Word: ptacek
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...I.R.D. now issues a monthly bulletin, topical pamphlets and special publications like last week's 100-page response to critics in the Protestant Establishment, and it answers a growing flood of press and lay inquiries (2,500 since the CBS show). The key researcher is Presbyterian Kerry Ptacek, a onetime member of the Students for a Democratic Society. He says now that "a crisis in my own spiritual life had led me to leftist totalitarian politics." His present work is a reaction against that earlier commitment...
Made largely of tough lightweight plastics -Kevlar fiber struts, Mylar sheathing, a Lucite windscreen, all from the project's sponsor, Du Pont-Challenger weighs only 217 lbs., excluding Ptacek, who had managed to diet down...
...nest. Since arriving in France in early June, he and his colleagues had played a frustrating game of hide-and-seek with the sun, made one false start and even sought more favorable conditions by packing up and shifting their base to England before returning to France. When Ptacek, who honed his flying skills as a crop duster, finally got under way last week and started climbing to his cruising altitude of 11,000 ft., he radioed that he was being buffeted by turbulence from a passing passenger aircraft. Then a helicopter and a small plane, both apparently filled with...
With that, the Solar Challenger continued its climb to 2,000 ft. and headed northwest toward the English Channel. Five hours and 23 minutes later, after a flight of 230 miles at speeds no more than 47 m.p.h., Ptacek touched down at Manston Royal Air Force Base on the southeastern coast of England some 20 miles north of Dover. His odyssey might have made Icarus drop with envy. In a historic feat, Challenger had managed to cross the Channel powered only by the glinting rays...
...Ptacek kept Challenger airborne an extra 23 minutes to let photographers land first, be cleared by startled customs agents, and get into position to record what turned out to be a perfect landing. Ptacek, gorging on chocolate mousse from R.A.F. chefs, said: "It was a real experience for someone like me who had never been to Europe." MacCready, joining the celebration with pilot and crew, conceded that "flying an airplane with solar cells is just about the most ridiculous use for solar energy that I can think of." Nonetheless, he insisted that the flight (total cost: more than...