'The Children of the Wind' - A History of the New Aviation 1971-1996 - Ch III, 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 III, Part 1 ==============

Chapter Three - DEVELOPMENT OF THE ROGALLO WING

Most of us, contemplating flight, buy a wing from an expert. But after the
Wright Brothers showed the way into the mainstream, and aviation developed
throughout the twentieth century at breakneck speed, there remained people who
did not accept wings and tailplanes and engines pulling aircraft through the
sky as the only way forward in aviation.

All television histories of flight have humorous coverage of the antics of such
people. We see chaps cycling furiously along in the middle of a pair of wings,
and then collapsing in a heap. Or that machine with what looks like two large
umbrellas going up and down frantically, the be-hatted pilot sitting solemnly
in the middle being shaken around, until steam comes out or something falls
off. The inference in the documentaries is that these people are lunatics. But
if they are, they should be called �holy lunatics�, among whom there was a
little group advocating foot-launched flight. These people wanted to get away
from airfields where they resented the regulations. Why could they not take
their flying machines where they wished, and fly without all the paraphernalia
that mainstream flying has accumulated?

In Southern California in the early 1960s, a group like this was linked
together by a magazine produced on a Roneo machine, first called Low, Slow and
Out of Control, later just Low and Slow. [Moderator's Note: Low and Slow was
published by Joe Faust: <http://www.hanggliderhistory.com/>.] hey bounced ideas
off each other, built fantastic contraptions, bruised themselves trying to get
into the air, and always, went back to the drawing board.

Among the ideas they discussed were those of Francis Rogallo, a NASA space
scientist. Rogallo, born in 1912, became interested in flight at the age of 7
at the start of the Jazz Age, but made no really original contribution until
1945. He had been an aeronautical researcher since 1936 and throughout the
Second World War, after which he chose to devote his spare time, working with
his wife Gertrude, to design what he called a "simple, practical, inexpensive
and reasonably safe flying machine"

His idea was to construct "a flying machine with no rigid element or element
designed to produce rigidity; a completely new concept, never seen before, with
no model in science". With Gertrude, he set up a wind tunnel in their kitchen
and conducted experiments. Attempts to interest his employers NACA (a
predecessor of NASA) came to nothing at the time. In 1948, the couple filed a
patent for the "Rogallo Wing", pointed at one end, looking like a cloth version
of a paper dart. It was entirely flexible, nothing rigid at all, and suspension
lines did as much to give it shape as the cut of the sail. It achieved a
certain popularity as a kite for children, but no commercial future was seen
for it.

The story might have ended there, among thousands of patents taken out by
inventors which went nowhere, except that in 1957 the Russians put a satellite
into space. Eisenhower's America, smug in the belief that no other country
equalled it in science (or anything else), was galvanized into action, and
billions of dollars were poured into the space race. Looking for ways to bring
satellite and space capsules back to earth, NASA spent an estimated $50 million
exploring variations on a rogallo wing. Francis Rogallo adapted his original
totally flexible principles and began designing semi-rigid variants,
stabilizing the leading edges with compressed air beams, or even with aluminium
tube.

US Government establishments, having completed the basic studies of a
development, often hand them on to private companies to see where they can take
the idea. The contracts to do so are lucrative. Two companies, Ryan and North
American Aviation were asked to develop the rogallo wing, and produced
flex-wings of different shapes and sizes. They built flexible re-entry gliders,
helicopter-towed flex-wings, radio-controlled self-steering cargo delivery
gliders, even rocket-powered escape rogallo modules.

Photographs appeared from time to time of the weird aircraft under development,
with highly sophisticated aircraft bodies suspended under rough-looking
delta-shaped sails. But in 1962 the development of flex-wing aircraft slowed
dramatically. NASA decided to bring back capsules from Space using conventional
parachutes, and the flow of money was diverted elsewhere. More photographs were
released publicly, which became the inspiration for at least two 'holy
lunatics', and two separate lines of research continued, one in the United
States, the other in Australia, that led to the official birth of hang gliding
on Lilienthal's 123rd birthday.

The American was a student called Richard Miller [Moderator's Note: Photograph
of Richard Miller flying his Conduit Condor; May 23, 1971:
<http://energykitesystems.net/hgh/images/RichardMillerConduitCondor1971May23.jpg>.],
an enthusiast of the '60's Age of Aquarius, with strong ideas on individual
freedom, personal motorless flight, and even "transcendental aerodynamics".
From 1964 onwards, Miller began constructing "Bamboo Butterflies", rogallo
wings made from bamboo and polythene, held together with sellotape. Miller hung
from a box-like structure under the wing, two parallel bamboo struts buried in
his arm-pits, much like Lilienthal. And like the great German original, Miller
threw his legs and lower body around to steer the contraption. He flew off
sand-dunes in Southern California; one early rule of thumb was, don't fly
higher than you are prepared to fall.

There is a classic series of photographs taken of Richard Miller hanging off
one of his machines just after take-off, with three friends behind him, all
with broad smiles on their faces, two with sun-glasses. Miller has sun-glasses
too. A curious dated quality haunts the photograph, as if they were not from
the 1960's but at least fifteen years earlier. Miller looks like a 'Beat' Poet,
someone that Jack Kerouac would have written about, an aerial Dean Moriarty.

There exists wonderful movie footage of young men flying bamboo butterflies in
the late 1960s, long-legging it down the sand-dunes with friends trying to hold
the wings level. They sometimes achieved a few short, manic, brilliant seconds
of flight. Often, flight wasn't achieved so much as a twanging, tumbling crash,
but the butterflies were easily repaired, or replaced, and experiments
continued. Yet rigging was cumbersome, and the box-like structure under the
sail had not really changed from Liliental's time.

The key American development in the New Aviation happened in 1971, two years
after Mainstream Aviation had taken man to the moon. The development was
triggered by a letter from Miller to a school-teacher called Jack Lambie. The
letter read, "The 123rd anniversary of Otto Lilienthal's birth will be on May
23, 1971. What can we do to celebrate?" Lambie had been conducting classroom
projects for his California high-school students, leading them to build a
replica of the bi-plane gliders developed by Octave Chanute before the end of
the nineteenth century. Lambie called it a "Hang Loose"...

�I had been screwing around with hang gliders for years. I built my first one
in the '50's, and then in '65 and '66. There was Richard Miller, Bruce
Carmichael, Paul MacCready, all the gang, building these bamboo butterflies.
But we didn't know how to fly them. We were doing it with arm balancing. We
would run along, get the nose up, and just about the time it started to fly,
the drag would go up. We didn't have hang bars. Or we would run along, I would
start to lift, and then, ohhhhhh we'd drop. In fact, one time we were out
flying in the dunes and MacCready ran and jumped off the hill with his arms out
and went further than we were going in the hang gliders...

Then I built a Hang Loose. I built it with a 28 foot span, real light so the
kids in the playground could fly it at very slow speeds. Then the next day I
went out and flew it, and it really flew! I was astounded! And this was to
prove that hang gliders do not work!

So Miller, Carmichael and the gang would all take turns, and this thing flew
time after time, floated down the hill. Don Dwiggins took photographs of it. I
gave Don a story I had written for Soaring magazine and he re-wrote it kind of
happier and more exciting and put it in Sports Plane magazine. It got on the
cover. And then some people said "we want plans", so my brother Mark and I drew
up some plans in one evening, and charged $3 for them.

We thought we'd sell maybe 40 of them and so I had 100 printed. The article
came out in Sports Plane and it came out in Private Pilot, and Doug Lamont just
went out of his gourd and said, "we've just got to put this in Soaring". It was
the first article on hang gliding in Soaring magazine. I had literally shopping
bags full of mail. Just about all the old timers in hang gliding are on my
mailing list. I've got letters from Dave Kilbourne, oh, just about everybody
built a Hang Loose at one time or another because you could build one for $25.
They'd never admit to it now but they all built Hang Looses. Yeah, I could go
through my list and you'd find all the old timers on it.

We sold over 4,000 plans. I just couldn't believe it. All those letters coming
in, and the beautiful 8-page letters from airline pilots! I saved them all.
Some of them start out, "Yeah, I flew fighters, I did this...." a whole
history, "but this is the way we want to fly". So we had really unlocked a
desire in man to get out and fly himself. Airline pilots, Air Force pilots, 14
year old kids, everybody! Beautiful letters. They all start the same way. They
tell their life histories, their dreams of flying, what a wonderful thing this
is, could we send them the plans, here's 3 bucks.

So Richard Miller wrote to me and told me about Lilienthal's birthday and said,
why don't we have a meet? There had been six of us who fooled around with hang
gliders and so we said, "OK, we'll do it". This was supposed to be a secret
meet. We didn't publicize it. Mark and I went out and found a hill and just
decided to do it. If they throw us off the land they throw us off. Fourteen
gliders showed up. There were 12 Hang Looses, one monoplane, and Taras Kiceniuk
in his Bamboo Butterfly which they had learned to fly, with the arm rests,
beautifully. He looked like Nureyev doing a ballet in that thing.

[Moderators Note: Watch historic video of this event on YouTube:
<http://youtu.be/t-XC0dxerYs>. More here:
<http://energykitesystems.net/OttoMeet1971/attendees.html>.]

Something in that meeting touched the soul of America. The American public had
seen hang gliders before, because of the public battle in the US between two
Australian pioneers, Bill Moyes and Bill Bennett. But it may have been the
whole idea of Americans launching an aircraft by foot. The Reader's Digest
called it, "The Flyingest Flying there is" in its account, and Lambie could be
forgiven for thinking that his Hang Loose, which had dominated the pictures and
the event, was really going to take off. It did not work out like that. It was
Taras Kiceniak�s Bamboo Butterfly � a Rogallo wing - that swept the stage.

One of the fourteen pilots at that Meet was Bill Liscomb, then 21 years old,
the son of Bettina Gray, whose brilliant photographs captured so vividly the
innocence and grit of the early days of the New Aviation. Bill Liscomb wrote
later....

[Moderators Note: Bill Liscomb's cinematographic production of the history of
hang gliding: <http://www.bigblueskythemovie.com/>.]
�.My goal in life, at the age of 21, was to first get all my aircraft repair
certificates, and then acquire pilot ratings. I was attending San Bernadino
Valley College, and in my first semester studied repair and maintenance of
aircraft structures, among other subjects. One day a fellow student showed me a
newsletter that changed my life. It was called Low and Slow and was about hang
gliders. I was vaguely aware of hang gliders, having seen them in some aviation
history books. They were ancient, frail machines, abandoned with the advent of
the powered aircraft. This newsletter touted the upcoming Otto Lilienthal hang
gliding meet in Newport, and supplied the address for the "Hang Loose" plans.

I lived in Riverside, California, and had several friends that attended UCR. We
were into riding ten-speed bikes en masse at great speed in the darkness of
night. My Hang Loose plans came, and work on the airframe progressed slowly
until a carpenter friend came on a visit and helped provide the energy to
finish the flying machine. I built the craft in my sister's garage. My cycling
friends would slip by to check on my progress. At first they would marvel at
this modern antique, then retreat into small groups in the corner and snicker
and giggle among themselves. Some support. With the help of my brother-in-law
the decision was made to adorn the polythene covering the craft with the air
signs of the Zodiac - Libra, Aquarius and Gemini - with a can of spray paint.

One night it was completed. My cycling friends assembled to admire the finished
product, and after some speculation and serious thought, we decided to take the
glider to a field a couple of blocks away for taxi trials. It was quite a sight
to see this throw-back carried tail-high across an overpass to the field. The
field was bisected ... [Continued next week]
============= End of Chapter III, Part 1 ==============