The California condor was down to 22 birds in 1987.

And there's my bat, using echolocation and apparently with the wings of a condor.

Human powered airplane Gossamer Condor sort of started me in this direction in 1976 and 77, winning the Kremer prize in aviation history, followed by the Albatross.

We're going to end our visit with Paul MacCready's flying circus by meeting his son, Tyler, who, with his two brothers, helped build the Gossamer Condor, 25 years ago.

We realized that if you just cleaned up our Gossamer Condor a little bit, the power to fly would be decreased a little bit, and if you decrease the power required a little, the pilot can fly a much longer period of time.

like that, a little bit cruder, in 1939 a long, long time ago there wouldn't have been a Gossamer Condor, there wouldn't have been an Albatross, a Solar Challenger, there wouldn't be an Impact car, there wouldn't be a mandate on zero emission vehicles in California.

But that began thinking about how birds went around, and then how airplanes would, how hang gliders would fly, and then other planes, and the idea of the Gossamer Condor type airplane quickly emerged, was so logical, one should have thought of it in the first place, but one didn't.