Lawrence Lehmann <<lplehmann>>
writes:

Alexander Lippisch was a pioneer of high speed aviation research
and the designer of the WW2 Me-163 rocket plane. What I hadn't known was that he
also had an interest in man-powered flight, and ornithopters (flapping wings)
such as a Canadian research team flew this past week. His name was mentioned in
passing a couple of days ago in the email of one of the interesting older
characters at the local sailplane club (a retired French horn player at the
symphony, of all things). I sent him an email asking when he'd met Lippisch, and
this is the story he sent me. In the story I have this comical image of the new
bride, lying forlornly in bed in a fetching outfit, while her ardent young
husband has run off to listen to an old geezer telling aeronautical tales.

Incidentally, the Wasserkuppe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasserkuppe in the story is where I first
learned to fly hang gliders in 1978.

Ken writes:

When I got married in Berlin, we took as the honeymoon destination the Alps. I
did learn that although flying in the Alps is really exciting, the weather there
is very often just no good for flying. We wound up at the Wasserkuppe about
eight days later, and to my complete amazement, they said, the tower here is no
longer being used for its intended purpose, and occasionally we have guests just
use one of those rooms up there for Unterkunft. I guess they wanted to be nice
to the newlyweds.

So then, right around nine in the evening, somebody knocks on the door and says,
"Herr Strack, by random fluke, you have arrived here at almost the same time as
Alexander Lippisch, who is holding court as we speak, in the restaurant on the
field. You could consider coming over and joining the fun. Interested?" I said
WHAT!!??! Are you kidding?

The trouble was that at that time I spoke essentially zero German, but still I
went over and took in what I could. He came back to his olde haunt yearly, and
was just there for vacation and reminiscing over the tumultuous times he had
lived through. But since he stayed for two more days, I wound up hanging out
with him.

He had by 1967 no trouble with English, since he had immigrated to the US after
the war, so I just asked him everything I could think of, and that's when this
topic came up. At that time the Kremer prize had not been won, and I told him
that I was quite interested in this, and was making calculations while in grad
school here at CMU regarding the feasibility of achieving the required
mile-long, man-powered flight. He had in fact designed a plane to make the
attempt, but told me that when he learned about the apparent failure of the then
best plane, the English Puffin, he said he dropped his plan, stating that "If
the Puffin can't get all that close to winning", then the prize is not
attainable. Period.

He was vastly more experienced than I at 27, and I felt that y'know, we should
be yearning for the impossible, and kept calculating. I in the end decided that
the prize was attainable, but that experience had already shown that those
planes were ultra-fragile, and therefore I should stick with gliders, since they
were not ultra-fragile.

In the end of course, Paul McCready did win that prize, and I was amazed to see
how close his design size and weight matched what I had considered right. But
McCready had also made a genuine breakthrough in the sense that he made a plane
which could be repaired overnight, in the event of damage. That plane did get
repaired countless times before winning, and was the only plane having that very
simple construction which enabled this to be done, as well as giving a much
lighter structure.

So - McCready's design wasn't all that great for low drag, but was that great
for low weight - nobody else had achieved that. I don't see Lippisch as being
diminished by his judgment though - McReady was really really sharp too.