I was just overwhelmed

“I was just overwhelmed. I didn’t have a waterski kite. I had a hang glider … This machine was stable.” John Dickenson’s face lit up when he described the moment he first took to the air under his own hand-built wing. “On my way home my head was spinning. I could see foot-launching, I could see the future of this thing.”

Sixty years ago, on 8 September 1963, John Dickenson, a then 28-year-old TV repair man, took flight under his homemade hang glider. Not only homemade – home designed too. 

Taking inspiration from flying foxes, a picture in a magazine and a 2,000-year-old Mediterranean sail he spent eight months building what was to become the template for the hang glider – and influence everything that was to come in free flight. Perhaps tragically though, Dickenson didn’t make a dime out of his invention and as hang gliding boomed in its 1970s and 80s heyday his contribution to the sport was largely forgotten.

Dickenson was born in the Sydney suburbs in 1934. “I had a Huckleberry Finn childhood,” he told an audience of hang glider pilots at a talk he gave in Anacortes, Washington State in 2008. “When I was five I used to be taken by my father down to the the seashore, and while he fished...