[piano intro] - [Announcer] Wingman was made possible by the generous support of the First Flight Society, a nonprofit organization preserving the legacy of the Wright Brothers, promoting aviation and aviation education, and supporting the National Park Service at the Wright Brothers National Memorial, and the Outer Banks Community Foundation, supporting communities across the Outer Banks through charitable giving, managing charitable funds, and awarding grants and scholarships to address both pressing needs and promising opportunities.

And Kitty Hawk Kites celebrating more than 50 years of teaching the world to fly.

Kitty Hawk Kites is an adventure, recreation, and retailing company with more than 28 locations along the East coast, and by the following... [waves crashing] [seagulls shrieking] [gentle music] - Hang gliding is free flight.

I like the feeling of being totally present in the air.

It's the closest a human being can get to having their own set of wings.

- There you go.

Push out a little bit.

Hold it.

- It is a fulfillment of the dream man has had for thousands and thousands of years of being like a bird.

- When we go and soar the beach, we're a pelican.

We go and soar the mountains, we're a hawk or a vulture.

- You get to leave everything on the ground and just experience you in that wing and the air.

- Mr. Rogallo's work and his invention was really the origin of all that.

The impact that his wing has had on society and culture is in millions of people have enjoyed it and continue to enjoy it.

[gentle music continues] - Francis Rogallo was an aeronautical engineer who developed the flexible wing concept that led to a number of applications, including hang gliding and paragliding and all of our modern parachutes, and most recently kiteboard kites.

Rogallo's invention is a completely flexible lifting surface.

Before, every aircraft that ever flew had some rigidity to it, even bird's wings have some rigidity with their skeletons, and this was very much like a parachute, but as a pure tension structure, it could hold an airfoil shape just by the aerodynamic forces as the air goes over the wing and it would actually glide and move forward.

First time in history we had a completely flexible lifting surface.

Significance in Rogallo's mind was huge, but it took a long time for it to catch on.

Nobody saw the possibilities initially.

Rogallo was born in Sanger, California in 1912.

His father was a Polish immigrant, Mathieu, and he made his way out west, and eventually he married Rogallo's mother, Marie Dajas.

Rogallo as a young child was the constant companion of his older brother, Matt, and they had pretty much free run of the town.

When Rogallo was a young boy, they called him Fran.

For some reason, the boys had salvaged this big corrugated pipe.

They were trying to haul it up into the pepper tree in the backyard.

So, Rogallo was on the ground, Fran was, and his brother Matt's up in the tree and the knot failed on one of the attempts, and it came down squarely on the top of Rogallo's foot and he lost the two first toes on his right foot.

His brother, Matt, was going to be sent to this boarding school up in Los Gatos, the Montezuma School.

So, he's seven years old and begs and pleads, and his mother finally relents and sends the two of them up to the Montezuma School.

But it was while he was at the Montezuma School that he first started making kites, but they also rigged 'em as gliders and had gliding competitions to see who could fly them the farthest outta the buildings.

He was seven years old and there was an airplane flying overhead.

Now, this is, what?

1919.

Airplanes were still a fairly uncommon sight.

Rogallo saw it and was just captivated, and it wasn't just that he wanted to fly, he wanted to know how it worked.

He was actually at school when his father passed away and they came back for the funeral.

Marie remarried within a year to a man named Betzold, and he had his two children and Marie had hers, and they worked more as a blended family and now they're with the new family.

And Doc Betzold had decided to send the four oldest kids to the San Marcos Academy in Texas.

[airplanes whirring] It was near two different airfields that were used for training.

It just fueled the imagination he'd already had.

You know, he was fascinated with flight and being able to see it constantly was a treat.

The family used to picnic at a nearby field in the summertime occasionally, where airplanes were flying, so airplanes were coming and going and offering rides.

Rogallo found out that for the tidy sum of $10, he could get a 10-minute flight, and he saved all that money and did not tell his folks.

He said, "I'm just gonna go over and watch those people get in and outta the airplanes."

And so, he went over and paid his money and got a flight.

And as they're taxiing by, his older brother looks over and says, "Hey, that looks like Fran."

And sure enough, it was.

Rogallo saw the military as the only way he could afford to learn to fly, and he tried to join three different times and was always disqualified because of the injury to his foot.

Rogallo started his college years at Fresno State, and he did two years there, studying mostly engineering, but then he transferred to Stanford after two years.

And then in the graduate program, he wound up with a degree that is a ME Aeronautical, Master's of Engineering Aeronautical.

His college roommate was Harvey Allen, and it was Harvey who started calling Rogallo Rog, and that nickname stuck.

When he graduated Stanford, he, like almost every other aeronautical engineer, thought they would go and work for the NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in Hampton.

And the problem was, at that time, they simply weren't hiring.

Rogallo's first job was for Shell and he was doing work to isolating isopropanes for some kind of fuel.

After his time at Shell, there was an opening at Douglas Aircraft and he worked there for a short time and found that work, of course, much more interesting.

But during that period, the NACA finally offered the exam for entrance, and Rogallo and Harvey Allen both took the exam.

They were both chosen.

When Rogallo first got to the NACA, his first job was working, doing basically what he'd done at Stanford, which was wind tunnel setups.

That work was actually quite important and really, really established him.

And he moved up the ladder at the NACA.

Rogallo and his fellow bachelor engineers lived in a handful of houses, and it was one of Rob's roommates was dating Gertrude's sister, and Gertrude's sister begged her to go along on a double date.

So, they had a courtship that they both remember fondly, and then they got married.

During that time, Francis and Gertrude lived at various places around Tidewater, Virginia, not far from the Langley facility in Hampton.

During World War II, the Langley Lab, you know, increased its activity, and it was during this time that Rogallo basically saw the writing on the wall.

The airplanes were getting heavier and faster and more complex, and harder to fly, and way more expensive.

And he thought it wasn't fair that only millionaires and the military had access to aviation.

He thought everyone should be able to fly.

He'd always wanted to fly.

So, he started to think of a way that he could make flying simple and inexpensive and available to everyone and practical, and that's what got him thinking about a wing that you could fold up and put in the trunk of your car and drive to the outskirts of town, unfold the wing, and fly away.

He realized he could make a wing that was completely flexible like a parachute, but if you make it the right shape and with the right length of lines and the right weight, the aerodynamic forces would hold it open in a way that it would create lift like a conventional rigid wing.

He and Gertrude this work together.

She's the one who could sew.

- Okay, this is the very first kite that flew.

My mother made this out of an old kitchen curtain, and it's made out of what's called chintz, and sort of a coated back, which gave it the ability to fly and the wind not just go through the material.

- And they played with them in a wind tunnel that Rogallo built in their house, and that was the beauty of this simple concept.

They could do this crude, preliminary work at home for very little money and do it on their own time, which they did.

And they got the first one flying successfully in 1948.

- In the development of the flexible wing, Francis always acknowledged and appreciated Gertrude's contribution in the success of his inventions and patents.

It was always very evident that he saw her as an equal partner and integral to what he did to develop the flexible wing.

- During the time that they were developing this flexible wing, Rogallo was still working for the NACA as a supervisor, basically, overseeing other engineers in the wind tunnels with the work they were doing there.

Anything aeronautical belonged to the NACA, so he took the invention that he and Gertrude had done to his superiors at the NACA, and he was hopeful that they would see the possibilities that he saw for this wing.

Unfortunately, a colossal lack of imagination led them to see no use for the kite whatsoever, and they allowed the Rogallos to patent the flexible kite, which they did.

They secured their patent in 1951.

As a way to illustrate the concept to try to get what Rogallo called real aeronautical interest in the idea, they went into the kite business and sold these as toy kites.

It backfired.

Because it was a toy, nobody took it seriously.

Rogallo continued his work at the NACA and it was Gertrude's kite business.

The kite business had its ups and downs, of course, but what really changed things was Sputnik.

[gentle electronic beeping] Once the Russians achieved that satellite flight, the entire footing of our aeronautical community changed.

NASA was formed out of what was the NACA, and really there was a huge shift toward space, and that's when this little kite idea finally got some traction.

In 1959, Wernher von Braun, famous rocket engineer, was doing, I believe, just a regular annual trip to Langley, and he just happened to see Rogallo demonstrate one of these little gliders.

And von Braun immediately saw the possibility for recovering rocket booster engines and radio control gliding them back with these gliding parachutes.

More or less, the floodgates opened and the government wound up spending almost $160 million in the 1960s doing flexible wing research for all sorts of applications.

- The endorsement really lent a lot of credibility to the technology.

You know, if NASA was doing it, by gosh, by golly, you know, it must be the real thing.

I think that it would've never evolved without NASA's participation.

- [Billy] They built the fleet, which was a flying Jeep.

It was a short takeoff with landing personnel and cargo carrier out of these flexible wings.

One of the applications for flexible wings was for basically gliding parachutes.

They used them as cargo drops, but you could also drop personnel.

And some of the early ones were adopted by the Golden Knights.

They got a hold of these gliding parachutes and absolutely loved them.

- Lift off.

- [Billy] One of the biggest applications they looked at for flexible wings was to recover spacecraft.

The powers that be added recovery by paraglider as one of the goals for the Gemini program.

And that would allow astronauts to deploy a completely flexible wing after reentry and have a controlled descent, gliding down, and landing on land.

And the astronauts loved the idea of that.

- We choose to go to the moon.

- Kennedy said, "We're gonna be on the moon by the end of the decade," and they flat ran out of time.

They just couldn't solve all the problems they needed to quickly enough to meet the goals of the space program.

Instead, they settled for parachutes.

And we did not achieve landing on land with spacecraft until the space shuttle.

The publicity around flexible wings in the magazines led people all over the world to think they could build one.

And some of the first were Australian water skiers, but from a NASA photograph, John Dickenson built one for a very specific kite festival.

They wanted a better ski kite, and he built one out of banana plastic and conduit.

And he's the one who realized the modern control frame, putting a triangle underneath it and sitting in a swing seat and using weight shift to control 'em.

Dickenson's innovation of the swing seat and the control bar really informs the way we fly hang gliders today, but the wing is absolutely Rogallo.

Rogallo didn't invent the hang gliders, invented the flexible wing concept that evolved into hang gliding and paragliding and all those other wings.

[gentle music] - The sport of hang gliding mushroomed very quickly.

It exploded in growth in the early '70s.

Francis and Gertrude were very happy to see their baby take flight.

They were delighted the sport was growing and that there were more people becoming involved with it.

- A lot of people don't know that he was the source of these things, of a hang glider, of a paraglider, stunt kite flying, the kites they use for kite boarding, sport parachuting, even ultra lights, you know, Mr. Rogallo's work and his invention was really the origin of all that.

The impact that his wing has had on society and culture is millions of people have enjoyed it and continue to enjoy it.

- [Billy] When NASA was founded, they set up the Inventions and Contributions Award System to basically compensate inventors for not taking their invention out into the private world and making a fortune on it.

They awarded Francis and Gertrude Rogallo $35,000 in 1963, which was the largest sum ever given out under that award system.

And what the Rogallos did in return was give the government royalty-free use of their patent.

- And in just doing that, the unselfishness of that, his legacy is that people were attracted to the idea of free flight.

- So, the path of the flexible wing research is interesting in that NASA went almost immediately to the most complicated thing they could do, which was to try to recover spacecraft, and what happened was we got to the moon and all the funding at NASA contracted, and one of the things on the chopping block was all the flexible wing research, so Rogallo retired.

Rogallo had been coming to the Outer Banks, I believe he first came in the 1950s, but being in Hampton's not that far away, and he bought a small flattop cottage in Southern Shores in 1967 and began doing his own experiments with completely flexible wings on the beach.

He did tethered flights with these full-scale paragliders.

- He flew us off the beach on those, and anyone who was interested in flying, if they had permission from their parents, we would be put in a parachute harness and tethered to the ground and we would fly.

We'd get in the harness and the wind would come and fill up the kite, which was a giant kite, because the parachute, we would just go up.

And then we had toggles and we could make it go to the left or to the right.

He had controls to the ground also.

And he was testing what would happen if he did certain things.

We were just Having fun.

- I was also one of his guinea pigs, and I did get to do that as well.

When you are on the ground looking up, it doesn't look that high, but when you are up there, you feel like you're way off the ground.

- They flew them at Jockey's Ridge through the late 1960s, and then he retired in 1970 and the family moved to the Outer Banks in 1972.

Rogallo was beginning to be recognized because they started calling them Rogallo Wings.

And when hang gliding really started going in the early 1970s, he was invited for a hang gliding meet in California.

One of the presidents of one of the early hang gliding companies presented Rogallo with his own hang glider and gave him a brief lesson on the beach, and then had it shipped here to the Outer Banks.

And he started flying in his hang glider in 1970.

Let's see, he was 62 years old when he started flying hang gliders.

The hang glider that he was given was shipped to Kitty Hawk.

- He came to our shop and Rog came down to pick it up, he and Gertrude.

They were just like, you know, kids in the candy store, you know, when they saw that.

- And Rogallo basically taught himself to fly on Jockey's Ridge.

He flew pretty regularly.

Anytime the wind was good, he was able to soar the dunes.

He could fly back and forth and stay up.

- Jockey's Ridge was very special to Francis and Gertrude.

Being in the backyard of where the Wright brothers first flew was inspirational to all of us, and certainly to Francis.

When Francis would go out to fly, Gertrude would accompany him out to the dunes, and usually they'd set up camp at the base, and then he would take the glider up and fly when the conditions were right.

And a lot of times, people would come up and approach them and ask them, you know, what they were doing.

And they very patiently would explain to them what hang gliding was.

- What we were trying to invent was a wing for aircraft that was simple and unbreakable and you could fold it up and inexpensive and- - When I first met Francis Rogallo, I was kind of struck by his presence.

He's fairly tall and slender, distinguished-looking, and as I got to know him, very humble, unassuming, open to answering questions, even-keeled, extremely friendly and approachable.

It really stuck with me that first encounter I had with him, that he, how humble he was and how much more interested he seemed to be in me and talking about me than he wanted to talk about himself.

He was very much interested in hearing about people enjoying his invention much more than talking about the process of inventing it.

The Rogallos were such an important part of what was going on, as far as aviation goes here on the Outer Banks, that being involved in it myself, I was able to strike up a relationship where we were able to talk about many things other than just flying, just what you would suspect coming from two wonderful people that were Francis and Gertrude.

[gentle music] They loved to come out to the dune and just watch and be a part of what people were doing with at least a version of their wing, whether it be a hang glider or a kite or whatever it may be.

So, they would come down and we'd have the Rogallo Kite Festival, stunt kite competition.

We'd have hang gliding competitions on the sand dune.

When people credited him for inventing the flexible wing, he was quick to point out that it wasn't him, it was he and Gertrude that invented the Wing.

And she had sewn up that first prototype for him out of their kitchen curtain.

[gentle music continues] - We did fly him on his 75th and his 80th birthday.

When it came to his 80th birthday, I was able to go out there and help him fly.

He got out there and flew and he landed, and you know, running down the hill.

I said, "Wow, what'd you think, Mr. Rogallo?

Wasn't that great?"

And he immediately started critiquing his flight.

"Well, I think I probably could have flown with a little bit more air speed."

And even at 80 years old, it wasn't just getting his feet off the ground, he wanted to have good flights.

So, he would get up there and make sure he flew with a little more air speed the next time.

He loved it, just like everybody.

When he got his feet off the ground, his reaction is just like everybody that ever gets their feet off the ground.

It is a sense of freedom and awe, and it always ends too quickly.

You wanna keep going forever.

Mr. Rogallo choosing to fly on his 80th birthday was quintessential Rogallo.

- Rogallo made probably his last public appearance in 2003 at the Centennial flight, which was a wonderful ceremony.

He was honored as one of the hundred aviation pioneers, which included, of course, the Wright Brothers, and many living people, but there were only 16 or 17 people there that day to receive the award, and among them were Neil Armstrong, Chuck Yeager, Buzz Aldrin.

So, he was in some pretty elite company.

- He was like royalty, you know?

In the hang gliding community, I mean, he was a God.

This is a man who brought so much joy to so many people, you know, by providing a way for them to fly.

- He gave the everyday man a way to experience flight, and there are thousands of people that enjoy that.

And I believe that is his legacy.

- He's got his own Wikipedia page, you know, because he did something that people remember and they will remember for a long, long, long, maybe forever in terms of as long as people are around and flying and wanting to fly.

- I believe his legacy is not only the story of him bringing this thing from an idea into reality, but the idea that he was able to invent this wing that so many people around the world enjoy in a sense that is pure joy, it's flight.

[gentle music continues] [gentle music continues] [gentle music continues] [gentle music continues] [gentle music continues] [gentle music continues] - [Announcer] Wingman was made possible by the generous support of the First Flight Society, a non-profit organization preserving the legacy of the Wright Brothers, promoting aviation and aviation education, and supporting the National Park Service at the Wright Brothers National Memorial, and the Outer Banks Community Foundation, supporting communities across the Outer Banks through charitable giving, managing charitable funds, and awarding grants and scholarships to address both pressing needs and promising opportunities.

And Kitty Hawk Kites celebrating more than 50 years of teaching the world to fly.

Kitty Hawk Kites is an adventure, recreation, and retailing company with more than 28 locations along the East Coast.

And by the following... [waves crashing]