Dr. Paul MacCready and The Kremer Prize
Flight! People have wondered about it since the beginning of time. Look in the sky! Imagine yourself flying in the air. Look around at the birds and bugs. They make it look effortless. Maybe you’ve imagined yourself flying in some manner similar to them. Maybe you’ve wondered how they do it. Or perhaps you’ve given it no second thought, given the technology we enjoy today. Paul MacCready, however, was one of those people deeply interested in flight. What follows is a story of Paul MacCready, and what we can learn from him in the engineering design process.
Figure 1: Paul MacCready at 13 years old with a model airplane [4].
To start, Henry Kremer, a well off business man living in England, helped create what became known as the first and second Kremer prizes [1]. In 1959 he offered 50,000 pounds, about $100,000 at the time [2], to anybody that could build and fly a human-powered vehicle (no engine) in a figure eight around two pylons about a half mile apart [3]. This was the first Kremer prize. The second was to cross the English Channel. Now imagine you're tasked with this design problem, to essentially create a pedal bike powered airplane. Where do you start? What questions do you need to ask yourself? What will be the key to your success?
Dr. Paul MacCready was an intelligent man who had received an education in physics at Yale and a doctorate in aeronautical engineering from Caltech [4]. He would accomplish much in his career and would go on to receive some of the highest awards in the field of engineering. In 1976, MacCready happened to be in debt to a friend, and he realized the debt could be covered by the money offered from the first Kremer prize. So MacCready set his sights on completing the outlined flight to earn the prize money.
Figure 2: Dr. Paul B. MacCready [4].
MacCready began on the project, just like many others had, but he realized something wasn’t quite working. So many people had tried to solve the problem but all of them had failed. He wondered where they were all going wrong. How come they hadn’t figured it out? Matt Linderman shares in an article, “MacCready realized that what needed to be solved was not, in fact, human-powered flight. That was a red herring. The problem was the process itself. And a negative side effect was the blind pursuit of a goal without a deeper understanding of how to tackle deeply difficult challenges. He came up with a new problem that he set out to solve: How can you build a plane that could be rebuilt in hours, not months? And he did” [2].
Unlike MacCready’s competitors, he was able to fly multiple times in a week, and occasionally multiple times in a day. His competitors were focused on creating a masterpiece of a project that they feared crashing. MacCready, on the other hand, could fly, crash, make a quick fix, and do another test flight. This allowed him to quickly learn from his mistakes. MacCready designed his model that weighed only fifty-five pounds, utilized cheap materials like duct tape and broom stick handles, and was “inspired by one of the simplest and most aerodynamic mechanisms in nature: bird flight” [3].
While on vacation, MacCready observed the flight paths of birds. Noting the speed and the turning radius of these birds, MacCready found a solution to safely making turns while in flight [2]. A simple design inspired by the wing angles of birds would not only be effective in the air, but was built for quick reiterations and many test flights. If something broke when he crashed, he could tape it up with scrap materials, and get back in the air. This ultimately led MacCready to win the first Kremer prize with his human-powered airplane the Gossamer Condor. He also went on to win the second Kremer Prize a couple years later [3].
Figure 3: The Gossamer Condor [4].
So what do we learn from Dr. Paul MacCready and the Kremer Prize?
We may be solving the wrong problem
Testing is key
Find inspiration in nature
Just like MacCready’s competitors, you and I might be solving the wrong problem. Reframing the problem, or looking at it from a different angle can lead us to the solution we need. The questions we ask lead to the problems we solve. Are we asking ourselves the right questions? Maybe we are stuck on the same question, limiting our ability to see a solution. Think of new questions like MacCready did. His focus shifted from solving human-powered flight, to making his plane quickly rebuildable. He changed his problem statement, and we might need to as well. The process itself might be the greater problem to solve. Like MacCready, we must find ways to look at the problem differently. And we shouldn’t throw away ideas too quickly, even if they seem too simple. Allowing different ideas to develop through shifting our problem statements could be just the thing to get us to our solutions.
Oftentimes when facing a difficult problem we try and solve everything in one go. We try to get it right on the very first try. Instead of creating the perfect product all in one go, we should create something that is testable. Once we have something that is testable, we can experiment with it, learn, and then experiment again. Push the limits of the product or solution. Don’t be afraid to break it during testing. Once testing is done new iterations are made, and then those iterations are tested again. As we test and reiterate we will gain insights that would have never been known. Expecting a complete and elegant design on the first try does not typically yield the right solution, but a simplistic and malleable design that is continually tested can be transformed into a robust, effective, and distinct solution.
It is easy to get hyper focused on an idea or a design. In connection to solving the right problem, we oftentimes need to step back. Take a break. Give our work a rest and allow ideas to come in other forms, like nature. For MacCready it was birds that inspired the design of his plane. For us it could be anything. It could be the way a bird flies, or how a plant sticks to things, or the sticky feet of a gecko that gives us the inspiration we need. Nature around us can be a great teacher. Sometimes it just takes a little walk outside and some simple observations to see the solution we need.
References
[1]Henry (haneich hanoch) kremer. (n.d.). Geni_family_tree. Retrieved May 23, 2025, from https://www.geni.com/people/Henry-Haneich-Hanoch-Kremer/6000000002672750419
[2]How nature and naiveté helped Paul MacCready build a human-powered airplane in only six months. (n.d.). Signal v. Noise by Basecamp. Retrieved May 23, 2025, from https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2861-how-nature-and-naivet-helped-paul-maccready-build-a-human-powered-airplane-in-only-six-months
[3]McKeown, G. (2021). Effortless: Make it easier to do what matters most. Crown Currency.
[4]Paul B. MacCready, ph.d. (2019, March 26). Academy of Achievement. https://achievement.org/achiever/paul-b-maccready-ph-d/
To cite this article:
Heiner, Taylor. “Dr. Paul MacCready and The Kremer Prize.” The BYU Design Review, 2 June 2025, https://www.designreview.byu.edu/collections/paul-maccready-and-the-kremer-prize.
