Francis Rogallo, 97, ‘father of hang gliding’
NEW YORK - Francis Rogallo, an aeronautical engineer who, beginning with a model made from a kitchen curtain, designed the wing that led to hang gliding, paragliding, sport parachuting, and stunt kite flying, died Tuesday at his home in Southern Shores, N.C. He was 97, his family said.
Such was Mr. Rogallo’s influence on lightweight flight that the wings of hang gliders for years were called Rogallo wings and that members of the Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association are called Rogallo members.
In an interview on Friday, David Glover, a past president of the association, called Mr. Rogallo “the father of hang gliding.’’
The saga began after World War II. Mr. Rogallo’s wife, Gertrude, helped him develop his ideas for a flexible, ultralight aircraft. She used her sewing machine and a flowered chintz kitchen curtain to give substance to the vision, a sort of cross between a boat sail and a parachute.
Mr. Rogallo thought his “flexible wing’’ might be used for new kinds of boats, ground vehicles, and aircraft, but nobody, including his employer, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, was interested. The couple got a patent in both of their names and started selling the invention as a kite.
The result was a triangle-shaped kite that turned out to be perfect for performing stunts. It was such a novelty that Meyer Berger wrote in The New York Times in 1954 that it “would startle Ben Franklin.’’
Three years later, after the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which succeeded the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, was suddenly very interested. Mr. Rogallo’s invention, now called the paraglider, was seen as a way to bring space capsules back to earth with more precision than a traditional parachute allows.
Wernher von Braun, the preeminent American rocket scientist, summoned Mr. Rogallo, who headed a team of 100, to Alabama for a personal briefing.
Rodney G. Rose, who managed escape, landing, and recovery for the Gemini program, told the Times in 1962 that the paraglider transformed “the landing problem of a manned spacecraft from something out of the ordinary to something ordinary - the landing of a light plane.’’ But in the race against time, the paraglider was abandoned in 1964 for the old-fashioned parachute.
Today about 50,000 people glide annually in the United States, with many paying more than $4,000 for gliders.
At 62, Mr. Rogallo took up hang gliding on the dunes of Kitty Hawk, N.C.. He took his last flight there on his 80th birthday.