page_title: John W. Dickenson
section_title: Ski kite
hierarchical_section_title: John W. Dickenson / Ski kite
caption_attribution_description: English: The Paresev experimental aircraft. A normal flight was a takeoff on the Rogers Dry Lakebed at Edwards Air Force Base and a circling flight path skirting the lake edges to insure a landing on the lakebed in the event of a towline failure. Release altitude was normally 10,000 to 13,000 feet. Data was obtained on the glide part of the flight. By maintaining simplicity during construction, it was possible to make control and configuration changes overnight and in many instances, in minutes.
context_page_description: John Wallace Dickenson AM is an Australian inventor, who developed some liquid flow measuring devices and designed a successful hang glider configuration, for which he was awarded with the Gold Air Medal, the highest award given by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, the world governing body for air sports, aeronautics and astronautics world records.
context_section_description: In 1963, after seeing an image of a Rogallo wing airfoil on a magazine, Dickenson set to build a water skiing kite that could be released at altitude for a glide to a safe drop in the water, thus designed and built a water skiing kite wing he called the Ski Kite.
  His ski kite format incorporated an airframe with a triangle control frame as used in hang gliding in Breslau 1908, having a basebar tow-point and was integrated on an all-ready publicized four-boom stiffened Rogallo wing airfoil, where the pilot sat on a swinging seat while the control frame and wire bracing distributed the load to the wing as well as giving a frame to brace for weight-shift control. Dickenson's Ski Wing turned out to be stable and controllable, unlike the flat manned kites used at water ski shows. The Ski Wing was first flown in public at the 'Grafton Jacaranda Festival', New South Wales, Australia, in September 1963 by Rod Fuller while towed behind a motorboat.
  The ski kite he now called Ski Wing, was light and portable, so Dickenson decided to file for a mechanical patent, but lacking on economic resources, the patent process of formal review of claims could not be entered to determine which, if any, of the claims could hold, so the patent was not awarded.
caption: NASA's Paresev glider in flight with tow cable (1962).
exif: {}