‘Nothing left except quivering protoplasm’: the man who pedalled a plane across the Channel

In 1979 a group of neurodivergent men embarked on an epic crossing, now immortalised on screen in The Flight of BryanBryan Allen is not the type to blow his own trumpet. Colleagues who knew him only as a software engineer in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where he worked on the Mars Exploration Rovers, occasionally stumbled upon news of his prior adventures by accident. “They’d say, ‘I’ve known you for five years and I only just found out it was you with the Gossamer and the English Channel,’” says the 72-year-old from his home in Los Osos.What he is referring to is the part he played in winning two Kremer prizes for human-powered flight, the first two in the award’s history in fact, in lightweight aircraft built by the aeronautical engineer Paul MacCready. In 1977, Allen, an experienced hang-glider, piloted the 70lb (31.75kg) Gossamer Condor over a mile-long, figure-of-eight course in Shafter, California. Two years later, it was his pedal power that got the Gossamer Albatross, which was one pound heavier, across the Channel. Allen moved on to other projects, breaking more records along the way, but the Gossamer story proved to have legs. Or rather, wings. Continue reading...