Pilcher Hawk

Percy Pilcher served in the Royal Navy as a boy and young man, trained as an engineer, and in the 1890s worked as an assistant lecturer in naval architecture at the University of Glasgow. In 1895 he built his first glider, the Bat, and tried it on the hills near Cardross on the Clyde. He then went to Berlin to meet Otto Lilienthal, the German who had made hundreds of flights in gliders of his own, and came home having flown one of them. With what he had learned he built the Beetle and the Gull, and in 1896 the Hawk, the best of his machines.

The Hawk was a hang glider. The pilot stood inside a narrow opening between the wings, took the weight on his forearms and steered by swinging his body. Each wing was a sheet of cotton stretched over nine bamboo ribs that fanned out from an upright mast, and wires from the top and foot of each mast held every rib in shape. A tailplane and fin rode high behind on a bamboo boom, and, unusually for the time, two small wheels on sprung legs took the shock of landing. Pilcher flew it at Eynsford in Kent, and in 1897 at Stanford Hall in Leicestershire, where, towed into the air by a line run through pulleys and pulled by horses, he glided about 250 metres, the longest flight of its day.

He meant to fit an engine next. By 1899 he had built a triplane with a light engine of his own design, and he arranged to show it to an invited audience at Stanford Hall on 30 September that year. The engine was not ready, so in wet and gusty weather he flew the Hawk instead to entertain his guests. A bamboo rod in the tail broke, the glider fell from about ten metres and Pilcher died of his injuries two days later, aged 32. The Hawk was repaired and given to what is now National Museums Scotland, and it is often described as the oldest surviving British aircraft.