(LOS ANGELES TIMES) - Like the iconic flyboys of `The Right Stuff’, most men who take to the skies dream of going higher, faster and farther. Over the Mojave Desert this summer, Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne streaked through the stratosphere to become the first private plane to fly into space, and off the coast of California, NASA has been testing a scramjet that reaches a speed of Mach 9.
Yet if the history of flight is usually told as a succession of macho extremes, it also encompasses another, decidedly more leisurely tradition: on the one hand the fast, on the other hand the buoyant. Where the former overcomes the dictates of gravity by sheer brute force, the latter makes its claim to the sky through mere lightness of being—the fleet versus the floating.
Just weeks after the historic flight of SpaceShipOne, another experimental flying machine was being put through its paces in the jungles of Guyana. Airship No. 6, a tiny two-man dirigible, is the latest iteration in a series of lighter-than-air craft designed and built by British engineer Graham Dorrington.
In contrast to the record-shattering ethos of Tom Wolfe's testosterone-fueled test pilots, Dorrington fantasises about flying lower, slower and nearer. As a lecturer in engineering at Queen Mary, University of London, he has devoted much of his life to building airships that putter through the sky at the pace of a human stroll. In 1991, he pedalled Britain's first human-powered airship from Southampton to the Isle of Wight, and in June he journeyed to Guyana to test his latest and most quixotic design.
Airship No. 6 had been specifically engineered for exploring the world's rain forest canopies. It was an enterprise at once utopian and dangerous, for Dorrington had lost an earlier ship, and a friend, in a fatal crash in another jungle. Adding to the uncertainty of its maiden flight was the presence of Werner Herzog, a filmmaker famed for his own audacious proclivities, a man who once threatened to shoot the star of a previous film and who had persuaded Dorrington to test his ship, with cameras rolling, at a location of breathtaking beauty—and high winds. That the ship would be launched in far from optimal conditions was further complicated by the fact that Dorrington had never actually flown it before.
Two thousand miles south of Cape Canaveral and an eon back in time, the primeval landscape of the Guiana Shield seems an unlikely launch site for any prototype aircraft. Hundreds of miles from the nearest city, it is beyond the reach of the power grid, the only contact with the world an intermittent satellite phone and a nearly inaudible two-way radio manned by the local park ranger, a loquacious string bean of a man with an encyclopedic knowledge of the region's unique flora and fauna.
Outside the spartan tourist lodge, diamondback boas slink through the foliage, microscopic spiders spin ball-like webs of Byzantine complexity, and golden frogs, their skins oozing hallucinogenic poison, shelter in the leaves of the giant tank bromeliads. Yet amid this psychedelic biology, Dorrington's airship looks surprisingly at home. With its rotund body, or "envelope," and oversized tail fin, it resembles nothing so much as a large aerial fish.
As vast reservoirs of biodiversity, the tropical forests of the equatorial regions have been likened to coral reefs, and Dorrington has specifically designed his craft to evoke the marine world. "I wanted it to look organic," he says. "I had a number of possible designs, but I chose the one that seemed most like a fish."
The theme of "organic design" is one to which Dorrington keeps returning. Though he is an engineer by training and in many ways an archetypal boy boffin —complete with Coke-bottle-thick spectacles and a tendency to engage in endless digressions on laminar flow and aerial drag — he also is in part a genuine naive artist, who rebels against the strict delineation between the sciences and the arts and who sees his idiosyncratic machines not merely as engineering prototypes but as elegant exercises in design.
This duality is reflected in his two heroes: Alberto Santos-Dumont, the pioneering Brazilian aeronaut who built the world's first airships and almost beat the Wright brothers to the first airplane, and the contemporary Belgian artist Panamarenko, whose work consists of designs and models for phantasmagoric flying machines, many of them resembling strange mechanical birds and bats.
Fully assembled, Dorrington's latest ship measures 12 yards high and 17 yards long from bow tip to aft propeller. Beneath the envelope is slung a two-man gondola, for the pilot and a single passenger. Whereas SpaceShipOne is definitively a 21st century vision, Airship No. 6 harks back to the 19th. Its literally homemade aesthetic seems straight out of a Jules Verne fantasy—forget microchips and fibre optics, think sealing wax and string. The nacelles that surround the four main thrust propellers are actually sliced from large plastic bins, and the nose and tail cones were sewn in Dorrington's London flat.
The entire enterprise, in fact, is very much a Vernian escapade, for the rain forest canopy remains one of the last great unexplored regions on Earth. Fully half of the world's species are believed to live here, but cataloguing them has remained a challenge.
Quest for redemption
The problem, as Dorrington notes, is access: "How does one get to a treetop 70 metres up in the air and deep in the middle of nowhere?"
His airship is supposed to be the canopy equivalent of a deep-sea diving bathysphere, a technology that he hopes will give biologists access to the total realm of the tropical forests and its wealth of hidden wildlife. Though he does not make the analogy explicit, Dorrington is a kind of aerial Captain Nemo, a man obsessed with experiencing for himself a new region of the world.
Beyond the engineering questions, he is compelled by another, more personal story — his journey to Guyana also is a quest for redemption.
A decade ago, in the jungles of Sumatra, the German wildlife photographer Dieter Plage was killed in an accident involving one of Dorrington's earlier airships. That one-man craft had been built at the behest of Plage himself, who wanted a platform for filming the canopy. Having previously survived being run over by an elephant and nearly mauled by a silverback gorilla, Plage fell to his death after the airship became stuck in a tree. Still tormented by this tragedy, Dorrington is driven by a need to demonstrate the validity of their shared vision.
In Guyana, Dorrington has been accompanied by another fearless German filmmaker, Werner Herzog. Though most Americans remember Herzog as an artifact of the '70s and '80s, he has never stopped making films (his tally as a director now stands at close to 60 projects), and in the past decade he has become one of the finest documentary makers anywhere. Herzog's interest in the jungle airship continues not only his legendary relationship with the Amazon, but also his own fixation with flight. This is his fourth film on the subject, following his 1997 documentary `Little Dieter Needs to Fly’, about a German American Navy pilot who was shot down during the Vietnam War and spent six months in a Viet Cong prison.
The last time Herzog filmed a feature in the Amazon, the baroquely high-strung melodrama `Fitzcarraldo’, he famously pulled a boat over a mountain, and in the evolution of his oeuvre it seems almost a natural progression that this time around the ship should be floating. In his personal manifesto on filmmaking, the so-called `Minnesota Declaration’, Herzog advocates what he terms "the ecstatic truth," the deeper strata of illumination that he believes should trump the mere accumulation of facts, or what he disdainfully calls "the accountants' truth." And there is about this production more than a tinge of the ecstatic.
An itinerant chronicler of obsession, Herzog homes in on dreamers and outsiders, and despite Dorrington's position at a respected British university, he fits the general brief. In the contemporary world of academic engineering, miniature airships have about as much relevance as trebuchets. In an interview earlier this year at the Queen Mary campus, Dorrington summed up his position with disarming honesty. "These days," he said, "aeronautical engineering is all about computer modelling. If I wanted to model the airflow around a virtual airship I could probably get a huge research grant. But to build an actual airship, nobody wants to fund that."
The unorthodox nature of Dorrington's project may be gauged by the fact that it has not been supported by any formal research grants. He has dipped deeply into his own pocket, and the university has helped with technical and workshop support. About half the funding for Airship No. 6 has been raised by the film's producers, Klaus and Annette Scheurich of Marco Polo Film, who as wildlife photographers themselves have long wanted a platform for filming the jungle canopy. After the Guyana project, they hope to use the ship in Africa —they are particularly eager to film at a beach in Gabon where hippos are rumoured to surf the waves.
Quite coincidentally, Dorrington was inspired in part to build his first airship after seeing `Fitzcarraldo’. And he's never forgotten an image from Herzog's other jungle epic, `Aguirre, the Wrath of God’, that descent into insanity starring the German cinema's most romantic fiend, Klaus Kinski. Toward the end of the film, as Aguirre glides madly down the Amazon on a raft, he passes on the riverbank the rotting hulk of a boat stuck in the top of a tree.
"I had always imagined that if anyone was going to make a film about the airship, it ought to be Werner," Dorrington declared as he sat drinking tea in the engineering department common room, a haven of British order that could not be more removed from the crescendos of chaos to which Herzog is drawn. That this has come to pass seems to both inspire and terrify him. Few men would not be intimidated by the knowledge that they are following in Kinski's footsteps, and one senses that for Dorrington the burden of his dreams is heavy indeed.
Three weeks into the Guyana adventure, the airship has been fully assembled and its envelope inflated with helium. But no flights have yet been undertaken. Restless at the best of times, Dorrington is now operating at fever pitch, although much of his effort appears to be aimed at delaying tactics.
Here in the jungle, the ghost of Plage is palpably present — not just to him but to all of the film crew, who are acutely aware of their brethren's demise. When Plage fell from the tree in Sumatra, he landed at Dorrington's feet, yet he did not die immediately; it was four painful hours before death came. A decade later, Dorrington cannot talk about the filmmaker without becoming visibly distressed.
Since that incident, Dorrington has actually built and flown another airship, in the jungle of Sabah, in Borneo. On that trip, however, he did not collect much scientific data, and this time he is determined to get formal documentation of his craft's capabilities so he can write up a paper for an engineering journal. He has brought with him a state-of-the-art anemometer to measure the drag on the craft in flight, and he hopes it will verify his theory about the design he has chosen for Airship No. 6. But his desire to fly is tempered by his not unnatural fear of another accident. Meanwhile, the cameras are lying idle.
Along with his hero Santos-Dumont, Dorrington is a petite man — small but feisty, like a bantam cock. Here in Guyana, he is surrounded by a flock of large and stately geese. The men in Herzog's crew are terrifyingly competent in that uniquely Teutonic way. One is a mountain climber, another, a pilot; all are magnificent specimens of confident male energy, and Dorrington's inner nerd is clearly feeling the pressure. Early one morning a heated dispute erupts when he refuses to make a trial flight. The launch location that Herzog selected has turned out to be far gustier than he was expecting.
A secret
High up on a plateau, the airship has been assembled at the top of the Kaieteur Falls, the world's tallest single-drop waterfall. It is undeniably a stunning place, with the rust-coloured water of the Potaro River thundering over the 741-foot drop into a valley that looks like a scene from our primeval past.
On the flight in from Georgetown, the jungle resembles a vast undifferentiated field of broccoli, two hours of unremitting sameness. Only as the plane approaches the falls does the landscape take on clear definition, when a gash opens up in the rising terrain and sunlight casts a rainbow across the water. As it happens, the geometry of the site pretty much guarantees that you can see rainbows all the time — usually full double rainbows, complete with red and green side bands.
From Herzog's point of view, this fairy tale feature is a constant annoyance to be rigorously excluded from the camera frame. From Dorrington's point of view, the entire spectacle is a nightmare. The sudden drop in the topography is a major source of turbulence, and at this altitude the wind conditions in general are highly dynamic. The airship has been designed to fly only in calm conditions, and with its low-powered motors (just 10 horsepower in all) it would be dangerous in wind speeds of more than a few knots. Dorrington had argued for a location in the shelter of the valley, but he was overruled by Herzog, whose decision was clinched by an additional, and nearly mystical, aspect of the falls.
For Kaieteur harbours a secret: Behind the curtain of water is a cave that is home to a million swifts. Each night at sunset they gather in the sky above the precipice in huge coruscating clouds, peeling off into spirals that sweep and swirl through the air at extraordinary speed. Suddenly, as if bidden by some collective impulse, they come plunging down in a seething stream of avian energy over the falls and behind the water like myriad coordinated meteorites. Timed one evening, this current of birds goes on for a full 15 minutes, never breaking formation — it does not seem possible there could be this many swifts in the world, let alone room in that cave. The Earth must be filling up with birds, our planet becoming a gigantic nest. This is, surely, a locus of ecstatic truth, and one that Herzog was not going to miss.
And so Dorrington must deal with the wind.
The first real airships, as opposed to simple balloons, date back to the turn of the last century, when Santos-Dumont designed and built a series of hydrogen-filled craft that he flew around Paris. The Baladeuse (`Wanderer’) was his own personal runabout, in which he frequently "went barhopping, tying the balloon to the gas-lamp posts in front of the city's glamorous nightspots," writes his biographer Paul Hoffman in `Wings of Madness’.
Santos-Dumont had a "vision of every person on earth possessing their own Baladeuse, so that they would literally be free as birds to travel anywhere," without the need for runways. Sadly, that dream has not come to pass, and Dorrington notes that today's airships are not much more advanced than they were back then. "Santos-Dumont would have been appalled at how little we have learned," he says.
In contrast to airplanes, surprisingly little is known about the aerodynamics of airships. With Airship No. 6, Dorrington is testing a design that has not been tried before and that he hopes will solve many of the problems associated with earlier models. One morning at Kaieteur, while the rain pounds down on the galvanised roof of the lodge with near deafening force, he explains the aeronautical basics.
"Most airships," he says, "have been built in an elongated cigar shape," the idea being that this is the most efficient form for cutting down on drag. But the longer an airship is the greater the area it needs to maneuver a turn, much like an ocean liner. When flying over forests, Dorrington says, what you need is "a small, compact craft able to turn quickly and land easily in a tight spot." In other words, something that is almost spherical.
Eschewing traditional thinking, Dorrington built his latest airship around an off-the-shelf balloon. Basically, it is a balloon onto which he has grafted a homemade nose cone and tail cone. To cut costs, he fabricated these additions himself, much to the consternation of his neighbors, who were not impressed by the clattering of his sewing machine. The length of the tail cone — the most aeronautically critical piece — "was determined by the length of my living room," Dorrington says. Where most airships typically have a length-to-width ratio of at least 4 to 1, here it is just 1.5 to 1. "In the wind tunnel, it works beautifully," he says—the drag reduction is precisely what he predicted.
But it is one thing to design an aircraft, and it is quite another to get it flying.
At the Guyana test site, the first flight proves to be a disaster. The time pressures, the shoestring budget, the remote location have all conspired to produce a less than optimal construction schedule. Monsoonal rains one night cause the collapse of the army tent that serves as the general workshop and the fall of the king post damages one of the struts that support the airship's motors, precipitating extensive repairs by Dorrington.
There have also been problems with the helium, which had to be flown in over several days, so that the initial inflation was not completed in a single clean fill. Instead of being taut, the envelope is slack, and rain appears to have settled in a depression at the top. Moreover, the ship itself is highly sensitive to weight, and Klaus Scheurich, who will be manning the camera onboard, proves too heavy to lift. In order to accommodate Scheurich's bear-like bulk, several of the batteries have to be removed, causing an extensive rewiring of the electrical systems.
And those are just the technical difficulties. On the psychosocial front, Herzog's zeal to fly combined with Dorrington's vacillation between extreme caution and his own brand of derring-do, plus the crew's collective alpha-male intensity, have blended into a combustible mix that seems almost a recipe for failure. Although the airship does fly on its first takeoff, two of its four motors burn out and by midmorning it is grounded. It is not clear if it will be airborne again. When asked his opinion of this aborted effort, Herzog has a typically oblique response. "There are three kinds of stupidities," he says, "necessary stupidities, dignified stupidities and stupid stupidities. This one was a stupid stupidity."
Engineering has always been part science and part alchemy, part mathematical theory and part magical touch. `The touch’ is well-known in engineering circles: some people just seem to possess an innate rapport with equipment, while others, no matter how good they may be with equations, do not. Dorrington belongs in the latter camp. Much of the work to repair the motors is taken on by a camera assistant, Bernd Curschmann, a former engineering student who definitely has the touch, and by an ultralight pilot, Jan-Peter Meewes, who was brought in to film the ship from the air and also turns out to be a mechanical engineer. Despite the bleak prognosis of the morning, with the three men working together the airship is ready for a second trial the following day—though this time it will be tethered by a rope and will only fly with several burly crew members acting as a human anchor.
After the day-one debacle, Meewes assumes the unofficial role of flight commander, guiding Dorrington through a rigorous set of graduated tests and putting the propulsion and steering systems through their paces until everything seems to be running smoothly. Several days later, after a successful series of maneuvers, Mark Anthony Yhap, a local Guyanese, jokes to Dorrington, "Graham, you are becoming a perfectionist."
When the joking starts, the fun cannot be far away, and the next morning Herzog suddenly announces: "Today we are gonna fly." Untethered, he means. No ropes, no human anchors. This is what Dorrington has been working toward for the past year and a half. Nonetheless, he balks. Despite the fact that the ship has now been tested in all its modes, it has never really flown before, and was inflated only once, in a huge hangar at Cardington, in England. Today will be its first real journey, and Herzog wants him to take it across an open clearing and over an adjacent patch of forest.
Having muffed his chance before, Dorrington now seems petrified by the prospect of free flight. He reminds the crew of Plage's death and of the danger of even the slightest breeze. As if on cue, the wind drops, leaving the air eerily still.
During the making of `Aguirre, the Wrath of God’ there was a moment when Kinski threatened to leave, and Herzog, in a famous retort, threatened to shoot them both if he did. It is difficult to avoid thinking of this scene during the ensuing exchange between Herzog and Dorrington. Yet for all of his rumoured mania, Herzog exhibits the utmost courtesy toward his recalcitrant subject. He is not so much a tornado as a glacier, grinding away at impediments with a steady, inexorable force. In the version of the ecstatic truth to which they have both committed, ships fly. Their manifest destiny is upward.
At Herzog's instruction and finally with Dorrington's nervous consent, the airship is freed of its tether to begin its ascent in the tropical air. A group of local Guyanese have gathered to watch. Mostly hardscrabble diamond miners hoping to make a quick fortune in the vast interior of their impoverished nation, they seem enchanted by the dreamlike machine. They have dubbed Dorrington "the nutty professor" and his ship "the white diamond."
Several minutes later the airship is cruising across the canopy with all of the lazy grace hinted at in its trials. A flying fish, an aerial bathysphere — nothing could seem more natural as it pootles across the green reef of the forest. The levity of the situation has asserted itself at last, and from on high Dorrington is whooping with delight. The next day he will take off and land on a nearby river, skipping the airship along the water like a dragonfly, and on his final flight, with the anemometer on board, he will take his scientific measurements.
One word sums up the experience when he is back on the ground: "Redemption!" he declares to Herzog and the camera, and to anyone else who will listen.