'The Children of the Wind' - A History of the New Aviation 1971-1996 - Ch III, Pt 3

[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 III, Part 3 ==============

Chapter Three - DEVELOPMENT OF THE ROGALLO WING

Despite the efforts of all these visionary engineers, the name of John
Dickenson must stand alone as the man who created the first completely
developed flexible wing hang-glider, with all the features we now take for
granted. He did it in 1963, way ahead of anything that was going on in the
United States. He did it in a small town in Australia away from the so-called
centres of learning. He even had a provisional patent for it. The whole process
was completed in a ridiculously short time at hardly any cost. Ironically, he
never made any money out of his invention.

Despite all this, his contribution is not generally recognised, not even in
Australia. Surely John Dickenson's rightful place in history is alongside Dr
Francis Rogallo?

Development in hang gliding is often unselfconscious. Magazines cover events
monthly, and in the early days, changes were so momentous that it was almost
impossible to draw breath and discover where we had come from. I had heard Bill
Moyes talk about John Dickenson long before Mark Woodhams’ discovery, but
Dickenson’s significance escaped me at the time. Dickenson’s vital invention
was the triangle control-bar, the so-called A-frame, which Leonardo da Vinci
might have got around to if he had authorized his apprentice to build his hang
glider in 1493, and actually tried to fly it. The A-frame is a much more
logical device for adding strength to the flimsy wing than the “mast” that da
Vinci envisaged.

But Dickenson’s insight could also have been lost to the wider world had it not
been for those two formidable Australians, Bill Moyes and Bill Bennett, and the
fierce competition they had with each other to profit from hang gliding. It is
hard to say which of the two is more important, but Moyes has sometimes been
called the Father of hang gliding.

Moyes, born in 1932, started flying after barefoot water-skiing got too boring
for him. He was towed to 8,600 feet in a hang glider behind a aeroplane,
scattering battens and nearly killing himself. He has flown from the Grand
Canyon, taken off from the top of Mt Kilimanjaro in Africa, been seriously
injured five times and there are very few bones in his body that he has not
broken. At the age of 52 he had a mad ambition to drop out of a balloon in a
hang glider, land at the top of Mount Everest, and plant the Australian flag.
Bill Moyes is very Australian. He started flying in kites in 1966, when he was
34....

…I had been water-skiing since the early '50's. My partner and I were looking
for something new to do. We were bare-footing and had done everything we could
do on the water. My partner used to drive a taxi for "Gelignite Jack" Murray
who had a kite, a ski-plane, a Rogallo wing with a pair of floats and
controlled with a joystick. It was pretty primitive so he suggested I try a new
wing that had been built by John Dickenson, the guy we call Dr Cyclops.

The Rogallo wing that we have today is John Dickenson's. When NASA decided they
didn't want to use the Rogallo wing they allowed Dr Rogallo to publish his
notes. John Dickenson got hold of those notes in 1962. He designed the trapeze
bar and the weight-shift system that was the basis of what we have today.

In 1966 John was flying his wing to heights of 20 or 30 feet, towing behind a
boat on skis. He never did anything too wild. He wanted to produce the wing to
sell and was trying to interest people in it, taking it around the ski clubs
and the kite flying clubs that flew the conventional pentagonal kites.

Those pentagonal kites consisted of sheets drawn tight on a frame and flown at
a high angle of attack in a constant stall. They are dreadful things. The
driver has to be completely alert all the time. They don't fly, they just drag.
I had never flown one of those when I met John Dickenson. At that stage he
hadn't sold one of his ski wings because he hadn't found anyone to test-fly the
thing for him properly.

The first time I tried it, it was a comedy. It happened on the Hawkesbury
River. Because it was somebody else's boat they had first crack at it. The
first guy went out and the kite climbed away pretty quick. The driver of the
boat has to co-ordinate with the kite all the time and has to slow down if the
kite climbs too quick. The first guy crashed. The rear restraining wire took
his ear off so they carted him off to hospital.

The second guy went out, climbed rapidly, panicked and pulled the bar right in.
When he hit the water he broke his leg. So they took him off to hospital too.
The third guy wasn't three feet off the water when he let go of the control
bar. He too was gashed by the wires. By the time the fifth had gone to hospital
there was no one left to drive the boat.

Eventually we found a driver who would only do what I told him to. I told him
to go at 30 mph and off we went. I flew the kite for 8 miles, turned around and
came back. I let go at about 150 feet and glided down. I knew exactly what the
thing was going to do and it did it.

Within six weeks of that flight, Bill Moyes had set a world altitude record,
towed up to 1,045 feet at Tuggerah Lake, and he began chasing this and other
records. In 1967 he flew at the Sydney Showground during a boat show and
subsequently got hired to do the job regularly. He started to travel the world
giving demonstrations of tow-kiting. He met Bill Bennett when Bennett was
official witness at the Tuggerah Lake record attempt. Bennett was in the
aircraft which flew along side Moyes to verify the height gain of more than
1,000 feet. In contrast to Dickenson (who says he taught both men to fly),
Moyes reckons he taught Bennett, and they flew together for about a year before
Bennett went to America in 1969. The two men became fierce rivals, and more
than 25 years later, remain so. You can still hear Moyes roar, "I always beat
you, Bennett, my son always beat your son, and my grandson will always beat
your grandson!".

The peculiar flavour of Bill Moyes’s strong personality can be caught in his
account of a tour of Europe, where he spent six weeks in plaster...

…That was in Denmark where I was flying in the World Water Ski Championships.
The officials had said I couldn't use the boat for practice because I was
distracting the men laying out the slalom course. But I wanted to finish
trimming the kite. The wind was pretty strong so I had six of the team run down
a hill with a rope towing me into the air. The first flight was quite good. I
wanted one more flight to finish the adjustments. We went back up. By this time
a crowd of about 2,000 people had gathered in the landing area. When the crew
came running down the hill again with the rope they ran into this mass of
people and couldn't go any further. I was still over the trees and came down
through them. I smashed my wrist, elbow, face, teeth, a few other things....

Nice line, that, isn't it?..."a few other things". Bill Moyes claims the first
soaring flight on a rogallo in May, 1968, flying tethered at La Perouse. He had
been towed into the air, but after some minutes noticed the rope was slack.

"Aren't you holding the bloody rope?" he roared.

The man shook it about to show there was no load on it, so Bill let the rope go
and flew about for 32 minutes.

Bennett went to the US where there was a much bigger potential market than
Australia, and he and Moyes slogged it out in front of the television cameras
and news photographers. Bennett towed over the Statue of Liberty wearing a suit
that made him look like the Rhinestone Cowboy. Moyes jumped into the Grand
Canyon. They were both towed higher and higher until Moyes got an aeroplane to
tow him up to 8,600 feet...

…In those days Bennett and I used to upstage each other. He'd do something and
then I would top it. He'd do something else and then I would top it and then he
would attempt to top that. It went on for years and years. I had established
the tow record for 2,870 feet in 1968. In 1971 Bill topped it with 2,900 feet.
So I thought I might as well make a proper job of it. I hooked on the back of a
plane and took it to 8,600 feet. There were quite a few problems as you can
imagine. I was lucky to meet a tow pilot in America called Chuck Doyle. He was
a pioneer of the barnstorming days and he was familiar with towing because he
towed banners. He was a Northwest Airline pilot and had his own fleet of
planes. He brought his fleet of planes along and we first tried it out behind a
Stearman. I thought it would have plenty of horsepower.

I underestimated the horsepower that a plane can put out. Anyhow, that thing
nearly tore me to pieces. It flew along at 60mph with the sail fully luffed. It
tore all the rubbers out and battens flew out like a shower of spears. I was
lucky to get down alive. I just lost a bit of skin, which we did in those days.
We bled almost every time we flew! After half a dozen unsuccessful flights we
decided we weren't using the right equipment. We switched to a SuperCub with
modified tips and a lower speed. We managed to get it down to 45 mph and since
I also used a smaller kite it went quite successfully.

I started behind the plane using a pair of skis with no fins. I kicked the skis
off when we got airborne and away we went. The plane took off and we didn't get
much over 45 mph until about 5,000 feet, and he had to pull the flaps up as the
engine was overheating. The speed went up to 60 mph and I had a sail-luffing
problem again, but not as badly as before, and we managed to creep up to 8,600
feet.

Was it a straightforward flight? Well, actually it was a crazy day in Autumn in
Wisconsin in America in 1971. Temperature was about zero on the ground and
minus 23 at altitude with wind chill on top. The wind was blowing about 50 mph
at 2,000 feet and only about 20 mph on the ground. So when we reached the 2,000
foot level I thought there was something wrong with the plane because it was
going backwards. We flew backwards for five miles until we climbed out of the
strong wind layer. Then we went forwards again. But I was about 10 miles upwind
of the airport when I released and I kept the glider headed away from the
airport and flew backwards all the way down to it. The wind was so strong.

That was the end of that type of competition between Moyes and Bennett, though
they remained rivals in other areas. They both became major manufacturers of
hang gliders. Moyes set up Moyes Gliders in Sydney, Australia. Bennett founded
Delta Wing Kites in Van Nuys, California. It was Bennett who made the Phoenix
6B that Alvin Russell took the agency for in England in 1976.

Moyes believes it was his flight into the Grand Canyon on a wing made with
aluminium and dacron in 1970 that finally put paid to the bamboo butterflies in
the US. The First Lilienthal Meet had only one rogallo, and that had no
triangle control bar, but as the New Aviation started to grow, it was rogallos
that dominated, because they had Dickenson's control-bars and were
car-toppable. You could fold them up, stick them on a roof-rack, and drive
away. The meeting after Lilienthal's 123rd birthday was named after another
American pioneer, Montgomery, where there were just two Hang Looses, but a
great many rogallos. Lambie was amazed....

…Little did we realise that Rogallo, the flexible wing, was going to be the
winner. We just didn't know. Volmer Jensen and Paul MacCready came out and
looked at us crashing and bashing and said, "Aw, it's just like jumping on a
bicycle with no steering and pushing off and going down a hill. It's
interesting but it has no future”. Then Volmer went out and built that good one
with the controls, the VJ-23.

Volmer Jensen, in his 70's and a holy lunatic if ever there was one, designed,
built and flew a rigid wing hang glider called the VJ-23. It was one of dozens
of rigid hang gliders whose designers, consciously or not, tried to lead
hang-gliding back into the mainstream 3-axis control aviation developed by the
Wright Brothers. But hang gliding wouldn't go. Jensen's VJ-23 did have a big
influence on the British-built CFM Shadow, one of the most sophisticated of
modern microlight powered aircraft, but that, too, is a cul-de-sac in
microlighting (although Eve Jackson became the first person to fly a microlight
from England to Australia in a Shadow in 1986/7)..

MacCready, of course, as we will discover, went on to build the Gossamer Condor
and revolutionise man-powered flight, mainly because of his hang gliding roots.

Before the end of 1971, the first soaring flight had been made in the US on a
Rogallo wing. At the Lilienthal Meet earlier that year, the longest flight had
been 196 feet, and the longest time in the air, 12 seconds. But so fast had
progress been that on September 6, not even four months later, Dave Kilbourne
soared a Bennett-designed 16-foot Rogallo on Mission Ridge near Fremont for 25
minutes!

(Can you imagine the grit that Kilbourne must have had, to rig on top of a hill
a 'flying machine' which previously had only flown down? He had this theory
that it was possible to turn into a lift band that glider pilots said was there
on other hills, but they didn't fly Mission Ridge. Kilbourne proposed to steer
his wing to stay in that lift band and go up. It was only a theory, though,
with no other proof than to try it himself. The risk was that he would hit the
hill and kill himself. There was no water around for a soft landing. As he
stood on that ridge, the wind beginning to fill his sail, his feelings must
have been very like those tower-jumpers in aviation's past. But he succeeded
where they failed. I met him once, years later, flying at Torrey Pines, near
San Diego, California, as if he was any other flyer. No one pointed him out to
me, and it was only by accident I discovered that he was, indeed, the Dave
Kilbourne, first man to soar a hang glider in America. He seemed to have no
awareness of how important that flight had been. It was probably modesty.)

With the exception of Bill Moyes and his Australian travelling circus, only a
few of us outside the US watched the magical New Aviation as if with noses
pressed heavily to a window, and read whatever we could about the heroes of our
sport. There was the great Bob Wills, whose role in the Smithsonian film "To
Fly" made my hair rise when I saw it. At the end of the sequence trumpeting the
triumph of Mainstream Aviation, the film shows a Jumbo taking off in all its
mighty noise and size and power, and cuts suddenly to a distant helicopter shot
of Hawaiian cliffs and a lone hang glider pilot circling...and silence. That
film's editor had an early insight into the significance of hang gliding in
man's urge to fly. Bob Wills, in his short career, exemplified all that was
best in American flying.

There were other legendary American names...Chris Wills (Bob's brother), Rich
Grigsby, Taras Kiceniuk, Chris Price, Tom Peghiny, Dave Cronk, Dick Eipper,
Dean Tanji, Roy Haggard, Keith Nichols....

When Johnny Carr, the great English pilot who four years later was just pipped
into second place at the World Hang Gliding Championships, saw Tom Peghiny in
1975, he couldn't speak to him. Johnny just watched Peghiny, (who was quite
unaware of the effect he was having), saunter absently by. Johnny whispered to
another English pilot, "That's Tom Peghiny". The idea of actually talking to
Peghiny was quite beyond him. By the beginning of 1975, that was our view in
Europe on American hang gliding. They flew off mountain peaks, built aircraft
and made flights we could only aspire to, won competitions with names like the
US Masters of Hang Gliding. They knew things about flying that were beyond us.
They were demi-gods, at the peak of achievement. And we were looking up the
long high mountain wondering how we could possibly get there too.

... [Continued next week]
============= End of Chapter III, Part 3 ==============