The Monarch A was a human-powered aircraft, designed and built by graduates and undergraduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with Professors Walter Hollister and Ed Crawley acting as Project Advisers.
[1] The concept and general arrangement of the craft, described as an improved successor to the Chrysalis, was first detailed in the Spring 1981 issue of the AIAA Student Journal.
Competition rules allowed for stored energy, generated by the pilot during a ten-minute period immediately preceding a flight, to be used as an additional power source.
During flights, the aircraft had two separate power sources, both leading to a fixed-pitch minimum induced loss propeller.
[2][3] To comply with the Kremer competition, these cells could be charged by the pilot pedalling for 10 minutes, immediately prior to a prize attempt.
According to its designers, both the pilot and the motor were each expected to deliver approximately equal amounts of power to the propeller.