Gossamer Condor — 96 ft of wing at 11 mph

On 23 August 1977 the Gossamer Condor flew a figure-eight around two pylons half a mile apart and took the first Kremer prize, which had stood unclaimed since 1959. Bryan Allen pedalled.

The wing is enormous, and that is the design: 96 ft of span carrying 712.5 ft² (66.3 m²) at a gross weight of 212 lb. Wing loading 0.30 lb/ft² — 1.45 kg/m², which is what lets a cyclist hold it up at 16 ft/s, about 11 mph.

These numbers come from the flight-test report, not from a three-view

NASA CR-3627 compiled the Condor's geometry from the official plans and says so explicitly: the figures "may differ from those in various published three-views, but they are compatible with the official Gossamer Condor plans and are considered definitive." Table A-1a:

All of that is carried into this model. Twist is the one thing the table does not give, so this model has none — not a claim that the wing had none, only that nothing published says what it was.

Section

Lissaman 7769, an 11%-thick Stratford-recovery section drawn for this aircraft and used again on the Albatross. The report's trim table puts the Condor at CL = 1.00 at 16 ft/s, the middle of the 0.8–1.0 band the section was designed around.

What the whole aeroplane did

At that trim the report gives the Condor L/D 22, on 9.7 lb of drag. The polars below are the wing alone and will be better than 22; the gap is the canard, the pod, the pilot, the wire bracing and the propeller.

This is a fit to published dimensions, not a replica. foil.tools draws a single-taper planform shaped by four splines; the real wing has structure this model does not carry. Span, area and section match the published figures — the metrics above are what this geometry actually produces, so where they differ from a published number, the difference is the fit.

Sources: NASA CR-3627, Jex & Mitchell, Stability and Control of the Gossamer Human-Powered Aircraft by Analysis and Flight Test, 1982 — Tables A-1a, A-2a and A-3 · Conigliaro, An experimental investigation of the low Reynolds number performance of the Lissaman 7769 airfoil, AIAA 83-0647, which is where the section is tied to both Gossamer aircraft · MacCready Gossamer Condor (Wikipedia)

The polars above are foil.tools' own analysis of this model, not published performance data for the aircraft. They are AeroBuildup — strip theory with NeuralFoil sections — for the wing alone, so they exclude the fuselage, the undercarriage and everything else that makes a real aeroplane slower than its wing. Read them for how this shape behaves, and for comparison against the other wings here — not as a figure for the aircraft. Open it in the designer and run your own.