3rd Year Special Annual Double Issue Vol 4 Issue 1 & 2 Jan - Apr 2 3rd Year Special Annual Double Issue Vol 4 Issue | Page 10

gliders
by
the
FAI.
During
the last part of the nineteenth century,
a German engineer made over 2,000
successful flights on weight shift hang
gliders. His name was Otto Lilienthal.
Otto Lilienthal built controllable gliders in the
1890s, with which he could ridge soar. His
rigorously documented work influenced later
designers, making Lilienthal one of the most
influential early aviation pioneers. His aircraft
was controlled by weight shift and is similar to
a modern hang glider.
In 1804 he flew the first successful glider
model of which there is any record. His work
culminated in 1853 with the completion of
a full-scale glider that carried his reluctant
coachman on the first manned glider flight on
record.
Hang gliding saw a stiffened flexible wing
hang glider in 1904, when Jan Lavezzari
flew a double lateen sail hang glider off
Berck Beach, France. In 1910 in Breslau, the
triangle control frame with hang glider pilot
hung behind the triangle in a hang glider, was
evident in a gliding club’s activity. The biplane
hang glider was very widely publicized in
public magazines with plans for building;
such biplane hang gliders were constructed
and flown in several nations since Octave
Chanute and his tailed biplane hang gliders
were demonstrated. In April 1909, a how-
to article by Carl S. Bates proved to be a
seminal hang glider article that seemingly
affected builders even of contemporary times,
as several builders would have their first
hang glider made by following the plan in his
article. Volmer Jensen with a biplane hang
glider in 1940 called VJ-11 allowed safe
three-axis control of a foot-launched hang
glider.
recovery system for the Gemini space
capsules. The various stiffening formats and
the wing’s simplicity of design and ease
of construction, along with its capability
of slow flight and its gentle landing
characteristics, did not go unnoticed
by hang glider enthusiasts. In 1960–1962
Barry Hill Palmer adapted the flexible wing
concept to make foot-launched hang
gliders
with
four
different
control
arrangements. In 1963 Mike Burns adapted
the flexible wing to build a towable kite-hang
glider he called Skiplane.
In 1963, John W. Dickenson adapted the
flexible wing airfoil concept to make another
water-ski kite glider; for this, the Fédération
Aéronautique
Internationale
vested
Dickenson with the Hang Gliding Diploma
(2006) for the invention of the “modern” hang
glider. Since then, the Rogallo wing has been
the most used airfoil of hang gliders.
There are many great flying locations around
India,Kangra valley and Dharmakot in
Himachal Pradesh are one of the famous
destinations for hang gliding in India.
On November 23, 1948, Francis Rogallo and
Gertrude Rogallo applied for a kite patent
for a fully flexible kited wing with approved
claims for its stiffenings and gliding uses; the
flexible wing or Rogallo wing, which in 1957
the American space agency NASA began
testing in various flexible and semi-rigid
configurations in order to use it as a
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Vol 4 | Issue 1 |Jan - Feb 2019