Flight Of Fantasy

As one-time wannabe Wright brother Terry Fallis writes, you have to risk falling to be able to soar.

AS A YOUNG BOY GROWING up in Toronto in the 1970s, I was obsessed with all things airborne. Frisbees, parachute-clad toy soldiers and those 69-cent balsa-wood gliders that pushed back the frontiers of fragility. They soared beautifully for about six minutes before disintegrating and returning permanently to the earth. My flight fixation ran deep: I wanted to soar like those gliders—but preferably without the in-flight disintegration part.

When I was 12, I started hanging out with an equally flight- obsessed classmate, Geoff. As rumour had it, he’d tested a homemade parachute by leaping off the roof of his house (and it wasn’t a bungalow). So Geoff and I decided to design and build our own hang-glider—and test-fly it, too.

Our collective knowledge of aerodynamics came exclusively from Roger Ramjet cartoons. To bone up, Geoff and I spent several minutes studiously researching gliders. We carefully noted the classics designed by the Wright brothers and their German competitor, Otto Lilienthal, in the late 19th century.

We considered the modern models that dominated the sport of hanggliding—and then we designed a hang-glider that bore absolutely no resemblance to any of them. We just thought ours looked better.