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Caution: paper print of photos are of print date, not date of the actual
shown real-life situation. This is part of the story of a wing that would bring more participants into DIY hang gliding, a sport that had been going already for over 70 years since the late 1800s, if not earlier! The A-frame of 1908 or triangle control frame for a very simple hang glider was demonstrated in Breslau in a gliding club; NASA did not choose that A-frame for their immediate purposes, but such as Igor Bensen did in 1954 and Spratt and others earlier; we use such often in 2012 hang gliders. Yet NASA Paresev had universal joint at hang point and weight-shift control for the hung pilot; eight pilots in all flew many variants of the Paresev manned glider hang glider framed paraglider. |
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wrote: 'The best way to acquire ... experience, of course, was by building and flying a Parawing. Two who actively favored such an approach were center research pilots Neil Armstrong and Milt Thompson. they approached Paul Bikle, who liked the idea, but recognized that both pilots had heavy Dyna-Soar commitments; FRC could not spare their services elsewhere, even to a project as interesting as the proposed Parawing. Instead, Bikle called in a group of center engineers under the direction of Charles Richards, a team composed of Richard Klein, Vic Horton, Gary Layton, and Joe Wilson. Bilke's [sic, Bikle] instructions were characteristically short and to the point: build a single-seat Paraglider and *do it quick and cheap.' All this took place just before Christmas 1961. The team, now totaling nine engineers and technicians, set to work on this *Paraglider Research Vehicle,' conveniently abbreviated Paresev. Seven weeks later, after expending $4280 on construction and materials, the team rolled out the Paresev I. It resembled a grown-up tricycle, with a rudimentary seat, an angled tripod mast, and perched on top of the mast, a 14-square-meter Rogallo-type parawing. The vehicle weighed 272 kilograms, had a height of over 3.4 meters, and a length of 4.5 meters. The pilot sat out in the open, strapped in the seat, with no enclosure of any kind. He controlled the descent rate by tilting the wing fore and aft, and turned by tilting the wing from side to side. NASA registered the Paresev, the first NASA research airplane to be constructed totally *in-house,' with the Federal Aviation Administration on 12 February 1962. Flight testing started immediately.' Published in James R. Hansen, Spaceflight Revolution: NASA Langley Research Center From Sputnik to Apollo, NASA SP-4308, pp. 380-387; Richard P. Hallion, On the Frontier: Flight Research at Dryden, 1946-1981, NASA SP-4303, pp. 138-139.
NASA Center: NASA
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