A wine-dark sea and a rosy-fingered dawn greeted the Daedalus human-powered aircraft on its launch from Crete on 23 April 1988. Named for the mythical Greek inventor who escaped with his son Icarus from the Minoan Palace on wings of feather and wax, the craft was pedaled by a Greek bicycle champion for 4 hours, just a few meters above the Aegean Sea, to reach the island of Santorini 120 kilometers away. The flight set a world record for the longest human-powered flight.

The MIT project team, of which I was a part, worked for 3 years and spent $1 million in an effort to recreate Greek mythology using modern technology.

Click below to read the National Geographic article about this project.

(Adobe Acrobat format 2.7 mb)