Book overview
1970s - The Decade of The Birth of Foot Launched Human Flight - HANG GLIDING - An Ancient Dream Made Real As Told by Nearly 40 of Its Pioneers.
270 beautiful color photos.
Comedy, tragedy, close calls, crashes, and successes, inventive genius, dangerous designs, fear, and joy... stories all told by people who were successful then and are still alive to tell their stories today. In just those few short years, humans learned how to fly... a permanent gift to humanity... thanks to these brave and sometimes foolish people.
If you have ever dreamed of flying and wondered what it truly feels like, this book will give you that experience. If you are a pilot, you will find these dramatic and often thrilling stories especially compelling. These are all real stories shared by pilots of the 1970s, learning what and how to fly, fifty years ago.
Foot-launched flying rapidly became a sport thanks to Francis Rogallo's revolutionary flexible triangular wing, originally developed at NACA/NASA for potential spacecraft recovery. For a flying wing, the Rogallo design was revolutionary because it could be built economically, folded for easy transport, and most importantly, it worked. Once the drawings were published, people around the world realized they could fulfill the eternal dream of flying.
Early kites were made of bamboo and plastic, then some realized they could use aluminum and Dacron to build Rogallo kites to SELL, inviting a wave of more athletic types who could simply buy a kite and fly.
They then devised ways to compete, and so a SPORT was born.
All this happened within just a very few short years in the first half of the 1970s.
