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Passing of Richard Miller



 
 
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  #1  
Old April 2nd 05, 12:11 AM
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Default Passing of Richard Miller

RICHARD MILLER 1925-2004


Richard Miller became interested in soaring after WW II, eventually
becoming the editor for Soaring Magazine. In 1967 he published
"Without Visible Means of Support" which inspired many to consider
new forms of flight.
Although not the first to foot launch a Rogallo flexible wing hang
glider, he influenced many people with his interest and accomplishments
in low speed flight. Richard is considered by many to be the spiritual
father of hang gliding.
In the early 1960's he became interested in Eastern religions and
philosophies, incorporating these principals into his flight dreams,
visions and experiments.
Richard died homeless in Santa Cruz, California, in January of 2004.

Bill Liscomb

  #3  
Old April 2nd 05, 06:33 AM
John H. Campbell
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Richard Miller... published "Without Visible Means of Support"
Perhaps my favorite out of my dozens of soaring books, a fascinating
historical anthology. But, if Richard passed away in early 2004, what
brings it up now? April fools claims, as per his foreword in that book,
"...most of us are inclined to believe far too little"? Got any new ones?
"Go then and sport yourself", as Richard said.



  #5  
Old April 5th 05, 01:16 AM
Larry Dighera
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On 2 Apr 2005 00:18:07 GMT, Gary Evans
wrote in
::

The Hang Gliding experience had to be lived to be believed.
Nothing will ever surpass it.
RIP Richard!



Below is an historical account of the Otto Lilienthal Universal Hang
Glider Championships held May 23, 1971:


MANBIRDS; Hang Gliders & Hang Gliding
By: Maralys Wills
1981
Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood cliffs, New Jersey
ISBN 0-13-551101-1

PP32-42

"LET THE MAYHEM BEGAN"

In 1970 Lambie was principal of Collins School summer session near
Long Beach, California, and also taught a class in science and crafts.
Always a nut about anything that flew, toward the end of the session
Lambie inspired his students to help him build an original
twenty-eight-foot biplane. They did-with glue, staples, clear
plastic, and baling wire from the local newspaper distributor. Lambie
christened their plane the Hang Loose, a name as suggestive of Lambie
himself as his biplane. When they took their machine out to a nearby
hill, the lighter students actually left the ground with it! Richard
Miller was there, and so was photographer Bob Whiting.

Suddenly Lambie found himself the subject of articles in Soaring
magazine and the Los Angeles Times. Men wanted plans for his Hang
Loose, and Jack and his brother Mark, half in jest, created some.
More articles were written, and the demand for Hang Loose plans grew.
After an article in Sport Planes called, "The $24.86 airplane you can
build in two weeks," Jack Lambie came home from a few months out of
town to find three shopping bags full of mail waiting for him. Jack
said, "Many had six-to eight-page letters, often from highly
experienced pilots telling of their love of flight and how this seemed
to be their long-sought dream. Some were from what were obviously
twelve-year-olds.
The letters and orders poured in by the thousands."

Among them was a letter from Richard Miller, suggesting they hold the
world's first hang gliding meet on Otto Lilienthal's birthday, May 23.
Jack thought it a good idea, and set about organizing it.

May 23, 1971. That is the date, perhaps, that hang gliding officially
became a sport.


Before the Lilienthal meet, hang gliding was Bill Bennett towing for
fascinated crowds. Richard Miller and a few friends galloping down to
the beach.

Satellite flyers with curious wings hopping and skipping down
mini-hills in crazy abandon-and sometimes even flying. Hang gliding
was the oddballs, the nuts, the screw-loosers, doing their thing. But
doing it solo.

Hang gliding was funny. Just watching the earnestness on the faces as
they ran and came to naught was funny. The movies are as good as
films of the early days of aviation. The man who runs pell-mell down
the hill under a fat, cumbersome wing ... and runs ... and runs ...
and runs ... and runs ... and then at the bottom when his feet are
still disappointingly on the ground, makes one tiny, hopeful jump-as
if that might finally do it. And the girl who runs under her
gossamer-wing glider, her legs churning like a bicyclist without a
bicycle, getting a miniature distance off the earth, only to have one
end of her wing suddenly collapse downward, like the dropped ear of a
dog, taking her plane down with it.

The soloists were all there were.

Now Jack Lambie was bringing them all together as a meet! He thought
there might be six flyers present.

Later, the names read like a roster of hang gliding's founding family.
Richard Miller. Jack and Mark Lambie. Karen Lambie. Taras Kiceniuk.
Bruce Carmichael and son Doug. Lloyd Licher. Joe Faust. Volmer
Jensen and Paul MacCready, observing.

For Jack, finding the flyers was easy; finding the site, next to
impossible. He says, "At the time it seemed we should pick a site
that was not too dangerous and favored low sink and flat glide.

But most of Orange County was owned by the Irvine Company, and getting
them to cooperate was like trying to build a house out of
marshmallows. You could set it all up, but it kept folding inward.
The Irvine people were courteous, fine listeners, interested, but they
had this little condition: a million dollars' worth of liability
insurance, which Lambie found out from his agent would cost about
twelve hundred dollars per day. "Why so much?" he asked. "They're
just little featherweight devices that only go about fifteen miles per
hour."

"Perhaps," the agent said, "but with no experience to go on we'll just
have to put it at the same rate as a motorcycle race."

How were the six possible competitors going to pay that, Jack
wondered.

Finally, after days of wandering the hills, and dozens of dead-end
phone calls to find owners, Jack and his brother, Mark, found an ideal
hill with no Irvine markings and no obstructions. With a single look
they both got the same idea. Why not just come here and fly? The
hell with trying to find the owner.

Jack says, "Having taught history for some years, I have been
impressed with how whole civilizations have been conquered by just a
few people. The Aztecs and Incas are good examples. Only four
hundred Spanish soldiers did the job, the strategy of which was to
capture the leader through some trickery and get him to surrender the
country. Lesson: The more centralized the organization the easier it
is to gain control of the whole. Another analogy: Highly developed
life forms-that is, mammals-are dispatched with one well-aimed shot to
the central nervous system, whereas some more primitive creatures such
as the starfish can't even be killed when chopped into pieces."

The group, Jack decided, would have no "heart." When confronted by
the authorities, each man would have to be dealt with separately;
there would be no leaders. Just a sort of multiheaded starfish.

On May 23 fifteen flyers-double what Lambie had expected-brought
eleven Hang Loose-type craft and three Rogallo shapes. Taras
Kiceniuk, a Cal Tech student, flew a version of Richard Miller's
Bamboo Butterfly, called The Batso. Richard Miller had moved on to a
Conduit Condor and Bruce Carmichael had a jib-sail Rogallo. The rest
were Hang Looses.

Lambie says, "We had a brief meeting. No one was to say who any of
the other competitors were, and there was no one in charge. A bevy of
cute girls from the University of California, Riverside, were to time
an measure distance ... on their own, of course.

Lambie's portrayal of the day is a classic.

"The mayhem began. Many had never flown their gliders before this
day. Launchers would grasp each wing tip. Another would hold the tail
boom and the group would stumble down the hill. The tip men let go,
the tail man kept shoving, and the machine climbed. The higher it
got, the steeper the angle of attack, with the tail man still gamely
shoving until he could shove no more; the glider was now in a full
stall. The pilot was running and kicking as the machine flopped to
the grass. In another variation one wing man would hold on and
continue shoving after the other stopped, resulting in a spectacular
ground loop. After a couple of stalls, ground loops, and backslides,
the wiring became so tweaked that the out-of-rig biplane was insured
of a curving flight no matter how deft the launch crew had become."

Taras Kiceniuk later wrote, "The Bamboo Butterflies demonstrated [that
day] that this design was capable of excellent control in the hands of
a skilled pilot-and very limited in aerodynamic performance. The
gliders ... showed the opposite face of the coin-acceptable
aerodynamic performance and practically no control!"

The hill, clearly visible from the road, attracted spectators, and
soon hundreds-then thousands-of people strolled over to see the
strange goings-on. Among the spectators was Paul MacCready, with a
doctorate from Cal Tech and a lifetime enthusiasm for aviation. But
what MacCready saw hardly qualified as aviation, for he remarked
pleasantly, "What good is it? It's like rolling down-hill on a bicycle
with the steering locked and seeing who can go the farthest before
crashing."

Volmer Jensen also felt it was all a little mad, funny but mad,
especially the Rogallos. With the flyer dependent on his body and his
buddies for everything-starting, steering, stability, and
stopping-Jensen figured flight had gone one giant step-backward! He
saw no future in weight-shift control-nor has his opinion ever
changed: "Nobody who understands aeronautics would fly one of those
things." Volmer Jensen's response was to go home and build his own
VI-12 hang glider, conventionally controlled from aileron to elevator.
But he still grins when he thinks of the Otto Lilienthal meet.

In due time both the owner of the land and the police showed up, in
that order. The landowner, cajoled by a friendly Russell Hawkes
(writer, TV producer, and fellow Hang Loose builder), finally decided
it was OK to proceed with the "good clean fun" about the same time a
police helicopter appeared overhead and began bawling from the skies,
"Will the organizers of the meet please report to the squad car at the
bottom of the hill." Over and over the command blared from heaven.

Nobody went.

Finally Joe Faust ambled down, but his peculiar brand of funny-speak
only confused the police.

At last the landowner more or less convinced the authorities that
every-thing was OK-and anyway, the police had been unable to pick even
one genuine culprit from the mobs of people.

Defeated, the police gave up.

Jack wrote, "Mark and I took turns flying, and after one smooth launch
Mark floated the length of the hill for 13 seconds, the meet's
duration record. Taras made 23 seconds on a towed flight, including
the towed portion, but this was not considered 'self' launched
flight, so it wasn't counted for the self-launched prize. We had a
batch of certificates of participation printed up-collector's items
now-for each pilot and crew, with notation of the achievements.

"We picnicked under the wings of our planes and laughed and laughed at
the flights and crashes. At one moment, forever frozen in my memory,
one ship climbed straight up, stalled and collapsed in slow motion;
another cartwheeled in the background to the left, while another spun
to the right.

"Although the Hang Looses did not turn in the flights I had expected,
everyone was having such a good time it didn't matter. The simple joy
of leaping into the air was enough."

Jack Lambie's little meet became front-page news, television news, the
subject of fourteen breathless phone calls the following week from
writers and photographers asking when the next meet would be held for
their benefit. The story was told by National Geographic, Popular
Science, Soaring, and Science once Mechanics. In Germany, England,
and France this crashingest meet stirred great excitement.

Interest in the event remained as strong with the participants as
everyone else. "Two weeks later," lack says, "When all our film was
developed, a gathering was held in Mark's recreation room for movies
and plans for the future."

That first meeting was followed by others. From that day on, whenever
flyers gathered to fly, they assembled later to talk about it. After
a while the group gave itself a name: Coast Hang Gliding Club. In
time the name changed, first to Southern California Hang Gliding
Association, finally to United States Hang Gliding Association, but a
little of the original purpose always remained -to refly in one's
chair the best of what had already been flown off the hill.

Only three months later Lambie helped promote the Montgomery meet at
the site of the John J. Montgomery Memorial in San Diego. But a
second meet, so soon after the first one, brought an inquisitive shark
from deeper waters. "The FAA called Mark and wanted a complete list of
participants so they could charge them with flying unlicensed
aircraft, flying close to people, flying after major structural damage
and repairs without inspection, no type ratings for Some of the
flyers, et cetera. Mark said he had no idea who the People were and
our own ship was tethered at all times, bringing it under kite
regulations. We heard no more from them."

For months afterward, shrewd hang glider pilots kept useless strings
dangling from their craft to prove, if necessary, that they were
nothing more than kites.

When Jack Lambie thinks about the great excitement generated by his
first meet, he becomes philosophical. A licensed pilot himself, he
says, "After World War II many thousands of people learned flying and
the advanced era of personal flying came of age.... But now that
everyone who wanted to was flying, there was a sense of
disappointment. The kind of flying we were doing wasn't exactly what
many of us had in mind. Grinding around in a light plane talking to
center or the tower every few minutes-or sitting in an airliner
watching a movie-wasn't it.

"The idea of launching oneself, running into the air like a bird,
feeling wing lift body physically with the wind in one's face was
more like it. The flyers were ready for that kind of flying. The
days of purposeful flight had been achieved. Now it was time to get
back to pure flying. The immense media coverage of the little meet
attracted the attention of millions who had dreamed of self-flight.

OUT OF THE COCOON CAME... A ROGALLO!
The dust raised by the first two hang gliding meets soon settled out
in one of two camps-with the fixed-wing enthusiasts or the
Rogalloists. Almost everyone aligned himself with one mode of flying
or the other, and there were arguments for both.

Volmer Jensen looked on the Rogallo flyers-as something akin to
upstarts-"They even took our name," he said ruefully-and he still
feels that way today. Though he admits, "We couldn't have done what
we did with the rigid wings if the kites [Rogallos] hadn't come up
with all the publicity and promotion," he still shakes his head in
wonder at the number of people flying such obviously unmanageable
craft. Without movable surfaces he is sure the Rogallo kites are
little more than predestined accidents. "Not that we can't get hurt
or killed in a rigid wing ... but we stand a better chance. I'm real
conservative. Irv Culver, John Underwood-all the fellows that have
flown my ships-they wouldn't buy the kites. My friend Irv Culver-he's
one of the top aerodynamicists in the United States-he just shudders
when he sees those kites fly."

To Jensen, control by weight shift alone is as archaic as it is
unreliable. "I mean, when you can sit there and take the control
stick and move it this much for all the maneuvers you want to make ...
why fly by weight shift?" But Jensen is also fair-minded. "The
Rogallos ... it's another type of flying, I'll admit."

To Volmer Jensen the hero of rigid-wing construction is young Taras
Kiceniuk. Although Taras appeared at the Lilienthal meet with his
Batso and flapped down the hill on a diamond-shaped bamboo frame
covered with plastic, by the Montgomery meet three months later Taras
had constructed a graceful, tailless biwing. He named it Icarus. In
October 1971 Taras and his Icarus cruised back and forth above the
cliff at Torrance Beach, California, an event seen on television. By
January 1972 Icarus had made the cover of Soaring magazine. The
advantages of his biwing, and later the single-wing Icarus V, were
obvious: In light or no breezes the Icarus could stay up and soar
above the ridge, and the eight-to-one glide angle it boasted meant
flights of long duration. The Icarus, and eventually Bob Lovejoy's
Quicksilver, were simple, graceful planes that stood midway between
conventional gliding and Rogallo hang gliding. Uncomplicated, easy to
build at home, they could be launched by running down a hill. They
left behind forever the necessity of finding a plane to launch a
plane.

Yet there were disadvantages.

When Jack Lambie noted, "The very slow speed Hang Loose was not to be
the hang glider of the future," he could have been speaking for other
fixed-wing craft as well-at least for the next six years. For while
the Icarus and Jensen's VJ-12 series offered long, graceful flight,
and Kiceniuk even caught a thermal in late'72, they hadn't solved the
problems of portability, easy assembly, crash resistance, and
restricted landings. They had left some of the problems of
conventional gliders behind, but not all.

In the beginning the Rogallos had another advantage. They were
different. What had failed to ignite enthusiasm when it looked like a
familiar glider seemed to turn everyone breathless when it looked like
a child's kite.

On this ... this aberration, men were running down the hill-and
flying! It was all so unexpected it somehow set people alight. It
was like arriving on a flying saucer. While everyone accepted calmly
the flight of a wing that looked like a wing, this funny,
diamond-shaped contraption had all the crazy fascination of a flying
umbrella!

So the early Rogallos got press that the fixed wings didn't get.

Volmer Jensen could have told reporters thirty-five years earlier that
it was possible to run down a hill hanging by your armpits and fly.
Only he didn't.

Now a different kind of man with a different kind of flying toy
finally turned people on. The Rogallo shape ... the promoters ... and
hang gliding ... had arrived!

THE AVALANCHE ROLLED DOWN SEVERAL FACES

The Rogallo hang glider caught on incredibly. While the excitement it
generated was not entirely reasonable, its practical success could be
explained, which Jack Lambie did in part when he said, "Their secret
was the hang-bar control and great crashability. The tyro could learn
to fly before his glider was demolished."

There were other things: The tyro didn't need to buy a trailer to haul
his machine; he didn't need a tool kit for final assembly, nor a
baseball field for landing. A Rogallo was truly a personal flying
machine.

Potential flyers were quick to see these advantages, and by the end of
1972 and early 1973 the Rogallo rush was on. When something begins
everywhere at once it is often impossible to know who was first of the
firsts. In Australia, in northern California, in Canada, in ...

------------------
  #6  
Old April 5th 05, 01:54 AM
Udo Rumpf
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default

After reading this wonderful account,
it brought back memories and it lead my wife and I to look at the photo
album, which had not seen the light of day for nearly 30 years.
Faded colour pictures but still there, an attempt to fly this very same hang
glider as pictured in one of the popular Magazines. In May of 1971
not knowing a "large meet" was going on in California.
I was towed up by car on a 5000ft sod farm (no hills in them parts) it flew
on tow for many seconds. As soon as I released (from a garden gate capture
hook) the machine, in a sort of way crash-landed. We covered about 2000ft.
I was congratulated on my attempt and that was it.
No one else was interested in pursuing this type of endeavour.
We did the next best thing, we bought a Stinson and never looked back.
Oh what memories.
Udo





"Larry Dighera" wrote in message
...
On 2 Apr 2005 00:18:07 GMT, Gary Evans
wrote in
::

The Hang Gliding experience had to be lived to be believed.
Nothing will ever surpass it.
RIP Richard!



Below is an historical account of the Otto Lilienthal Universal Hang
Glider Championships held May 23, 1971:


MANBIRDS; Hang Gliders & Hang Gliding
By: Maralys Wills
1981
Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood cliffs, New Jersey
ISBN 0-13-551101-1

PP32-42

"LET THE MAYHEM BEGAN"

In 1970 Lambie was principal of Collins School summer session near
Long Beach, California, and also taught a class in science and crafts.
Always a nut about anything that flew, toward the end of the session
Lambie inspired his students to help him build an original
twenty-eight-foot biplane. They did-with glue, staples, clear
plastic, and baling wire from the local newspaper distributor. Lambie
christened their plane the Hang Loose, a name as suggestive of Lambie
himself as his biplane. When they took their machine out to a nearby
hill, the lighter students actually left the ground with it! Richard
Miller was there, and so was photographer Bob Whiting.

Suddenly Lambie found himself the subject of articles in Soaring
magazine and the Los Angeles Times. Men wanted plans for his Hang
Loose, and Jack and his brother Mark, half in jest, created some.
More articles were written, and the demand for Hang Loose plans grew.
After an article in Sport Planes called, "The $24.86 airplane you can
build in two weeks," Jack Lambie came home from a few months out of
town to find three shopping bags full of mail waiting for him. Jack
said, "Many had six-to eight-page letters, often from highly
experienced pilots telling of their love of flight and how this seemed
to be their long-sought dream. Some were from what were obviously
twelve-year-olds.
The letters and orders poured in by the thousands."

Among them was a letter from Richard Miller, suggesting they hold the
world's first hang gliding meet on Otto Lilienthal's birthday, May 23.
Jack thought it a good idea, and set about organizing it.

May 23, 1971. That is the date, perhaps, that hang gliding officially
became a sport.


Before the Lilienthal meet, hang gliding was Bill Bennett towing for
fascinated crowds. Richard Miller and a few friends galloping down to
the beach.

Satellite flyers with curious wings hopping and skipping down
mini-hills in crazy abandon-and sometimes even flying. Hang gliding
was the oddballs, the nuts, the screw-loosers, doing their thing. But
doing it solo.

Hang gliding was funny. Just watching the earnestness on the faces as
they ran and came to naught was funny. The movies are as good as
films of the early days of aviation. The man who runs pell-mell down
the hill under a fat, cumbersome wing ... and runs ... and runs ...
and runs ... and runs ... and then at the bottom when his feet are
still disappointingly on the ground, makes one tiny, hopeful jump-as
if that might finally do it. And the girl who runs under her
gossamer-wing glider, her legs churning like a bicyclist without a
bicycle, getting a miniature distance off the earth, only to have one
end of her wing suddenly collapse downward, like the dropped ear of a
dog, taking her plane down with it.

The soloists were all there were.

Now Jack Lambie was bringing them all together as a meet! He thought
there might be six flyers present.

Later, the names read like a roster of hang gliding's founding family.
Richard Miller. Jack and Mark Lambie. Karen Lambie. Taras Kiceniuk.
Bruce Carmichael and son Doug. Lloyd Licher. Joe Faust. Volmer
Jensen and Paul MacCready, observing.

For Jack, finding the flyers was easy; finding the site, next to
impossible. He says, "At the time it seemed we should pick a site
that was not too dangerous and favored low sink and flat glide.

But most of Orange County was owned by the Irvine Company, and getting
them to cooperate was like trying to build a house out of
marshmallows. You could set it all up, but it kept folding inward.
The Irvine people were courteous, fine listeners, interested, but they
had this little condition: a million dollars' worth of liability
insurance, which Lambie found out from his agent would cost about
twelve hundred dollars per day. "Why so much?" he asked. "They're
just little featherweight devices that only go about fifteen miles per
hour."

"Perhaps," the agent said, "but with no experience to go on we'll just
have to put it at the same rate as a motorcycle race."

How were the six possible competitors going to pay that, Jack
wondered.

Finally, after days of wandering the hills, and dozens of dead-end
phone calls to find owners, Jack and his brother, Mark, found an ideal
hill with no Irvine markings and no obstructions. With a single look
they both got the same idea. Why not just come here and fly? The
hell with trying to find the owner.

Jack says, "Having taught history for some years, I have been
impressed with how whole civilizations have been conquered by just a
few people. The Aztecs and Incas are good examples. Only four
hundred Spanish soldiers did the job, the strategy of which was to
capture the leader through some trickery and get him to surrender the
country. Lesson: The more centralized the organization the easier it
is to gain control of the whole. Another analogy: Highly developed
life forms-that is, mammals-are dispatched with one well-aimed shot to
the central nervous system, whereas some more primitive creatures such
as the starfish can't even be killed when chopped into pieces."

The group, Jack decided, would have no "heart." When confronted by
the authorities, each man would have to be dealt with separately;
there would be no leaders. Just a sort of multiheaded starfish.

On May 23 fifteen flyers-double what Lambie had expected-brought
eleven Hang Loose-type craft and three Rogallo shapes. Taras
Kiceniuk, a Cal Tech student, flew a version of Richard Miller's
Bamboo Butterfly, called The Batso. Richard Miller had moved on to a
Conduit Condor and Bruce Carmichael had a jib-sail Rogallo. The rest
were Hang Looses.

Lambie says, "We had a brief meeting. No one was to say who any of
the other competitors were, and there was no one in charge. A bevy of
cute girls from the University of California, Riverside, were to time
an measure distance ... on their own, of course.

Lambie's portrayal of the day is a classic.

"The mayhem began. Many had never flown their gliders before this
day. Launchers would grasp each wing tip. Another would hold the tail
boom and the group would stumble down the hill. The tip men let go,
the tail man kept shoving, and the machine climbed. The higher it
got, the steeper the angle of attack, with the tail man still gamely
shoving until he could shove no more; the glider was now in a full
stall. The pilot was running and kicking as the machine flopped to
the grass. In another variation one wing man would hold on and
continue shoving after the other stopped, resulting in a spectacular
ground loop. After a couple of stalls, ground loops, and backslides,
the wiring became so tweaked that the out-of-rig biplane was insured
of a curving flight no matter how deft the launch crew had become."

Taras Kiceniuk later wrote, "The Bamboo Butterflies demonstrated [that
day] that this design was capable of excellent control in the hands of
a skilled pilot-and very limited in aerodynamic performance. The
gliders ... showed the opposite face of the coin-acceptable
aerodynamic performance and practically no control!"

The hill, clearly visible from the road, attracted spectators, and
soon hundreds-then thousands-of people strolled over to see the
strange goings-on. Among the spectators was Paul MacCready, with a
doctorate from Cal Tech and a lifetime enthusiasm for aviation. But
what MacCready saw hardly qualified as aviation, for he remarked
pleasantly, "What good is it? It's like rolling down-hill on a bicycle
with the steering locked and seeing who can go the farthest before
crashing."

Volmer Jensen also felt it was all a little mad, funny but mad,
especially the Rogallos. With the flyer dependent on his body and his
buddies for everything-starting, steering, stability, and
stopping-Jensen figured flight had gone one giant step-backward! He
saw no future in weight-shift control-nor has his opinion ever
changed: "Nobody who understands aeronautics would fly one of those
things." Volmer Jensen's response was to go home and build his own
VI-12 hang glider, conventionally controlled from aileron to elevator.
But he still grins when he thinks of the Otto Lilienthal meet.

In due time both the owner of the land and the police showed up, in
that order. The landowner, cajoled by a friendly Russell Hawkes
(writer, TV producer, and fellow Hang Loose builder), finally decided
it was OK to proceed with the "good clean fun" about the same time a
police helicopter appeared overhead and began bawling from the skies,
"Will the organizers of the meet please report to the squad car at the
bottom of the hill." Over and over the command blared from heaven.

Nobody went.

Finally Joe Faust ambled down, but his peculiar brand of funny-speak
only confused the police.

At last the landowner more or less convinced the authorities that
every-thing was OK-and anyway, the police had been unable to pick even
one genuine culprit from the mobs of people.

Defeated, the police gave up.

Jack wrote, "Mark and I took turns flying, and after one smooth launch
Mark floated the length of the hill for 13 seconds, the meet's
duration record. Taras made 23 seconds on a towed flight, including
the towed portion, but this was not considered 'self' launched
flight, so it wasn't counted for the self-launched prize. We had a
batch of certificates of participation printed up-collector's items
now-for each pilot and crew, with notation of the achievements.

"We picnicked under the wings of our planes and laughed and laughed at
the flights and crashes. At one moment, forever frozen in my memory,
one ship climbed straight up, stalled and collapsed in slow motion;
another cartwheeled in the background to the left, while another spun
to the right.

"Although the Hang Looses did not turn in the flights I had expected,
everyone was having such a good time it didn't matter. The simple joy
of leaping into the air was enough."

Jack Lambie's little meet became front-page news, television news, the
subject of fourteen breathless phone calls the following week from
writers and photographers asking when the next meet would be held for
their benefit. The story was told by National Geographic, Popular
Science, Soaring, and Science once Mechanics. In Germany, England,
and France this crashingest meet stirred great excitement.

Interest in the event remained as strong with the participants as
everyone else. "Two weeks later," lack says, "When all our film was
developed, a gathering was held in Mark's recreation room for movies
and plans for the future."

That first meeting was followed by others. From that day on, whenever
flyers gathered to fly, they assembled later to talk about it. After
a while the group gave itself a name: Coast Hang Gliding Club. In
time the name changed, first to Southern California Hang Gliding
Association, finally to United States Hang Gliding Association, but a
little of the original purpose always remained -to refly in one's
chair the best of what had already been flown off the hill.

Only three months later Lambie helped promote the Montgomery meet at
the site of the John J. Montgomery Memorial in San Diego. But a
second meet, so soon after the first one, brought an inquisitive shark
from deeper waters. "The FAA called Mark and wanted a complete list of
participants so they could charge them with flying unlicensed
aircraft, flying close to people, flying after major structural damage
and repairs without inspection, no type ratings for Some of the
flyers, et cetera. Mark said he had no idea who the People were and
our own ship was tethered at all times, bringing it under kite
regulations. We heard no more from them."

For months afterward, shrewd hang glider pilots kept useless strings
dangling from their craft to prove, if necessary, that they were
nothing more than kites.

When Jack Lambie thinks about the great excitement generated by his
first meet, he becomes philosophical. A licensed pilot himself, he
says, "After World War II many thousands of people learned flying and
the advanced era of personal flying came of age.... But now that
everyone who wanted to was flying, there was a sense of
disappointment. The kind of flying we were doing wasn't exactly what
many of us had in mind. Grinding around in a light plane talking to
center or the tower every few minutes-or sitting in an airliner
watching a movie-wasn't it.

"The idea of launching oneself, running into the air like a bird,
feeling wing lift body physically with the wind in one's face was
more like it. The flyers were ready for that kind of flying. The
days of purposeful flight had been achieved. Now it was time to get
back to pure flying. The immense media coverage of the little meet
attracted the attention of millions who had dreamed of self-flight.

OUT OF THE COCOON CAME... A ROGALLO!
The dust raised by the first two hang gliding meets soon settled out
in one of two camps-with the fixed-wing enthusiasts or the
Rogalloists. Almost everyone aligned himself with one mode of flying
or the other, and there were arguments for both.

Volmer Jensen looked on the Rogallo flyers-as something akin to
upstarts-"They even took our name," he said ruefully-and he still
feels that way today. Though he admits, "We couldn't have done what
we did with the rigid wings if the kites [Rogallos] hadn't come up
with all the publicity and promotion," he still shakes his head in
wonder at the number of people flying such obviously unmanageable
craft. Without movable surfaces he is sure the Rogallo kites are
little more than predestined accidents. "Not that we can't get hurt
or killed in a rigid wing ... but we stand a better chance. I'm real
conservative. Irv Culver, John Underwood-all the fellows that have
flown my ships-they wouldn't buy the kites. My friend Irv Culver-he's
one of the top aerodynamicists in the United States-he just shudders
when he sees those kites fly."

To Jensen, control by weight shift alone is as archaic as it is
unreliable. "I mean, when you can sit there and take the control
stick and move it this much for all the maneuvers you want to make ...
why fly by weight shift?" But Jensen is also fair-minded. "The
Rogallos ... it's another type of flying, I'll admit."

To Volmer Jensen the hero of rigid-wing construction is young Taras
Kiceniuk. Although Taras appeared at the Lilienthal meet with his
Batso and flapped down the hill on a diamond-shaped bamboo frame
covered with plastic, by the Montgomery meet three months later Taras
had constructed a graceful, tailless biwing. He named it Icarus. In
October 1971 Taras and his Icarus cruised back and forth above the
cliff at Torrance Beach, California, an event seen on television. By
January 1972 Icarus had made the cover of Soaring magazine. The
advantages of his biwing, and later the single-wing Icarus V, were
obvious: In light or no breezes the Icarus could stay up and soar
above the ridge, and the eight-to-one glide angle it boasted meant
flights of long duration. The Icarus, and eventually Bob Lovejoy's
Quicksilver, were simple, graceful planes that stood midway between
conventional gliding and Rogallo hang gliding. Uncomplicated, easy to
build at home, they could be launched by running down a hill. They
left behind forever the necessity of finding a plane to launch a
plane.

Yet there were disadvantages.

When Jack Lambie noted, "The very slow speed Hang Loose was not to be
the hang glider of the future," he could have been speaking for other
fixed-wing craft as well-at least for the next six years. For while
the Icarus and Jensen's VJ-12 series offered long, graceful flight,
and Kiceniuk even caught a thermal in late'72, they hadn't solved the
problems of portability, easy assembly, crash resistance, and
restricted landings. They had left some of the problems of
conventional gliders behind, but not all.

In the beginning the Rogallos had another advantage. They were
different. What had failed to ignite enthusiasm when it looked like a
familiar glider seemed to turn everyone breathless when it looked like
a child's kite.

On this ... this aberration, men were running down the hill-and
flying! It was all so unexpected it somehow set people alight. It
was like arriving on a flying saucer. While everyone accepted calmly
the flight of a wing that looked like a wing, this funny,
diamond-shaped contraption had all the crazy fascination of a flying
umbrella!

So the early Rogallos got press that the fixed wings didn't get.

Volmer Jensen could have told reporters thirty-five years earlier that
it was possible to run down a hill hanging by your armpits and fly.
Only he didn't.

Now a different kind of man with a different kind of flying toy
finally turned people on. The Rogallo shape ... the promoters ... and
hang gliding ... had arrived!

THE AVALANCHE ROLLED DOWN SEVERAL FACES

The Rogallo hang glider caught on incredibly. While the excitement it
generated was not entirely reasonable, its practical success could be
explained, which Jack Lambie did in part when he said, "Their secret
was the hang-bar control and great crashability. The tyro could learn
to fly before his glider was demolished."

There were other things: The tyro didn't need to buy a trailer to haul
his machine; he didn't need a tool kit for final assembly, nor a
baseball field for landing. A Rogallo was truly a personal flying
machine.

Potential flyers were quick to see these advantages, and by the end of
1972 and early 1973 the Rogallo rush was on. When something begins
everywhere at once it is often impossible to know who was first of the
firsts. In Australia, in northern California, in Canada, in ...

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