Word: pterodactyl
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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White and delicate, high tech yet oddly primitive, the plane looks like some elegant insect or a sleek, latter-day pterodactyl. With her reedlike central wing slicing across three slender cylinders, she might have been designed by an austere modern sculptor rather than an aeronautical engineer. In an age of space travel and supersonic flight, her mission is a throwback to a different kind of odyssey: to fly not faster, but longer. Not higher, but farther. Voyager is a flight of fancy, of quaint possibility...
Relieving some of the embarrassment of U.S. riches, the most imposing swimmer on the premises was actually a West German, Michael Gross, 20, a world-champion freestyler and butterflyer with the wingspan of a pterodactyl. But even he was overhauled in an exciting U.S. relay and by a 17-year-old Aussie, Jon Sieben, in a butterfly. Though the Australians and also the Canadians had their moments, the drama at the pool was fundamentally and expectably intramural...
...gaudy, gawky new flying machines called ultralight aircraft, but none more accurate than this waggish observation. The plane that sounds like a low-calorie beer does resemble a plastic -and video-age version of the Kitty Hawk. Or, as a Tolkienian might put it, a petroleum-feeding pterodactyl. In any case, the planes are designed not to lodge beauty in the eye of the earth-bound beholder but, rather, to warm the soul of the seat-of-the-pants pilot. Put-putting along a few hundred feet up at 40 m.p.h. is not like any other kind of flying that...
...craft is not only reliable but capable of remarkable achievements. New Jerseyan Jim Campbell, 25, set an unofficial altitude record of 21,210 ft. And on May 1, Campbell and Pat Trusty, 23, from Massachusetts, took off at 50 m.p.h. from Watsonville, Calif., for Washington, B.C., in two Pterodactyl Ptigers. They plan to fly round the world in about six months. Says Campbell: "What we have here is a plain old-fashioned adventure." -By Michael Demarest. Reported by Richard Woodbury/Denver
...annihilating pawns on a global board of a spinning planet." At another point he says, "the news accounts of congressional travel plans rubbed like shards of glass in an oozing wound." His fear of losing his campaign is "a gray moth of doubt that had ballooned into a terrifying pterodactyl whose razored jaws were shredding what remained of my confidence...