Pacific Beach ornithopter

[Aerohydro]

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Hello All,

Here is a human-powered ornithopter, which it would be nice to get more information about. Interesting that it incorporates a Rogallo-style wing.

The scan comes from the 1973 edition of the Boys' Own Annual, edited by Jack Cox, and published in the UK, though with a lot of American content, so there may well be a US equivalent of it. The ornithopter may have appeared in the press, there, a year or two before the Annual was published.

Cheers,
Paul

 

[Aerohydro]

Hello All,

A bit of online sleuthing has worked wonders ... I've been able to ID the ornithopter!

It was built by Rex Pagett of Inglewood, Los Angeles in 1970. From what I can tell, the craft first appeared in the press when it was included in a story about "homemade flying machines", written by Don Dwiggins, and published in West magazine, an LA Times Sunday supplement, in their issue for November 29, 1970. Here's the part which concerns our ornithopter:

... other dauntless inventors, including Rex Pagett of Inglewood, think a man could fly by flapping home-made wings with his back muscles.​

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Pagett agrees with [P.H.] Spencer that the secret of flapping flight lies in the wingtips, which create strong vortex currents at the top and bottom of each stroke, a concept first stated in 1906 by Professor Harry La Verne Twining, secretary of the Aero Club of California: "The upstroke of the wing drives the bird forward in the plane of the wing just as surely as the downstroke does."​

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Pagett is a batman rather than a birdman. He paid a San Pedro sailmaker to make a pair of Dacron wing covers somehow reminiscent of Count Dracula's cape. With a few refinements, Pagett, who helped built Northrop Scorpion night fighters in World War II, is confident his batwing machine can fly a measured mile over a figure-eight course, to win England's coveted Henry Kremer Award for a successful man-powered flight.​

In the months that followed, Dwiggins' article was re-formatted, re-edited, and re-published - without attribution - in several newspaper supplements, one being the Hartford Courant, and in digests like the Senior Weekly Reader. The item in the first post, which appeared in the 1973 Boys' Own Annual, is from yet another re-hashed and un-attributed version of Dwiggins' original piece.

The photographs which appeared in the West magazine were probably originally in colour. Unfortunately the scans of them appear very dark; I think that's the result of the photographing/scanning processes which had been employed at the time.

Cheers,
Paul

 

[Aerohydro]

Hello All,

I've managed to get myself a copy of the West magazine which had featured Rex Pagett's ornithopter.

Here's what it looks like, in four-colour offset printing, and on newsprint.

Cheers,
Paul

 

[publiusr]

Ahoy Junior Birdmen…flap your arms George