century American businesspeople, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Paul MacCready outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

How to study Paul MacCready in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Paul MacCready means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Paul MacCready out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Paul MacCready in simple terms?

Paul Beattie MacCready Jr. (September 25, 1925 – August 28, 2007) was an American aeronautical engineer.

Why does Paul MacCready matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Paul MacCready?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Paul MacCready.