For now over 75 years, The Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to life in BL Classics. This May 1990 Classic describes how Baylor math professor Max Shauck and co-pilot Grazia Zanin made history in 1989 as the first to cross the Atlantic in a plane powered by ethanol, battling engine failures, brake loss, and a harrowing crash-landing attempt on the island of Flores along the way. Despite skepticism from the oil industry and a launch overshadowed by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the couple’s harrowing 6,000-mile journey aimed to prove alcohol fuel’s reliability — and viability — for the future of aviation.
Max Shauck and co-pilot Grazia Zanin late last year became the first people to cross the Atlantic Ocean in an airplane powered by an alcohol fuel: ethanol, to be precise.
They flew on dead reckoning — reckoning they would be dead within minutes if they ditched their airplane in the cold waters.
Skeptics in the gasoline industry had questioned flying anywhere on alcohol fuels. Yat-Ping Tong, a Chevron Corp. fuels specialist, raised doubts about their reliability in a Wall Street Journal article, saying, “If you stall in a car, you park it; but in a plane, that’s it.”
Added to the safety equation was an experimental airplane powered by a rear propeller and navigation equipment that was of little use for much of the flight.
Still, Shauck and Zanin landed December 19, 1989, at the Toussus-le-Noble airport in Paris. They had completed a journey of more than 6,000 miles that began in Waco three months before, on September 15. The lofty goal of the flight was to prove to the aviation industry that alcohol fuels could be trusted when a pilot’s life was on the line.
The response in America to the flight was underwhelming.
Shauck, 54, a Baylor University mathematics professor, had not counted on such headline grabbers as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Romanian Revolution coinciding with his flight.
Sitting in a trailer that has been his home while he pursued his dream of a transatlantic flight, Shauck shrugged off his bad timing.
“Not being feted by a huge army of journalists wasn’t really a big deal,” he said. “This was not a feat of aviation; it was a demonstration of the reliability of a fuel. Maybe the alcohol industry could have taken better advantage of the flight, but this was not something that was one-day news.”
Shauck is confident that the day of alcohol fuels is approaching, regardless of how much public notice his flight received. It’s a cleaner fuel than gasoline, he said, and is renewable. Ethanol, for example, is made from vegetable matter. (No snickers, please, but Shauck at one time flew using ethanol fuel made from candy waste at Waco’s M&M Mars plant.)
He accuses the gasoline industry of engaging in scare tactics to ward off alcohol fuels. Signs at service stations that ballyhoo the absence of alcohol in their gasoline imply that alcohol fuels damage cars, Shauck said. “But you know what happens when you leave gasoline in your fuel line?” he asked. “It turns into a goo, like varnish.”
“The greed on the part of the oil companies is sad,” said Shauck. “They don’t want to give up until the market is all gone, I guess.”
Now that Shauck has returned to the Baylor campus to teach and conduct research, academic papers and seminars will spread the news about ethanol and his flight, he said.
If that seems dry, Shauck prefers it to publicity that would make him out to be Baylor’s Indiana Jones, though he would seem to fit the role with his shock of silvery white hair, his mustache, his penchant for aviator jackets, and his Cinesmascope smile.
While Shauck talked, Zanin, 33, made expresso.
They married upon returning to Waco. Zanin came to America in 1980 to learn to fly, eventually becoming an instructor at Meacham Field in Fort Worth, Texas. Although living in Fort Worth at the time, she met Shauck in Italy about two and one-half years ago.
Zanin gave demonstration rides in an ultralight aircraft at an air show in Udine, Italy, to friends of Shauck. They coaxed him into going for a ride, too.
“He was scared,” Zanin said softly, smiling.
But he was impressed with her aviation skills. It was clear he had found the co-pilot he needed to make the difficult flight across the Atlantic, to prove the safety of ethanol-powered flight.
Behind the couple, videos of their recent transatlantic flight flickered silently across a television screen, the date scrolling across the bottom, to help them remember the chronology of their adventure.
Although Shauck ignored those who doubted alcohol as a fuel, his preparation to cross the Atlantic was not carefree.
A one-year leave of absence from Baylor turned into two and one-half years; an Italian company that agreed to sponsor the flight dropped out; and the light-weight fiberglass airplane that Shauck bought had to have everything replaced but the outer shell.
There were plenty of problems. And solutions.
The airplane was named the “Velocity,” after the company that manufactured it, the Velocity Corporation of Sebastian, Florida. Shauck describes the experimental airplane as “an egg with wings.” Weighing only 1,300 pounds, the plane is designed to reach a top speed of 200 miles per hour.
They began to realize what lay ahead during Velocity’s ten-hour maiden flight to California. The engine mount broke in two places. The engineer who worked on Voyager, the first airplane to fly non-stop around the world without refueling, helped Shauck and Zanin painstakingly rebuild the engine.
Such mishaps pushed the takeoff date back. What had been planned as a summer attempt to cross the Atlantic didn’t get rolling until early fall.
On the first attempt to lift off from Waco, Velocity’s propeller split. A summer of tinkering with the pitch of the propeller so it could lift as much weight as possible off the ground was lost as well.
Friends tried to persuade Shauck and Zanin to abandon the flight and stay in Waco. “They said, ‘Listen to what the airplane is telling you,’” Zanin said.
On everybody’s mind was Shauck’s failed 1986 attempt to fly across the Atlantic. He barely got out of Texas, crash-landing his airplane on an Alabama highway.
Repairs made, Shauck and Zanin lifted off on September 15, 1989. One of their first stops was in Mansfield, Ohio, Shauck’s hometown. From there, they hopped across the country, stopping at places like Newark, Ohio; Paducah, Ky.; Hazleton, Pa.; and Suffolk, Long Island—wherever they could buy ethanol.
Shauck and Zanin had planned to kick off their transatlantic flight from St. John’s, Newfoundland, and fly to Shannon, Ireland, and on to Paris, mimicking Charles Lindbergh’s solo Atlantic flight in 1927.
A takeoff from Suffolk, however, changed their mind. They had not fine-tuned their new propeller because of time constraints, and the climb performance on the prop was not sufficient to lift the fuel needed for that length of a trip.
To ensure their flight across the Atlantic would get off the ground, Shauck and Zanin chose to carry less fuel, reducing the plane’s weight and also its range of flight. They abandoned their plan to fly to Ireland, about a twelve-hour flight. Instead, they chose to make the seven-and-a-half-hour flight to the Azores, a string of Portuguese islands in the Atlantic. From there, they would fly to Lisbon, Portugal, and on to Paris.
The ethanol, though, was in Shannon. A group of ferry pilots, little-known pilots who routinely fly single-engine airplanes from North America to Europe, saved the flight when they offered to fly the ethanol, in five-gallon cans, to Santa Maria in the Azores.
The Velocity’s takeoff from St. John’s on October 21 was smooth. Both pilots, though, were tired. They had worked nonstop the day before, plotting a corrections table that would enable them to fly by dead reckoning, a method by which pilots determine location by their direction and the distance traveled from a known point.
Their computations had to be accurate. Shauck and Zanin knew that about five hours after leaving St. John’s they would lose their Long Range Navigation (LORAN), a series of radio signals that helps pilots determine their position.
Two hundred miles before the Azores, the needle of the airplane’s automatic direction finder jumped to the right. Ferry pilots had warned Shauck and Zanin not to depend on their instruments to find the islands. Zanin said they trusted their own reckoning to keep them alive.
“The Azores are small islands,” she said. “You can lose them. Two weeks before we left, a plane with two German pilots went into the water. They ran out of fuel, and the plane blew up. They think that what happened to them was that they followed the needle instead of their own navigation.”
Thunderstorms forced Shauck and Zanin to scuttle their flight plan to Santa Maria. They looked for a closer island, Flores.
That presented new problems. Velocity required a long glide path to land because of its sleek design. The Flores airport, however, had a short runway. And waiting at the end of the runway was a fifty-foot cliff.
Waves stirred by the fierce winds lapped over the cliff. The winds bucked Velocity as it descended, and Shauck decided to try instead for the Horta airport on the island of Faial, about 170 miles away.
Attempts to contact an airline, to ask them to radio Horta for its weather conditions, only brought static. Just before Flores vanished from sight, Shauck turned back. Rather than fly into the unknown, he took on the known dangers of landing there.
Unknown to Shauck or Zanin, the airline that serves the Azores had cancelled its flight into Flores that day. The airport was closed.
To avoid the stiff winds, Shauck approached the runway from a 90-degree angle, in what the ex-Navy pilot called a carrier landing, and turned into the runway almost sideways.
His flat approach put Velocity right over the rooftops of houses in line with the airport’s landing pattern. One wheel grazed a roof, Zanin said.
“He turned right on top of houses,” she said. “He was very, very low. I never could have made that landing. That plane lands like a glider. We applied all the brakes, and we stopped. I couldn’t believe it. We stopped on the first half of the aiport runway.”
Shauck pulls the Velocity forward to the fuel pit during a stopover in New York.
With no hangars in which to park an airplane, airport officials called the island’s fire department. They brought over two huge trucks, parking one in front of the airplane and one in back to anchor it.
The tenacious bad weather kept Shauck and Zanin in Flores for three days. For Zanin, both the people and the island were a revelation.
“Flores means ‘flowers,’” she said. “Flowers were growing literally everywhere — there were hydrangeas everywhere you looked. And Flores is a volcanic island with many beautiful volcanic lakes.
“The people were beautiful, too. When we left St. John’s, we didn’t have time to get money. When we arrived at Flores, all we had was a VISA card. There was only one hotel. Then we found out that no one on the island had a VISA machine — not even the bank. But they said, ‘Don’t worry about it. Stay here as long as you want. When you arrive in Lisbon, you will send us the money.’”
When the weather cleared, the Velocity resumed its voyage. Shauck and Zanin flew to Horta on October 24, hoping to pick up some ethanol. Fifty miles from the island, they saw the top of Mt. Pico, the tallest mountain in Portugal, sticking through the clouds. They headed straight for the peak of the mountain, using it to locate Horta.
After spending three fruitless days trying to get ethanol flown into Horta, they flew on uneventfully to Santa Maria, their original destination.
The ferry pilots had kept their word and flown ethanol into the island. But Shauck and Zanin found themselves ten gallons short of the fuel needed to complete their flight across the Atlantic. They waited three weeks for the additional fuel to arrive.
Those three weeks were not entirely wasted, said Shauck; during that time, he met an air traffic controller who had written to him asking for information on alcohol fuels.
That topic obviously revs up Shauck’s energy level. Discussing the flight across the Atlantic, he is cool, analytical. He becomes passionate, though, when talking about the advantages of alcohol fuel over gasoline.
“Gasoline is a dirty fuel, and it is a finite fuel,” Shauck said. “The handwriting is on the wall for it. Not only can we not afford it economically. Our environment also cannot afford it — look at just the one aspect of oil spills. And alcohol fuel can be made locally. Gasoline is mostly produced in politically unstable areas of the world. When you get down to it, we may be supporting terrorist activity when we buy it.”
Yat-Ping Tong and other oil company representatives, however, argue that alcohol fuels cost too much to produce. Alcohol can’t compete with gasoline without a government subsidy, Tong said, adding that a gallon of ethanol for a car costs about $1.60 compared to $1.10 for gasoline.
Bruce Beyaert, a Chevron planning specialist, says it isn’t yet feasible to expect alcohol fuels such as ethanol to replace gasoline. Ethanol is the most expensive alcohol fuel to produce, he said, because of the cost of fermenting and distilling it.
“We couldn’t switch over and run every American car on ethanol,” Beyaert said. “We don’t have enough crop land to grow the corn required. Then we’d get into the problem of fuel competing with food for the land.”
A sour look crosses Shauk’s face when he’s told of such statements by oil company executives.
“I get so tired of that argument,” he said. “Ethanol can be made from waste, anything made up of starch and sugar. In Brazil, they use sugar cane; in Europe, sugar beets. You can make ethanol from the oranges that fall off the trees. California’s waste stream could produce a billion gallons of ethanol a year, enough to power the entire fleet of piston-engine aircraft in the United States.”
As they prepared to leave Santa Maria in November, at the end of their three-week wait for fuel, Shauck and Zanin finally got lucky. They lost their brakes during a “run-up,” checking the airplane’s engine before takeoff.
“We control our direction with our brakes,” Zanin said. “If we had lost them while making a landing, we would have gone into the ground. We were very lucky.”
After repairs, Shauck and Zanin left Santa Maria for Lisbon, a 1,136-mile flight, on November 19. They flew in complete cloud cover until the last hundred miles. The landing in Lisbon was most satisfying, Shauck said: “We were finally across the water.”
Becoming the first pilots to fly across the Atlantic in a single-engine airplane powered by an alcohol fuel did not make much of a splash in world news, though. The Berlin Wall fell the same day.
From Lisbon, Shauck and Zanin flew to Paris by way of Bilbao, Spain, and through Bordeaux, Rochet-Sur-Yon, and Tours in France.
An air traffic controller’s strike greeted them in Paris on December 19.
“We would call, and no one would answer us,” Zanin said. “There was a lot of traffic, and the pilots answered us in French. We just kept our eyes open and went down.”
The voyage was supposed to end in the Le Bourget airport, where Lindbergh landed in 1927. Shauck ended it one stop early; he didn’t want himself compared to Lindbergh.
“Lindbergh was doing one thing, we were doing another,” Shauck said. “He was promoting aviation in general. There’s no question about aviation now. People fly over the Atlantic all the time. We were promoting a fuel, not ourselves.”
Shauck’s younger daughter, Kristin, a recent Baylor graduate, was on hand in Paris to witness the completion of the Velocity’s transatlantic journey. She rendezvoused with Shauck and Zanin again a few days later in Zanin’s hometown of Trieste, Italy, when the pilots flew the Velocity there for a well-deserved rest and storage.
Europe proved to be more intrigued than America was by the flight of the Velocity. A television crew from Switzerland filmed a documentary on it. The Italian media especially flocked to the story because of Zanin’s Italian heritage. An Italian TV show patterned after “Jeopardy” asked what woman from Friuli (the region Zanin hails from) flew across the Atlantic in an airplane powered by alcohol. A magazine called Visto splashed Zanin’s photograph and screaming headlines across several pages.
Zanin cringed when shown the magazine, which Shauck bought in Venice. “It says I said things like, ‘In this storm I thought I would lose my life,’” she said.
“It’s a great article,” Shauck said.
“He was very happy about it,” Zanin said. “It says he is forty-two years old. It says it all through the article.”
“I never told you my real age, did I?” Shauck asked. “It also says she navigated by her nose.”
“It’s a saying in Italian,” Zanin said. “It’s a way to say you navigate by your senses.”
“Are you sure they just didn’t look at you and say, ‘That must be how she did her long-range navigation?’” Shauck asked.
He laughed, but Shauck has had his fill of high-octane stories. The alcohol industry hired a PR firm to publicize the transatlantic flight, and asked Shauck to write up his recollections. He did. But after the publicists read them, a representative wrote back and suggested a way to heighten the flight’s dramatic content.
“I guess, being a mathematician, I didn’t write the purpose they were interested in,” Shauck said. “It was pretty much, ‘this is what we did, and this is why we did it, and these are the numbers.’”
“This man wrote me back and sent a piece he had written. He asked me to sign it. I wouldn’t. It started out, ‘Sitting here, hypnotized by the propeller. . . .’ Well, the propeller’s on the back end of the airplane, and I had told him that. Then he wrote, “The only thing that breaks the monotony. . .’ Well, we were always working: navigating, monitoring the instruments, flying the airplane. That was good for us. When you look down at waters in which you would have a twenty-minute life expectancy, well, you don’t like to think about that. When you’re flying with an experimental engine, with limited fuel, and with your navigation equipment gone, it’s not a boring thing.”
Shauck stood and stretched, then laughed.
“Boring would be beautiful.”
