Top: SUMPAC pilot
Derek Piggott tries the
cockpit for size with the
rest of the team running
through a few pre-flight
checks.

86  HUMAN POWERED AIRCRAFT

Bottom: Employees

from De Havilland’s

Hatfield factory put their

woodworking skills to

good use in building the

Hatfield Puffin HPA and

the Puffin II, pictured

here in 1965.

Surprisingly, at the slightly increased height,
Allen found the going easier and carried on to
land on the beach.

The figure-of-eight had been flown and the

English Channel had been conquered, so in

1983 the RAeS decided to set another challenge.

No HPA had been known to fly at more than

about 20 mph, so to encourage inventive

engineers and designers to build faster HPAs,

the challenge was to complete a 1.5 km (0.93

mile) course in less than three minutes. Henry

Kremer again put up the prize money, this time

offering £20,000 for the first to complete the

challenge and £5,000 to anyone who could

better the previous successful time by 5%.

A team from the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology (MIT) began building the Monarch

B in May 1983 and within a year they had it

ready to go for the prize. After a number of

setbacks, the Monarch B was flown around

a course at the Lawrence G. Hanscom Field

airport in Massachusetts in 2 minutes 54.7

seconds. That record stood for only a week

before another MacCready design, Bionic

Bat, knocked 11.4 seconds off the time, but

Bionic Bat then lost the record a month later to

Musculair I when it recorded a time almost 12

seconds faster than the Bat. Four months later

the Bat reclaimed its record, but in October

1985 Musculair II appeared. The Musculair

planes were fielded by a German father-

and-son team, with Gunter Rochelt leading

the design team and his 19-year-old son Holger

pumping the pedals. This time they flew the

triangle in 2 minutes and 2 seconds, setting a

world record speed of 27.5 mph (44.3 km/h),

and they shared the Kremer prize money pot

between them.

If all of this suggests there are teams out there

building HPAs purely to win cash prizes, then