عالم البنات النسائي كل ما يخص المرأة العربية من ازياء وجمال والحياة الزوجية والمطبخ
بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
السلام عليكم ورحمة الله و بركاته
هذي اول قطعه ابي اعرف اش معناها لاني بجد ماحبيتها احس انها ثقيله دم
ماعليها اسئله بس اكيد لو جت في الامتحان راح يحطون اسئله عليها يا اما اختصري وعليها اكيد معاني كلمات وكم سؤال على الطاير
PAUL MACCREAD’S FLYING CIRCUS
by Mark Wheeler
Striding into his office on a June afternoon, a slightly rumpled-looking Paul MacCready juggles an armful of folders with a bag of take-out Thai food and apologizes for his tardiness. “I was up until 3 A.M. the past few nights working on some projects,” he explains, fidgeting with his glasses as he drops the folders, his lunch, and then himself on the couch. What sort of projects? The gray-haired, seventy-four-year-old company founder hesitates. But then his enthusiasm gets the better of him.
“i may have found a way to make exercise addictive,” he says, launching into an energetic description of his “Micro Gym,” a pocket-size exercise machine with a pulse meter that vibrates when the user reaches an optimal heart rate. “Just enough exercise to get that rush of endorphins that will make you want to do it again,” says MacCready. “Wouldn’t that be a great service to humanity?”
From anyone else, the idea might seem pure fantasy. But MacCready has a knack for making the fantastic real. In 1977, the mild-mannered aeronautical engineer designed the first plane powered solely by human effort—a furiously pedaling pilot—capable of sustained flight. Dubbed the Gossamer Condor, the flying machine now sits alongside the Wright Brothers’ Flyer and Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis in the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum.
MacCready grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, where his father was a doctor and his mother a nurse, shy and diminutive, he spent his free hours immersing himself in his hobbies—collecting moths and butterflies and collecting model airplanes. “i think kids do better if they hobby, a topic they know better than anybody else,” he says. By his early teens, MacCready had begun building flying machines, and by age sixteen, he had followed them into the sky as a licensed pilot. “that really gave me confidence in myself,” he recalls. MacCready was even more thrilled when he was introduced to the sport of soaring—glider flying—at age twenty. “Unlike with conventional aircraft, this was pure, quiet, birdlike flight,” he says. “it was first insight into how technology could be combined with the natural world.”
In 1957, MacCready wed Judy Leonard, the daughter of one of his soaring colleagues, and he set about launching an engineering career. “i didn’t want to join a standard aerospace firm, the king that buys engineers by acre,” he says. “such places foster by-the –book thinking, a lockstep way of approaching a problem.” In stead, MacCready started Meteorology Research Inc., a business specializing in flying small planes into clouds to try to modify the amount of rainfall they would produce. When it worked, says MacCready, “it was fun, it gave me a feeling of omnipotence. We got pretty good at creating lightning, but there wasn’t much of a market for it.” MacCready left the company in 1970 and soon after began AeroVironment to develop renewable energy sources like wind and solar power, a mission close to his heart. ” we are quickly using up the resources of a finite planet,” he says.
But the inspiration for his most noted achievements, the Gossamer projects, came from less lofty ambitions. In the early 1970s, a relative had to default on a business loan, and MacCready, who had co-signed the note, suddenly found himself owing $100,000. While searching for a way to pay it back, he recalled an eighteen-year-old challenge that had been offered by British industrialist Henry Kremet to the first person who could complete a 1.15-mile-long-eight course using human-powered flight. The prize? $100,000. “All the conventional ways to achieve human flight had been tried,” MacCready says. “People were stuck.”
A solution came to MacCready as he was driving cross-country on vacation with Judy and their three sons, and started watching the hawks and turkey vultures soaring in circles overhead, taking advantage of updrafts. He got to thinking about the size and weight of the birds, and how much power for each pound of weight an animal—or an airplane—needed to fly. “That’s when the great ‘Aha!’ moment hit,” he says. “i realized that as long as you as you kept the weight the same, you could take an airplane and let the wings get bigger and bigger. The flight speed would decrease, but so would the power needed to make the plane fly.” MacCready wasn’t looking for speed. He just wanted to resuce the necessary power enough so that a single human being could complete the Kremer challenge.
Back in his office, MacCready and his colleagues set to prove that theory with the Gossamer Condor. They designed a light plane and MacCready drafted his sons, then teenagers, as test pilots. “They were the right size—small. Lightweight,” says Judy. “And we didn’t have to pay them anything.” Ultimately, the Condor met Kremer’s challenge—and made aviation history
