Powered hang glider

A foot-launched powered hang glider (FLPHG), also called powered harness, nanolight, or hangmotor, is a powered hang glider harness with a motor and propeller in pusher configuration. An ordinary hang glider is used for its wing and control frame, and the pilot can foot-launch from a hill or from flat ground, needing a length of about a football field to get airborne, or much less if there is an oncoming breeze and no obstacles.

While powered microlights (ultralights) developed from hang gliding in the late 1970s, they were also a return to the type of low-speed aircraft that were common in the earlier years of aviation, but which were superseded as both civil and military aircraft pursued more speed. For a second time in aviation history, during the 1970s, motorization of simple gliders, especially those portable and foot-launched, became the goal of many inventors and gradually, small wing-mounted power packs were adapted. These early experiments went largely unrecorded, even in log books, let alone the press, because the pioneers were uncomfortably aware that the addition of an engine made the craft liable to registration, airworthiness legislation, and the pilot liable to expensive licensing and probably, insurance. Inventors from Australia, France and England produced several successful microlight motor gliders in the early 1970s and very few were portable wings.

Surprisingly, what really launched the powered ultralight aviation movement in the United States was not the Rogallo flexible wing but a whole series of rigid-wing motorized hang gliders. The Icarus V flying wing appeared with its tip rudders and swept-back style wing was used as a base for some powered experiments. Differently, a rigid biplane designed also by teenager Taras Kiceniuk, Jr—the Icarus II—was a foundation for a modification in Larry Mauro's UFM Easy Riser which biplane started to sell in large numbers; Larry Mauro would power his tail-less biplane; one version was solar powered called the Solar Riser. Hang gliding record holder Don Mitchell fitted his BF-10 with a motor, though he still used the pilot's legs as undercarriage, an arrangement which persisted until his B-10 Mitchell Wing appeared.

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