After what seemed an eternity, the thing eventually died on me. I yanked on the twist-grips, performed a couple of hairy turns, and landed—badly, but more or less upright—in a neighboring field.
I opened my eyes. I was above the trees. I was flying. Except that I didn’t know how to fly. Or land. Or slow down.
My friends were with me in seconds. I had visions of them on their motorbikes, weaving through the countryside in hot pursuit. It took me a few minutes, while I got my breath back, to realize I had covered barely any distance at all. All the while my friends were cheering and clapping, and Joan, my girlfriend (later to become my wife), was slapping me on the back, saying, “Well done, Richard, that was amazing!” They had not heard Ellis’s instructions. They had no idea I was supposed to stay firmly on the ground.
I walked away from my first flying lesson with a few bruises and with my confidence badly shaken. Maybe, I thought, I am not cut out to fly. I shook hands with Richard Ellis, wished him well with his other students, and drove away.
I never saw him again. A couple of days later, the news came through: Ellis had been killed flying that same contraption. So that afternoon in Oxford was not just my first experience of flight; it was, looking back, my first unvarnished glimpse of what it is to be a pioneer in the air. No one remembers much about Richard Ellis now. The man who wanted to teach Britain how to fly died before his work could even really begin. For every adored hero of the air, there are men like Ellis—men whose qualities will never be truly tested because they lack that one essential possessed by all great aviators: a boatload of luck.
What does it feel like to really fly, the way a bird flies? The nearest I’ve ever come was when I was dangled off a cable beneath a helicopter as it swooped over Darling Harbour, in Sydney. We were promoting the Australian launch of Virgin Mobile, and some wag in the publicity office thought it would be a great idea to dangle me over the city. The problem being that as you’re propelled forward, you don’t just hang there in the air; you tumble. It took me some heart-stopping moments to sort myself out. Finally I adopted the position skydivers have learned makes them stable in the air—and presto, I was flying. I felt the air sticking to me. I felt how the wind and my flying suit became one.
In 1938, in North Africa, 19-year-old Leo Valentin made his first parachute jump. It was not an elegant display. Nor was his outfit, the French Armée de l’Air: “All of us, and I was no exception, jumped like sacks of flour,” he complained. “When a man leaves the plane he falls anyhow; he tumbles about the sky; he twirls like a sack of potatoes.” This style of parachuting wasn’t just ugly; it was very often lethal. Valentin went in search of a better way to dive. Unaware of Art Starnes’s pioneering skydives a generation earlier, Valentin studied acrobats, dancers, and—naturally enough—divers. He finally found his inspiration from his studies of birds. He imitated, as far as he could, the posture of birds as they held themselves aloft in a breeze: spread-eagled, with his chest thrown forward, he found that he could direct himself through the air with careful movements of his arms and legs. It was like swimming!
Not content with perfecting modern skydiving technique, Valentin then wondered whether, with the right posture, he might be able to fly like a bird. “A few of us want to open up the air to man on his own,” he wrote. “When machinery reaches its limit, man feels the need to return to simplicity. There comes a time when he wants to get out of his car and walk and so, getting out of a supersonic aircraft, he wants to fly with his own wings.”
It was the old dream, and to fulfill it Valentin returned to some of the earliest works on flight. He studied Otto Lilienthal. Clearly, he understood the problems of Lilienthal’s design. Somewhere along the way he must have decided, What the hell. After all, the higher you were, the longer you had to experiment and correct a mistake. If the early days of flight had taught aviators anything, it was that altitude was your friend. Lilienthal, though, had had no choice but to launch himself from hills. The conical hill he built himself—and from which he launched himself on his last and fatal glide—was barely 70 feet high. Maybe Lilienthal’s style of gliding could be made to work after all—provided that you started high in the air.
Valentin built a set of canvas wings, attached them to his shoulders, and threw himself out of a plane to see what would happen. The results weren’t pretty—he tumbled and spun—but he did manage to control his fall well enough to deploy his parachute and execute a reasonable landing. After a few days’ practice, he had learned to glide and turn. Finally, in April 1950, before 30,000 spectators, he made his first public demonstration. Forever afterward, the newspapers called him “L’Homme-Oiseau”—the Birdman.
By 1951, Valentin had abandoned his canvas wings for wings made of balsa wood. His progress wasn’t just astonishing; it was surreal. Single-handedly, Valentin seemed to be playing out the history of aviation in reverse. Wooden wings were just the sorts of contraptions that had gotten daredevils killed since written records began. Yet, by 1954, here he was, jumping from 9,000 feet with wooden wings attached to his shoulders—and flying. Granted, the moments of lift he achieved as he plummeted toward the ground were rare, but they were real enough and witnessed by plenty of independent observers.
Mission impossible: skydiver Leo Valentin learned how to fly like a bird.
In May 1956, before a crowd of 100,000, Valentin stepped into the air at 8,500 feet. The slipstream snatched one of his wings and smashed it against the plane’s fuselage. Valentin tumbled. He opened his main parachute, but it got fouled around what was left of his glider. He opened his reserve. It wrapped itself around him, mummifying him. He died on impact.
Valentin was not the only birdman of the twentieth century, but of the 75 who tried it, only 4 survived into retirement.
Yet the dream of flying like a bird is a common one. A universal one. Absurd and unobtainable as it seems in our waking hours, we cannot ignore it, and we should not belittle it. One day, the dream will be realized, in its purest form.
On April 23, 1988, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s human-powered aircraft Daedalus, its propeller driven by a bicycle chain, ditched into the sea just short of the island of Santorini, a staggering three hours and 54 minutes into its maiden flight. To this day, the Daedalus holds the record for distance and duration for human-powered aircraft.
The human-powered airplane
Daedalus before its record-breaking flight.
Even more exciting, in 2006, Frenchman Yves Rousseau flapped his way (after 211 unsuccessful tries!) into the record books as the first man ever to launch himself into the air using mere muscle power. The Royal Aeronautical Society reacted quickly, announcing four new prizes, including one for a human-powered flapping flight over a marathon-distance course. If birdmen aren’t competing for Olympic medals in time for Rio in 2016, I have a hunch they’ll be taking the podium—or hovering just above it—by 2020.
Read any average history of aviation and you’ll be forgiven for thinking that after about 1950 and the dawn of the Jet Age, all the fun fell out of the sky. There seem to be no more daredevils to gasp at, no more single-handed battles against the elements, no more heroes.
Well, of course that’s not true. In 1979, Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff began to set the record straight, showing that aviation’s daredevil spirit was very much alive at Edwards Air Force Base throughout the 1950s and ‘60s. Still, the X-Plane and Mercury programs were hugely expensive and exclusive, and the experiments and test flights were mostly kept top secret. What happened to the fairground spirit of the early barnstorming shows?
Valentin and the birdmen aside, what happened in the twentieth century was that flying ceased to be much of an attraction and became much more of a sport: something people did. An hour’s flying lesson will set you back around £100. If you can afford to join a golf club, you can afford to learn to fly and buy a share in a light plane. Now, this is not exactly cheap, but if you have a modest budget, there are plenty of alternatives. Hang
gliding and paragliding are mature technologies now, and well worth the risk. If you’re feeling particularly brave, you can learn to free-fall in a wingsuit and fly, as Valentin once flew, through mountain passes and off cliffs and (though you’ll get arrested) tall buildings.
In this chapter I want to tell you about what happened to the barnstorming spirit of the interwar years. Rumors of its death are greatly exaggerated. It’s thrilling more people, and spinning off more new technologies and new aviation ideas, than ever before.
Barnstormers disappeared from our skies after the Second World War not because they became unfashionable, but because so many people got in on their act. Why thrill to someone else’s stunt when you can get up out of your chair and try a few stunts yourself? By the end of the war, you didn’t even need a plane—or not much of one. The era of a one-size-fits-all biplane was over very quickly as numerous light and microlight aircraft, wings, kites, and parachutes took advantage of new lightweight materials.
Some of these designs, like the Rogallo wing, were brand-new. Others, like the autogyro, had a venerable history. It was back in 1919 that the Spanish engineer and aeronautical enthusiast Juan de la Cierva invented an unusual and very effective safety device for aircraft: a freewheeling rotor. Not only would the rotor help keep the plane up in the air; should the plane lose power, the rotor would allow the craft to make a slow and reasonably controlled descent.
Juan’s safety feature never caught on. Instead, and much later, his principle inspired a line of tiny, lightweight, personal fliers called autogyros. The Wallis autogyro, developed in England in the 1960s, became an instant icon when it starred in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice. Sadly, the designer, Ken Wallis, held no truck with amateur aviators and never released his designs to the public, saying that his work was strictly for “reconnaissance, research and development, surveillance and military purposes.”
The hang glider is born! NASA’s Paresev (Paraglider Research Vehicle).
Juan de la Cierva’s C-30 autogyro turned heads. Sadly, no flyable models survive.
Well, never mind Wallis. Today the autogyro is a hugely popular machine among amateur aviators. If you have only £100 to spend and take only one flying lesson in your life, give yourself that Sean Connery moment: fly an autogyro.
Meanwhile, regular airplanes have not only gotten bigger and more expensive; they’ve also gotten smaller and cheaper. The era of the modern home-built airplane was ushered in by a French furniture manufacturer called Henri Mignet. Mignet failed to be accepted as a military pilot and decided to build his own plane instead. Between 1931 and 1933, Mignet built prototypes in Paris and tested them in a large field northeast of the city.
The proud result of his researches was the Flying Flea (Pou du Ciel)—a light aircraft first flown in 1933. Mignet claimed that anyone who could build a packing case and drive a car could fly a Flying Flea—and he published details of its construction in a book. Costing only about £100 to build, it seemed the answer to many an amateur aviator’s prayers. In France, at least 500 were completed. Unfortunately, a significant number crashed, owing to the spacing of the craft’s wings.
The authorities of the time were very supportive: the Royal Aircraft Establishment in the United Kingdom and the French Air Ministry conducted full-scale wind-tunnel tests to isolate the problem, and later Flying Fleas were a lot safer. Though the aircraft never quite overcame its dangerous reputation, enough French enthusiasts fly Fleas today to justify an annual meeting every June.
Homebuilt movements have come and gone over the years, and different countries seem to foster different kinds of low-tech flying. BASE jumping—that business of flinging yourself off a tall building and paragliding to a police reception at street level—was a largely American invention, enthusiastically adopted by the British: in 1990, Russell Powell jumped from the Whispering Gallery inside St. Paul’s Cathedral, in London—the lowest indoor BASE jump in the world.
Across the Soviet Union in the 1930s, parachuting was all the rage among high school children, who competed in accuracy contests. Parks and playgrounds boasted steel jump towers. There were even small towers for young children, complete with cables and safety harnesses.
The Germans, on the other hand, have always excelled at flying gliders. This is largely because, between the world wars, sport aviation was virtually the only way Germany’s aviation pioneers could get around the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles. By 1931, German gliding pioneers had discovered thermals and were keeping their gliders up in the air for hours rather than minutes. Willy Messerschmitt, who would fill the skies with German fighter aircraft throughout the Second World War, began his career designing a light sport plane, and the Luftwaffe’s brilliant pilots all earned their wings in gliders.
European gliders remained by far the world’s best well into the twentieth century. Don’t take my word for it. Ask the celebrated U.S. aircraft designer Burt Rutan. Burt’s love of European gliders inspired his use of lightweight composites for kit aircraft. Years later, tricks of composite construction would make a vital contribution to his X Prize attempt and place him at the head of the grid in the race for space.
Burt was born in Dinuba, in rural California, in 1943. He and his elder brother Dick shared a room converted from an open woodshed. They filled it with model airplanes, engine parts, glue, balsa, and tools. Dick built the models out of kits, flew them, and broke them; Burt picked up the pieces and made new models out of them. His mother, Irene, would drive him into the Sierra Nevada; Burt operated his planes from the backseat while his mother drove the station wagon as a chase vehicle. In the end he began carrying off so many prizes that the modelairplane associations had to change their rules.
Burt Rutan’s model planes performed so well, competitions had to change their rules.
Rutan began his career at Edwards Air Force Base, writing the rule book for flying the notoriously unstable F-4 Phantom fighter-bomber. Exciting as that job was, however, it didn’t compare with the pleasures of aircraft construction. What Burt really wanted to do was design and build his own plane, in his own garage. And he did: his scale-model version of a Saab fighter was as exciting to fly as a military jet, a fraction of the size, and extremely forgiving. Burt started selling the plans of his VariEze aircraft to other homebuilt enthusiasts.
The VariEze was easy and cheap to build. “If you can chew gum and walk a straight line simultaneously,” Burt wrote, “you won’t have any trouble at all.” You didn’t need to use metal in its construction. You didn’t even need to mold anything. Instead you took a block of packing foam, carved it to the right shape, and laid on shredded glass and epoxy. The technique—one he developed while studying imported European gliders—became his signature.
Burt’s customers admired his policy of radical openness: he kept on improving his designs, read and replied to every letter, and produced little magazines detailing every glitch, problem, accident, and, yes, crash. Eventually, though, he ran into a problem as old as flight itself: being sued. The selfsame thing happened to the Wright brothers. When people started building their own planes, and building them wrong, they took the brothers to court demanding compensation for their accidents. It stymied their later careers.
There has never been any doubt that a Rutan-designed VariViggen, VariEze, or LongEZ aircraft, built right, is one of the safest light airplanes ever designed. Nevertheless, the more plans he sold, the more Burt became exposed to lawsuits, and so, rather reluctantly, he began looking for other ways to make money. He went back to model making, of a sort, and built small-scale versions of prototype aircraft for flight testing. This approach to aircraft development—one that would have been perfectly familiar to German glider and sports-plane pioneers between the wars—turned out to be more reliable and cheaper than wind-tunnel testing, and the company Burt started to do this work, Scaled Composites, is now a world leader in aeronautical designs built around composite materials—materials the trade has nicknamed “fast glass.”<
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A kit plane that thinks it’s a fighter jet: Burt Rutan’s VariEze.
Putting on the pressure suit and climbing into the cockpit was the easy part. The difficulty was climbing out again. “Cramped” does not begin to express conditions aboard what was, in 2005, the world’s most advanced all-composite plane.
The Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer was designed by Burt Rutan to carry one extremely brave pilot around the world on a single tank of fuel. In return, that pilot would have to spend at least 80 hours struggling to stay awake in a space no bigger than a coffin—and as I floundered my way out of the cockpit and into the dry glare of the Mojave sun, it hit me for the first time: that someone might be me.
The plane’s owner and lead pilot, Steve Fossett, had made me his backup because we were friends, and to thank me for Virgin Atlantic’s sponsorship of the project—and, maybe, to tease me a little: I was approaching my fifty-fifth birthday, I owned several airlines, and I held numerous ballooning world records—but I still hadn’t gotten around to obtaining my pilot’s license. (I still haven’t!)
The plan was that if Steve was struck down by illness in the weeks preceding the launch of the GlobalFlyer, then I would devote the intervening time to getting my license and almost immediately afterward attempt to fly around the world in this most radical of experimental planes. This was taking my life philosophy of “learning on the job” to new and scary extremes.
It never came to that: on February 28, 2005, with my feet firmly on the ground, I waved Steve farewell on his record-breaking journey. My heart was in my mouth as I watched him go. Steve had put his heart and soul into this project; now he was putting his life on the line.
Reach for the Skies Page 20