'The Children of the Wind' - A History of the New Aviation 1971-1996 - Ch II, Pt 1

[Larry Dighera, Moderator]

'The Children of the Wind' - A History of the New Aviation 1971-1996

Here is a serialized account taken from Brian Miltion's magnum
opus, 'The Children of the Wind' - A History of the New Aviation
1971-1996, soon to be published by Endeavour Press, a
London-based epublisher. These first few chapters
chronicling the beginnings of man's quest to fly and how the
forefathers of aviation have influenced contemporary ultralight
aviation have kindly been made available to newsgroup
readers. They will be posted here over the next few months.
This first post is the Table of Contents.

You can learn more about TV presenter, lecturer,
journalist, award winning around-the-world microlight pilot,
author of seven books, and born adventurer, Brian Milton on
his web site <http://www.brian-milton.com/>;. You can also
purchase autographed copies of Brian's literary works there too:
<http://www.brian-milton.com/book>. And don't miss the
extensive collection of aviation videos, including Brian's Around
the World by Microlight flight for which he was awarded the
Britannia Trophy, joining a very distinguished list of aviators
who have won that award including Sir John Alcock, Bert Hinkler
and Sir Alan Cobham. Brian was also awarded the Segrave Trophy,
an award presented to great sportsmen; past recipients include Sir
Malcolm Campbell, Amy Johnson and Jackie Stewart:
<http://www.brian-milton.com/video/>

Additional links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Milton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segrave_Trophy


� Copyright Brian Milton 2013, All Rights Reserved


============= Beginning of Chapter II, Part 1 ==============

Chapter 2

History of aviation from Icarus and Daedelus, through King Bladud and
Leonardo da Vinci, to Lilienthal, our last common ancestor with
Mainstream Aviation. Includes a recce of Crete to see if Daedelus
could have flown from there in 1500BC and whether the flight could be
repeated today (it could). The English apprentice who, 500 years after
Leonardo da Vinci conceived it, built and flew a hang glider designed
by the Italian genius. Some comments on Mainstream Aviation since the
Wright Brothers, and death of the "Right Stuff" by 1970.


EARLY HISTORY OF AVIATION

It is accepted by lazy thinkers, especially in America, that aviation
began with the Wright Brothers. Orville and Wilbur Wright made the
first successful powered flights on December 17, 1903, at Kittyhawk in
North Carolina. It was a vital breakthrough, and for some time the
French, then leading the quest to aviate, could not believe the
Americans had got there first. In flying terms the Wrights should not
be seen as a beginning but as part of a stream of experiment about
flight that has a much longer history. They did not succeed in a
vacuum. Had they not been men of their time, at the end of a long,
evolutionary line of pioneers, they are likely not to have made the
vital breakthrough. And the way they did succeed contained the seeds
of the later corruption of the dream of flight that we can see in the
way aircraft are used today.

The quest to fly is old, and cuts across all cultures. In Asia, the
earliest stories of flight are of eighteen hundred years before
Christ, when Ki-Kung-Shi is said to have made a flying chariot without
the use of birds in the reign of the Chinese Emperor Ch'eng T'ang.

To Westerners, the first flyers were Icarus and his father Daedelus.
In Greek mythology, both men lived fifteen hundred years before
Christ, but the first written sources we have of their flight occurred
nearly a thousand years after the event. It was inevitably corrupted,
as the oral tradition is, by the needs of each speaker, passing the
story on, to find a reasonable explanation for what happened. Daedelus
was employed on the island of Crete by King Minos to build the great
labyrinth as a prison for the Minataur, the half-bull, half-man which
had the rather anti-social habit of eating young virgins. King Minos,
who lost a son in Athens on mainland Greece, had a powerful fleet of
ships, and dominated the seas around Athens. In revenge for his son�s
death, he threatened to destroy the city unless it paid him fourteen
young Athenian hostages a year. These hostages he sent in to the
labyrinth to be eaten by the Minataur, who was kept inside, and from
which he was not expected to escape. When the labyrinth was completed,
the king decided to detain Daedelus on Crete because, having designed
it, he knew the way out, and might tell someone. Icarus was also kept
on the island.

The accepted myth is that Prince Theseus of Athens secretly entered
the labyrinth, helped by Minos's daughter Ariadne, killed the Minataur
and freed the fourteen Athenian hostages. Theseus, hostages and
Ariadne then took ship back to Athens. Minos was so upset at the loss
of his daughter and hostages that he blamed Daedelus, claiming
Daedelus had said no one could get out of the labyrinth alive. The
King wanted to roast Daedelus alive.

(An alternative story is that the king's wife rather fancied the
powerful Minataur as a lover, and persuaded Daedelus to build her a
wooden structure which looked like a cow, to arouse the Minataur, into
which she could be fitted to achieve satisfaction. If Minos had found
this out, it is no wonder he was upset about Daedelus).

Because of King Minos� control of the seas around Crete, there was no
way Icarus and Daedelus could escape by sea. But Daedelus, said to be
the greatest sail-maker of his age, saw the link between wind and
lift, and constructed wings for them to fly on (the feathers and wax
which later appear in the myth do not, apparently, appear in the
original Greek, and may have been added in the fifteenth century).
Father and son were said to have climbed Mount Ida (Idhi Oros) in the
middle of Crete, just over 8,000 feet high, and used it as a launching
site to fly. They headed north, but Icarus flew too near the sun, the
wax melted, and he fell into the sea. In the myth, his father made it
to the island of Icaria, named it after his son, and appears in other
myths later in Sicily.

Almost everyone accepts this as wishful thinking, an original story
passed down by word of mouth and turned into legend, as oral history
cannot work without legends. One exception is a Yorkshire architect
called Arthur Quarmby, who claimed it could have happened. He
persuaded Yorkshire TV to make a film of the story, and I went out to
Crete in 1990 with a YTV producer called Nick Gray, Arthur Quarmby
himself, and Bruce Goldsmith, one of the world's best hang glider
pilots, to see if it was possible for two men to foot-launch off Crete
and fly to another island. If it was, it would not be me doing it, as
I was not skilful enough. The second chosen candidate was Robbie
Whittall, then only 20 years old, but hang gliding champion of the
world.

Quarmby's theory, which he developed from a glider pilot called Walter
Neumark (one of the originators of paragliding), is that in certain
weather conditions Crete has a 'standing wave'. This is a weather
condition where the wind blows over a mountain and 'sets' in a
particular shape. There is an up 'elevator, where the air climbs
thousands of feet, followed by a down 'elevator', where it falls
steeply, and it continues in a sort of vertical zig-zag down-wind
through the sky. Certain areas of the world, such as New Zealand, for
example, or the Scottish Highlands, are famous for 'wave' flying. All
conventional gliding height-gain records, up to 50,000 feet are made
in 'wave'. The phenomenon is powerful, smooth for the most part, but
with strong turbulence at the edges. If Icarus did make his legendary
flight, his fatal fall could have occurred because of this turbulence,
rather the wax melting too close to the sun, because of course the
higher you go the colder it gets.

In certain conditions you can see 'wave'. The rising air gets cooler,
and carries moisture which turns into cloud at the top of the wave. As
the air falls again, it warms and the cloud disappears. 'Wave' cloud,
called lenticular, looks like a fat white cigar lying horizontally
across the peak. It is stationary, or moves back and forth as the
'wave' itself changes frequency with the wind strength. Some people
mistake 'wave' cloud for UFOs.

Only advanced flyers know much about 'wave'. They also say that the
first wave, the primary wave, is virtually impossible to get into with
a glider, and you have to join on a secondary wave, perhaps 10
kilometres down wind. By definition, Daedelus and Icarus were not
advanced flyers if they stood on Mt Ida all those years ago, looking
south at their launch site, over their shoulders to the north at where
they wanted to go, occasionally looking up at the lenticular clouds,
presuming that the wave started south of Ida. The two men had to go
down-wind to go north, so they needed a southerly wind, which Quarmby
told us was the prevailing wind in Spring and Autumn on Crete.

To be successful, we would have to find a point from which to launch.
Bruce and Robbie would have to be able to soar the mountains in ridge
lift - that is, like a ping-pong ball on top of air rising up the
slope - and then catch the wave to climb thousands of feet, before
turning north and diving through the down-cycles to catch the next
'elevator' up, all the 80 or so miles to Icaria, or even just to the
nearest island off Crete, Antikythera, 17 miles away.

As it happens, it is not impossible. With the right research, and the
experience of local conditions that months of soaring the area would
bring, one day conditions could be right and an attempt made. But the
terrain is extremely inhospitable, and landings anywhere are likely to
be ankle-breakers in one landing in three.

We concluded that it would be more possible to thermal off the island
from a site near its north-western corner, not far from the little
airfield at Maleme where more than six and a half thousand German
parachutists were killed in the 1941 invasion of Crete. We thought the
two pilots could make the island of Antikythera with a normal
cloudbase of 8,000 feet and a bit of nerve, by following a thermal in
a southerly wind out over the sea. When it dissipated, they could make
the island on a down-wind glide. It would be safer on parasails. We
even found a take-off site.

There was one moment on Crete that made us all thoughtful. We were
halfway up the north side of Mt Ida in a little village called Anoyia
where all males - men, boys and babies - had been shot by the Germans
in the last war after a British commando team captured a German
general and sheltered in the village. We found a priest, Papa Nikoulas
Andreadakis, who had kept weather logs three times a day since 1952,
information he used to telephone through to Athens for the forecasters
there. The priest did not speak English, and we were struggling to
communicate with him, trying to learn something about local weather.
He found a book with photographs of different cloud formations, and we
turned to the page with wave cloud to ask if he ever saw them. He
thought for a few moments and spoke to the interpreter.

"Yes, I do see these clouds from time to time," we were told. "But
only when the wind is blowing from the south!"

Bruce and Robbie never made the flight. It would have entailed a month
out of their lives, and more to the point, I could not raise the
sponsorship needed to make it work, despite intense television
interest. But it is still possible, with the right pilots and
organisation, to try. Arthur Quarmby falls into a long tradition of
original, often eccentric and sometimes even mad thinkers (as we
measure madness) who approach a situation differently to anyone else.
If they are wrong, it is for the right reasons.

Icarus and Daedelus were not isolated myths. In English history, the
first man to attempt flight is said to have been King Bladud, founder
of the City of Bath and father of King Lear. In BC 852 he tried to fly
over London with artificial wings after weaving a few magic spells.
They did not work, and he was killed in the attempt.

King Bladud is one of the first in the long line of so-called 'tower
jumpers', those courageous and driven souls who defied gravity to
achieve pure flight. They were thought insane, but interesting to look
at. Crowds would gather to watch them fly. Modern American hang glider
pilots call these crowds "wuffos" ("hey, honey, hurry back to the car
and get my camera, a guy's gonna get killed").

Another famous tower jumper was the English monk, Oliver, also known
as Eilmar, who leapt from the tower of Malmesbury Abbey in AD 1020
with 'wings' fastened to his hands and feet. It seems to be accepted
that he did make some sort of a glide. He landed heavily, broke both
legs and was crippled for life. He put his unsuccessful flight down to
lack of a tail.

In Scotland in 1507, an Italian immigrant called John Damien, inspired
by the example of King Bladud, launched himself from the walls of
Sterling Castle but fell to the ground, breaking several bones,
including his thigh. He blamed his failure on the fact that when he
made his wings he used feathers from a chicken, a bird which does not
fly.

Another Italian chose France for his tower jump. In 1536, in Troyes an
Italian clockmaker called Bolori jumped from the cathedral tower, and
flapped his way to his death on the pavements below.

Judging by the number and quality of attempts to fly in the last five
hundred years, France is the country most likely to produce those
willing to take the most chances, either by jumping out of towers or
producing flying machines.

In 1678, a French locksmith named Besier jumped from a garret in a
town called Sable. Historians are dubious it was flight, and think it
was another 'parachute' jump. Besier survived the plummet, and news of
his attempt set off the English inventor, Robert Hooke, who concluded
that man does not have the physical strength to power wings, and
required artificial propulsion.

In 1712, a French acrobat and actor called Charles Allard tried to fly
from Terrasse de St-Germain to the Bois de Vesinet, with wings
attached to his arms. He was killed by the fall.

Later that century, in 1772, France's Canon Pierre Desforges built a
'voiture volante' for which he claimed a flying speed of 60mph. Sadly,
all that happened as he sat in his contraptions and flapped his wings
was that he went nowhere. Two years earlier he had built a pair of
wings for a flying experiment. That failed because the peasant to whom
the wings were fixed refused to go through with the attempt. The
French Revolution occurred 19 years later, and from that peasant�s
point of view, none too soon, either...

My favourite French tower jumper is the Marquis de Bacqueville, who in
1742 tried to soar across the Seine River in Paris with paddles
attached to his arms and legs. He announced he would fly from his
house on the corner of Rue des Saints Peres and the Quai Malaquais,
across the river to the Tuileries Gardens. He tried, failed, fell into
a washerwoman's barge, and broke his leg. You can walk to where his
house was in modern Paris, look down at the river, and keenly imagine
his feelings as he trembled at the edge of the window, wondering if he
could really fly (we still wonder; but most of us, thankfully, fail to
end up in a washerwoman's barge, though some of us do break legs).

Tower jumpers were everywhere. In Italy, in 1499, Giovanni Battista
Danti, a mathematician, jumped from a tower in Perugia wearing some
sort of apparatus. It included feathers, but one wing malfunctioned
and he fell heavily on the roof of St Mary's Church and 'hurt his
leg'. He was also said to have glided across Lake Trasimeno. The
story, in C.Crispolti's "Perugia Augusta", in 1648, seems to have been
based on a real event.

In Spain, in AD 852, a Moorish savant called Armen Firman donned a
huge cloak and leapt from a tower in Cordoba. He survived the plummet
to the ground in a primitive parachute descent.

In Turkey in the 11th century, at the Hippodrome in Constantinople,
now Istanbul, the so-called Saracan of Constantinople tried to
demonstrate flight to the Sultan, with a huge cloak stiffened with
battens. He fell to his death.

In Portugal, Father Laurenco de Gusmao (1686-1724) designed and built
the 'Passarola', and in 1709 requested a patent for the flying machine
from the King of Portugal. On 24 June, 1709 he even demonstrated the
machine...but it failed to fly. Later that year he launched a small
craft of some kind from the Castello Sao Jorge in Lisbon. Gusmao is
said to be the first to demonstrate hot-air balloons. His 'Passarola'
is described by Charles Gibbs-Smith, from whom most of these stories
come, as a very advanced design.

The tower jumpers were still trying even in the nineteenth century. A
Swiss called Jacob Degan, a watchmaker, carried out flying experiments
in Vienna and in the Champs de Mars in Paris, between 1806-1817. And
in Germany, a tailor called Berblinger achieved legendary status by
falling into the river at Ulm testing a machine similar to Degan�s.

But history would have been so much different if the towering genius
of the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519), had actually
ordered his apprentice to build a machine he had every intention of
building. Working in Florence, Leonardo came so close to devising the
first flying machine, though it was not with the flying designs and
flapping wings for which everyone has seen the drawings (and which
were dismissed in a tabloid English newspaper as "a Turkey"). Five
hundred years after Leonardo put pen to paper with his doodles, one of
his designs achieved flight. It was built by an Englishman, Michael
Pidcock, without the help of anyone in the British or Italian aviation
establishment....


�My attachment to this machine was born one day in 1989 when my
co-researcher Suzanne shoved a large book at me across her dining room
table. "There you are! There's the glider that you keep maintaining
never existed!"

Up until this moment I had been sceptical about Suzanne's claim to
have seen a drawing by the great Leonardo da Vinci of a glider. At
this time I was on a project for a BBC documentary, constructing
models of the Artist's machines and supplying them with the magic
ingredient - Electricity!

I had felt entitled to opine upon the scope of his ingenious machines:
for 18 months I had been studying his flapping wing devices, known as
"Ornithopters" and I had never come upon a drawing of a hang glider.
Yet among a great many machines were doodles of fledgeling hang
gliders! Doubly exciting, the drawing had all the appearance of
airworthiness. Well, so it seemed to my eager and untutored eye! The
thing flew right off the page! Carlo Pedretti, world's supremo da
Vinci expert, had written "A reconstruction of it would be far more
meaningful than any other of Leonardo's flying machines - and it would
certainly work". It took me all of 3 seconds to decide to build it.

The reason I had never seen the drawing was that it had never been
published. In 1966, two manuscripts were discovered in the National
Library in Madrid where they had lain for 150 years. Among the
closely-filled pages was a design for a man-carrying kite and another,
a striking precursor of the modern hang-glider.

At the time, no one took any notice of it! Hang gliders would not make
their debut for another 7 or 8 years. What an irony! Rediscovered
after 470 years and still just a little bit ahead of its time.

The following weekend found me in London, where I met Ian Grayland,
designer of Clubman hang gliders, and Nick Minnion, his business
partner and test pilot, who were to become my early technical
advisors.

More than once, Leonardo wrote in the margin of his aeronautical
studies: "Get an apprentice to build the model". Well, now it seemed I
was to be the apprentice. Armed with skills derived from years of
wooden boat maintenance, I embarked alone upon the uncharted waters of
Renaissance glider construction.

"Canes, wood, varnished silk and ropes," the Master had specified.
Mindful of the English climate, I decided to pass on the varnished
silk - good wing fabric though it had proved until the advent of
polyesters. Apart from that, I would limit myself to materials and
technology available at the time of its conception.
=============== End of Chapter II, Part 1 ==============