Beyond Kitty Hawk

Pioneering aircraft design did not end with the brothers Wright. Some of today's most innovative work is being done by designers in their own high-tech skunk works.

Airplane kits with nose-mounted wings and no tail that seem to fly backward. Jets with oversize canards mounted, Wright-brothers style, forward of the wings. A spindly, twin-boomed plane that in 1986 was the first to fly around the world without refueling. Aircraft designed by Burt Rutan don't look like other planes. One of the industry's most innovative and influential designers, Rutan has built a pressurized gondola for a round-the-world balloon attempt, a rigid winglike sail for an America's Cup winner, GM's Ultralight show car and the X-38 NASA crew-return vehicle. He is now testing his most exotic craft yet, the asymmetrical twin-engined Boomerang, designed to prevent instability should one engine fail. And he has set his sights on the $10 million X-PRIZE for the first private spaceship to carry three passengers to sub-orbital altitude, land safely and return to space twice within two weeks.

PAUL MACCREADY In 1977 one of MacCready's creations, the Gossamer Condor, a kitelike affair powered only by a furiously pedaling cyclist-pilot, flew more than 7 min. Two years later, the Gossamer Albatross, an improved model, was pedaled across the English Channel. In 1981 a pilot took the sun-powered Solar Challenger 163 miles from France to a base in England. No wonder the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1980 named MacCready its Engineer of the Century. In the years since, MacCready has fashioned such marvels as the wing-flapping pterodactyl that flew in the IMAX film On the Wing, the General Motors "Impact" electric car and the unmanned solar-powered Pathfinder, which has already flown to 80,000 ft.--higher than any other propeller-driven aircraft.