History of Hang Gliding & Paragliding

Dark Side of the Moon

In 1972 the last manned moon landing mission (Apollo 17) returned and the Americans wound down their bombing of North Vietnam. During 1973 fuzzy pictures of 'hand' gliders, a spin-off from American aerospace research, appeared in newspapers and magazines.

[ Link to Flexi Flier picture page ]
Most of the images on these pages are links to larger versions of the image. Click the small image to download the larger picture page.

Although most of the information reaching Britain at the time came from the USA, much of the early development work was Australian.

Their bamboo spars and polythene sheet sails were by 1974 replaced by aluminium tubing and nylon or Dacron sailcloth.

[ Link to Skyhook IIIa picture page ] The pilot dangled underneath his kite-shaped wing in an upright harness. Why were they that shape? Because it worked. How did it work? Nobody really knew.

Also in 1974 an obscure Swedish group called Abba won the Eurovision Song Contest, and Kestrel Kites, a hang glider manufacturer based in Poole on England's south coast (they previously made surfboards), founded the Wessex Hang Gliding Club which the author joined in early 1975.


[ Link to Quicksilver picture page ] In the early 1970s the direction of hang gliding's technical evolution was unclear. The Quicksilver was a 'semi rigid' type with a rudder connected to the seat harness. Together with its dihedral this effected turns.

Mark Clarkson, flying a Quicksilver in the spring of 1974, flew seventeen miles (measured as a straight line between take-off and landing). The farthest anyone had flown in a hang glider.

After a bleak day's flying at Melbury hill, near Shaftsbury in Dorset, in February 1975 the author sat in a car with other hang glider pilots. Darkness fell while we waited for others to finish de-rigging, and the December 1974 edition of Scientific American was passed around. On the cover, a Ted Lodigensky painting of Mike Markowski's Eagle III.

[ Scientific American and the Eagle III ] Inside, pages of aerodynamic explanation, photos, and diagrams to be read and inwardly digested by all young men not wanting to be 'left behind'.

Sail flutter was a characteristic of the standard rogallo. "If you couldn't hear the sail flapping, you were flying too slowly," said Wessex Club rogallo pilot Peter Robinson.

Unfortunately, if you flew too fast -- sometimes flying fast was necessary to penetrate a strengthening wind -- the rippling became more pronounced. In the extreme, in a full-on dive, the sail luffed, or flapped loosely, creating no lift. Furthermore, pitch stability was lost, rendering the dive unrecoverable.

Airworthiness was one impetus behind the development of hang gliders such as the Markowski Eagle III.


Over the following couple of years, described on the next page, rogallo flex wings became the dominant type of hang glider. And a major movie, starring James Coburn among others, featured hang gliding as its core theme.


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