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Aviation History
1974
1974 - 0709.PDF
Private Flight PHILIP JARRETT & DAVID KENT THE PEDIGREE of the modern hang glider can be traced right back to the "tower jumpers" of the Middle Ages. But what seems to be the earliest recorded conception of a true rigid-wing hang glider appears in a manuscript by Leonardo da Vinci, dated between 1510 and 1515. A series of crude sketches shows a man suspended at arms' length beneath a rigid plane surface, controlling his descent by bending his arms. Leonardo derived the idea from a falling sheet of paper. Previously, about 1497-1500, he had proposed a "semi- hang glider" with flapping wing tips. From the time of da Vinci until the mid-1800s, the only serious design to employ the hang glider principle was one by Sir George Cayley, in which it was applied to an ornithopter. For the glider to evolve, it was necessary for someone to realise that sustained unpowered flight could be accom plished provided sufficient knowledge of air currents was obtained. Ironically, the man who did realise this, Louis Pierre Mouillard, achieved little success in his own attempts at flight. His most successful glider, built in Algeria in 1865, carried him for 138ft, but its pilot was so surprised to be airborne that he completely forgot to test his theory of control by body movements. What Mouillard did con tribute was his book The Empire of the Air, a work filled with enthusiasm for flight and read by so many of his successors following its publication in 1891. Six years after Mouillard's 46yd glide, a young German,. Otto Lilienthal, commenced a study of bird flight which culminated in the publication in 1889 of another classic of aeronautical literature, Bird Flight as the Basis of the Flying Art. The same year, Lilienthal began experiment ing with fixed-wing hang gliders. In 1891 he started to make successful glides, and three years later his No 11 glider appeared. This monoplane represented his ultimate design, and examples were purchased by pioneers across the world. It must thus qualify as the first full-size, heavier-than-air flying machine to be produced in numbers. When Lilienthal was killed on August 10, 1896, he had built 18 different types of hang gliders, including three biplanes, and had made more than 2,000 glides. Many were inspired by Lilienthal's example, among them Percy Pilcher in Great Britain and Octave Chanute and the Wright Brothers in the USA. Pilcher's gliders evolved very little beyond the basic Lilienthal form until the appearance of his triplane in 1899. This, however, was never tested, owing to its designer's death on October 2 that year. Although Pilcher made some good glides, his influence upon other pioneers was negligible. Conversely, the influence of Octave Chanute upon his contemporaries was almost immeasurable. When he retired from his profession as a railroad engineer in 1884, he renewed the interest in aeronautics which he had developed in 1855. Chanute was a prolific writer on the subject, and in 1894 a collection of his articles which had originally appeared in the American Engineer and Rail road Journal were published in book form as Progress in Flying Machines. This book remains one of the greatest works of aeronautical history. Two years later, at the age of 64, Chanute conducted a series of experiments with man-carrying hang gliders to perfect automatic equilibrium, thereby enabling the "operator" to concentrate on steering. His "test pilot" and assistant was A. M. Herring. From his work originated the now-famous biplane which formed the basis of new powered aircraft developments. Hang gliders based on this design are still popular today. While the Wrights continued to develop the glider into a fully controllable aircraft, the simple Chanute-type hang glider remained in widespread use, being built by small groups of enthusiasts for "air experience" up to 1912 and beyond. Demonstrations of the tandem monoplane hang glider were made by John J. Montgomery in 1905, the machine being released from a balloon with the "pilot" Daniel Maloney dressed in an acrobat's costume. Maloney was killed when the glider crashed on July 18 of that year. After the First World War gliding slowly began to mature and the new and comparatively high-performance monoplanes pushed hang gliders into the shade. Early in the 1920s the greatest disciple of the simplest manned aircraft was Willi Pelzner of Germany. His machines were little more than slightly improved Chanute gliders, but he had sensitive muscle control over them. And in the beginning—the Pilcher Hawk glider of 1896 L^ •s* ^jfifc'i rV .•'•',*i rf..r*&i, ;'.--A:lV.-i
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