Like a huge pre-historic bird one sees only in biology text books, the pterodactyl touches down on a strip of grass barely sixty feet in length. A man is strapped into a bucket seat in the midst of aluminium tubing, Dacron Sailcloth and metal staywires. Looking at this seemingly fragile contraption it is difficult to imagine that it can really be flown. Yet today this contraption has captured the imagination of people all over the world.
Known to different people by different names as micro-light, aero-light, ultra-light, pterodactyl this brain child of human ingenuity signifies the realization of a dream, a dream as old as humanity, the dream of flying like the birds.
In 1903 on an isolated beach in America two brothers, at long last open the realm of the skies to the rest of humanity Orville and Wilbur Wrights Pioneering flight from Kitty Hawk in 1903 changed, the world once and for all.
Folk lore and legends are replete with accounts of man’s clumsy yet brave attempts to fly. All of them were drawn back to earth as unexorably as Newtons apple. Greek mythology accounts the flight of Icarus who with wings of wax flew too close to the sun. The wings melted and Icarus was brought back to earth. Da Vinci made drawings of an aircraft. Yet all of man’s efforts met with failure until 1903.
Though many expected the model-T of the skies to materialize, world war-1 prevented it from happening. The aircraft was turned into a killing machine. Following closely on the heels of the first, the Second world war completed the metamorphosis. The aircraft had become too fast, complicated and expensive for the common man. Ironically wings for the common man had to await the dawn of the space age to revert to the simplicity of their beginnings.
Otto libenthal, the great German aero nautical pioneer had fashioned bat-like wings of willow and linen and had made nearly 2000 glides by jumping off the top of mountains before a stall and consequent fall in 1896 brought his life to an abrupt and unceremonious end.
In 1951 Francis M. Rogall of NASA Patented after test a new kind of airfoil shaped like an obtuse V. The fabric para-wing unstiffend by intermediary ribs bellowed on both sides of a central spar. His simple and elegant design sparked the rebirth of hand gliding fledgling bird men with their home made, brilliantly coloured butterflies soon covered the sky slopes of North America and Europe.
Biologists have a saying: Ontogeny re capitulates phylogeny; that is an embryo goes through all the stages followed in the evolution of a species. So with a evolution of glider into micro-light; designers of the ultra- light had, in a decade, recapitulated the aeronautical development of 75 years. Many daring people experimented with bizarre ideas like strapping a chainsaw engine fitted with propellers on to the backs. None of them met with any real success, until, the Orville wright of the new era, John Moody of Wisconsin rigged a ten horsepower engine and propeller into a glider with his legs as landing gear flew a mile and a half a few feet above a frozen lake. In September 1975 Moody flew 16 miles cross country for the first time and the word of his pioneering flights soon spread. The race to add power was on.
The Wright brothers first flew on the “kitty hawk flyer” which weighed 605 lbs Moody’s glider fitted out with landing gear, seat, controls and heavier engines weighed only 150 to 250 lbs. This is why this new breed of glider is known as ultra-light.
Only four year after the Wright brothers first flew, a Brazelian living in Paris designed and flew the ancestor to todays ultra-light. Albert Santos-Damont in 1907 built a miniature high-wing monoplane that weighed 243 lbs and had a two cylinder 20 horse-power engine that flew the machine at48 miles an hour. The designer of the world’s largest selling and most copied micro-light ‘Quick silver’ is John Lasko. Lasko studied and refined Albert’s Santos-Dumonts early micro-light. When Parisians first saw Dumonts craft, they dubbed it ‘Demoiselle’ or Dragon fly.
Flying is a hobby which is now not too expensive. Micro lights cost only about as much as two wheeler to build. In India however the craze that has taken the west by storm has not yet taken root. Micro lights with its innumerable application is ideal for a country like India where cash resources are not easy to find. The technology involved is not of a complicated nature. At best it is a craft that could be put together by school children. However micro lights in India are flown in some of the big cities only by people who have access to flying clubs. The micro light requires only a backyard as runway and it can easily be maintained at home. Apart from the select few who have access to flying clubs the Indian defense services and the N.C.C. use these crafts. The true capacity of this craft can be judged from the fact that fact an Indian army officer flew from Kashmir to Kanyakumari on a micro light.
It has been said of micro lights that they are so easy to fly that the real danger is now that a novice might jump into his machine and take off.
Eipper Aircraft one of the leading manufacturers has the following statistics to quote. 7000 micro lights sold and flown for a total of more than one million flying hours and a total of only ten fatalities, One for every 1,00,000 flying hours half of that of general aviations. In other words a well maintained machine is rapidly becoming the safe aircraft aloft.
In many crashes pilots can walk away from the wreckage without serious injuries. The reasons are simple A micro light with trainer and passenger weighs, lets say, around 550 pounds and lands at 27 miles an hour. A Cessna with the same two people in it weighs around 1600 lbs, 3 times as much and land’s at 55 miles an hour.
Bill Adaska, builder of the Rotec-Rally says “We are not advancing aviation but setting it back 75 years. Now anyone can fly, stay up two hours on a full tank, go a hundred miles, spray crops, inspect pipe lines, but mostly have fun. The micro light is the common mans window to the sky.”
In deed, so versatile is this aircraft that experts say that it is virtually undetectable by radar, and should it be built from carbon or Borone fibre it simply would not be there. Two Palestinians on micro lights were forced landed b Israeli war-planes trying to fly into Israel. The mission was unsuccessful but it is an ominous portent.
Manufacturers have been approached by government of several nations. Saudi Arabia has bought a few with desert camouflage. Manufacturers have been requested not to sell these aircraft to a select list of bad guys. These aircraft can easily be adapted for pilotless flight to be sent into hazardous areas with TV Cameras and radiation sensors. They can be fitted with grenade launchers or sub machine guns and if the pilot is removed they can stay aloft-for 24 hours, Intelligence agencies dread the thought of smugglers flying across borders with drugs, piloted or by remote control. On the positive side it can be used for inspection of pipelines, electricity lines, spraying fields. It is used extensively by scientists to study the migration of sharks butterflies and the like.
The truth is that the potentialities of the micro light are virtually limitless. Its flight has started and it will fly high for quite some time to come, for the over riding function of this tiny fragile, elegant and versatile David in a sky filled with goliaths is to make possible the poetry of flight.
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