From the earliest of times, we have dreamed to fly like a bird, to soar through the air by our own power. The Gossamer Condor is the fragile aircraft that fulfilled that age-old dream. This documentary tells story of the invention and building of the world’s first truly successful human-powered airplane, the Gossamer Condor, filmed as it happened. The film was made over one year in 1976-1977 as inventor Dr. Paul B. MacCready, his family and friends worked to win the coveted 1st Kremer Prize for human-powered flight. With Bryan Allen as pilot and airplane engine, this is the true-life account of a landmark in aviation history. 1978 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject. 2019 ProRes Digital Remaster from Academy Film Archives 16mm Restoration Print. Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of AEROVIRONMENT, Inc. A Shedd Productions, Inc. Film.
In 2007 around the 30th anniversary of the Gossamer Condor’s flight, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences was having a screening series of Oscar winning documentaries. The Academy asked for the original 30 year old 16mm film printing masters of THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR to make a restoration print for their screening series and to preserve it. At the same time, we were asked by a teacher writing a USA national high school engineering curriculum if THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR was available on DVD to include it in the Project Lead The Way pre-college engineering curriculum. The Gossamer Condor film story illustrates all the classic steps of a creative and successful design engineering project and would be used in the Project Lead The Way Introduction to Design Engineering course as a Project model and inspiration.
The long and short of this story is the Academy Film Archives Restoration Print was used for the Academy Oscar Doc Series and to make the DVD master – and it looked beautiful! On the DVD release in 2007, Wall Street Journal Pulitzer Prize winning movie reviewer Joe Morgenstern wrote: “The disc is resplendent, thanks to digital remastering in HD (a rejuvenation that has wisely left traces of the imperfections that characterize all films of a certain age).” When THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR was first made in 1978, the Wright Brother’s airplane footage was the old footage “of a certain age” and now the whole film was “of a certain age.” The DVD was used for 8 years in schools across the country, showing to students who were half the age of the movie.
At the end of 2019, I was invited to show THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR film at the Port Townsend Film Festival. The Port Townsend Film Festival was having it’s 20th Anniversary and THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR film was celebrating the 40th anniversary of getting the Documentary Short Oscar, so it was a nice match. I sent off the DVD to the PT Film Festival and a few days later, I got a polite call asking if I might have a better resolution version of the film, as the 12 year old DVD was by today’s standards really low resolution.
Joe Linder, who had made the Restoration at the Academy Film Archives, helped me track down the post production film lab which had made the original Restoration Print/DVD digital transfer 12 years ago. I sent a blind email to them, asking if they had the 12 year old THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR master in their archives and I got an email back about 30 minutes later from David Moreno, the man who had made the original transfer and still at the company.
David found the THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR Digital Master in a form called D5, which was the top format in 2007 and is a now out-of-date digital format. He wrote to me saying they would see if they could get their old D5 machine to run. They did and it worked and I got a new ProRes digital file [now state-of-the-art] just three days before that Port Townsend Film Festival screening.
And when we screened it, THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR looked like it looked in 16mm when it was first made. It is sharp and detailed, showing the Gossamer Condor’s thin wire super-structure and every reflection in the transparent wing covering. There are vibrant colors in the film, like the orange red main title, which I hadn’t seen in decades, and I can see some of the original 16mm film grain in this version. And it still has some of those wonderful “imperfections that characterize all films of a certain age.”
I have thanked the Port Townsend Film Festival over and over for asking. It is so cool to have this long lived film in such pristine condition. Like magic, THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR movie is new again.
Earlier in 2020, the company Paul MacCready founded, AeroVironment, contacted me about having copies of this historic film story for the company’s 50th Anniversary. In my movie making career, I have seen the hardware and technology change from 16mm celluloid to high resolution digital formats and I have had many colleagues and experts guide me from format to format. When this request came in while I was Guest Professor at Linköping University in Sweden, I contacted Editor Mark Brewer, who had been the original Assistant Editor on THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR at Churchill Films in 1978.
Now a highly talented professional movie editor for 40 years, Mark and I had been corresponding about once a decade about projects we were working on. After Mark visited the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC in 2013 and saw the Gossamer Condor airplane and a video excerpt of THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR which runs in that exhibit, he had written to me about the poor quality of that old video and said “I am open to helping you out if you ever decide to futz with Gossamer Condor for the Smithsonian. In fact I’d be honored.”
Now indeed it was time to “futz”…using the new 2019 ProRes Digital master and digital copies of the Special Features from the DVD. It is my turn to be honored to work with Mark. EditGuru Mark guided me through this process and digitally edited this 40th+ Anniversary version of THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR at the highe quality, all done online and with care and new details which expands the film. I thank Mark Brewer deeply and we hope you enjoy this story of the Gossamer Condor airplane, history’s first truly successful human-powered airplane designed and built by Paul MacCready and his family and friends, as this fragile plane flies into aviation history…
Blog Review of THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR, from the Port Townsend Film Festival screening:
A BRIT GOES TO THE MOVIES IN PORT TOWNSEND 2019
“The mission of the Port Townsend Film Festival is to spark community by connecting filmmakers and audiences.’ WOW do they do it! …
[last paragraph]…. And suddenly in the middle (of the Film Festival), rather unexpectedly, the Oscar winning short of 1979: THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR. I confess I went half-expecting a quaint piece of film-making from the past. How foolish was I! The film is still knockout, and is really an object lesson for all in how to make a movie. Impeccably judged and visually stunning, it has everything – human endeavour and excitement, heartfelt emotion, gripping suspense, clear and understandable science, at least three outright disaster moments, and a glorious finish, all beautifully realised. OK, there is no CASABLANCA runway romance, but this is documentary, and anyway I for one could not help falling in love with the plane, a creation of such eccentric and indefatigable beauty. This man-powered bird was made to soar.”
Photo by Mariana Gosnell taken moments after the Gossamer Condor, piloted and powered by Bryan Allen, completed the Kremer Prize Figure-8 Course and flew into Aviation History on August 23rd, 1977.
Remembering Paul MacCready by Ben Shedd – Written 19/Sept/2007
Being around Dr. Paul MacCready and his ideas, I saw and documented someone who changed everything about the world. Before the Gossamer Condor airplane flew, human-powered flight was considered impossible in all of human history – and after the Gossamer Condor completed the challenging Kremer Prize course, human-powered flight was a reality. Over the past three decades, I observed that Paul’s projects keep changing everything about the world, and I learned that we all change everything about the world – often not nearly as visible as Paul’s lifetime of work, but none the less real change – all the time, and that is very empowering to know.
Although nothing like flying the Gossamer Condor had ever been done before in human history, my making the film about the plane was for me a very low risk issue once I had met Paul. I researched his background and learned that even then he took huge leaps in the things he did, and he let me dig through his notebooks and hand drawn sketches of the soon to be built Gossamer Condor airplane. As I taught myself all about flight, the proposed wing-loading in his design jumped out at me. To cut down on the power needed by a pilot pedaling [where the upper limit was about 1/3 horsepower] human-powered planes needed to have a trim strong pilot like Bryan Allen and a very large wing area. All the previous attempts at making pedaled-powered airplanes used the interior box structure so common in motor powered planes and their wing loading – total weight divided by wing area – was always in the range of 1 pound per square foot. With Paul’s idea to make a huge hang glider using giant triangles of piano wire to brace the huge wing – wired triangles from the top post out to the wing when it was on the ground and wired triangles from the bottom post when the wing lifted the plane into the air – the Gossamer Condor wing loading was going to be in the range of .2 pounds per square foot, an order of magnitude drop from all other designs, as long at the wing held together, and it did. Even on paper, his ideas had taken a huge simple leap from anything in the past. Combined with Paul’s clear determination to win the Kremer Prize money, I knew we should follow this team as long as they were working on the Gossamer Condor – and indeed, it flew into aviation history.
On occasion every couple of years, I would see Paul or give him a call, and invariably he would pick up the phone without knowing who the caller was and say “This is Paul” and jump into a 10 or 15 or 20 minute conversation about new ideas he was working on or thinking about. While talking, I always wrote notes as fast as possible because of the flood of interesting ideas. When we last talked in February, I brought up the demise of the EV1 electric car which I had driven from knowing about Paul’s projects, and Paul noted that besides being a great all-electric car, it was the best low drag vehicle ever made. I remembered Paul once telling me that to cut down on drag, a car or any object needed to put the air back together again as it moved through it. And then in our phone call, my notes say Paul commented “All cars would have much less drag if driven backwards instead of forwards.” Another of those simple huge ideas that changes everything.
In the month before Paul passed away, I was working on a remastered version of our film about the Gossamer Condor for the 30th anniversary of its flight, and I spent many hours looking through 30 years of time to those events when Paul led the Gossamer Condor team to make the first truly flyable human-powered airplane. Thanks to Aerovironment’s support, the new DVD of the film makes the 30 year old story all new. Even as Paul slipped away a few weeks ago, there are so many of his ideas and words and pictures to keep all of us thinking and doing and inspired for our whole lives. I’ll miss the phone calls and visits, but I find Paul’s ideas and constant curiosity and thoughtful provocations are alive everywhere I look.
