Terry Sweeney | |
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 Terry Sweeney c. 2014 | |
| Born | Terry Sweeney December 6, 1947 Grasmere, New Hampshire, U.S. |
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| Spouse | Lisa Lapin |
| Relatives | Patsy Sweeney (great uncle) |
Terry Sweeney is an American inventor and hang glider pioneer. He designed hang gliders and equipment for Sky Sports and was a founding member and leader of many musical groups including Sweeney's Glider, Fly by Day, and Tam and the Bourines.
Terry Sweeney was born in Grasmere, New Hampshire, on December 6, 1947, and raised in Dunbarton, New Hampshire. He was the youngest of the four children of John Sweeney, a laborer, and Charlotte Sweeney, a waitress. [1] He was fascinated with flight from a very young age and began building balloons and gliders in his backyard as a teenager.
Sweeney and one of his first gliders, a homemade $40 biplane, were featured in Fritz Weatherby's 1971 classic hang gliding video, Sweeney's Glider. [2] [3] In the video, Terry Sweeney describes the inspiration for his biplane, and Weatherby documents the efforts to get the glider off the ground. The video is accompanied throughout by music from Sweeney's band, Sweeney's Glider, singing about the dream of gliding flight.
Sweeney designed hang gliders for Sky Sports, an East Coast hang glider manufacturer in the mid-1970s. While working for Sky Sports, along with other members of the Sky Sports design team, including designer Tom Peghiny and pilot Dennis Pagen, Sweeney contributed to the design of the Sirocco I, Sirocco II, Osprey, Merlin, and Kestrel. Sweeney was one of the first to incorporate double sail surfaces and an enclosed crossbar in his glider designs. [4] To improve pitch stability of these early Rogallo designs Sweeney added a strut under the sail of each wingtip, which were then attached to the top of the kingpost with a cable. [4] Together with David Aguilar he also helped design and develop the Sky Sports supine harness. [4] Sweeney was also an early pioneer in powered hang gliders. In 1977, he developed a twintube kingpost mount for attaching an engine to a Rogallo-type flex-wing glider; this proved to be quite a dangerous design in turbulent conditions. [5]
After teaching himself to fly various types of fixed-wing gliders in the late 1960s, [2] by the early 1970s, Sweeney was sharing his enthusiasm for the sport by teaching others. His beginner lessons in the "Clay Pit", an open field by a slope near his house in Dunbarton, New Hampshire, were well known throughout the East Coast by hang gliding aficionados. [6] The hill has become overgrown with trees and is now part of a popular motocross trail called Hang Glider Hill in the Hopkinton-Everett Multi-Use Trail System in Weare, New Hampshire. [7]
Terry Sweeney is married to Lisa Lapin. He is the great-nephew of the boxer Patsy Sweeney, the Manchester Whirlwind.
Hang gliding is an air sport or recreational activity in which a pilot flies a light, non-motorised, heavier-than-air aircraft called a hang glider. Most modern hang gliders are made of an aluminium alloy or composite frame covered with synthetic sailcloth to form a wing. Typically the pilot is in a harness suspended from the airframe, and controls the aircraft by shifting body weight in opposition to a control frame.
A fixed-wing aircraft is a heavier-than-air flying machine, such as an airplane, which is capable of flight using aerodynamic lift. Fixed-wing aircraft are distinct from rotary-wing aircraft, and ornithopters. The wings of a fixed-wing aircraft are not necessarily rigid; kites, hang gliders, variable-sweep wing aircraft, and airplanes that use wing morphing are all classified as fixed wing.
The Rogallo wing is a flexible type of wing. In 1948, Francis Rogallo, a NASA engineer, and his wife Gertrude Rogallo, invented a self-inflating flexible wing they called the Parawing, also known after them as the "Rogallo Wing" and flexible wing. NASA considered Rogallo's flexible wing as an alternative recovery system for the Mercury and Gemini space capsules, and for possible use in other spacecraft landings, but the idea was dropped from Gemini in 1964 in favor of conventional parachutes.
Francis Melvin Rogallo was an American aeronautical engineer inventor born in Sanger, California, U.S. Together with his wife, he is credited with the invention of the Rogallo wing, or "flexible wing", a precursor to the modern hang glider and paraglider. His patents were ranged over mechanical utility patents and ornamental design patents for wing controls, airfoils, target kite, flexible wing, and advanced configurations for flexible wing vehicles.
Karl Wilhelm Otto Lilienthal was a German pioneer of aviation who became known as the "flying man". He was the first person to make well-documented, repeated, successful flights with gliders, therefore making the idea of heavier-than-air aircraft a reality. Newspapers and magazines published photographs of Lilienthal gliding, favourably influencing public and scientific opinion about the possibility of flying machines becoming practical.
Taras Kiceniuk Jr. is a hang glider pioneer from southern California.
An ultralight trike or paratrike is a type of powered hang glider where flight control is by weight-shift. These aircraft have a fabric flex-wing from which is suspended a tricycle fuselage pod driven by a pusher propeller. The pod accommodates either a solo pilot, or a pilot and a single passenger. Trikes grant affordable, accessible, and exciting flying, and have been popular since the 1980s.
Hang gliding is an air sport employing a foot-launchable aircraft. Typically, a modern hang glider is constructed of an aluminium alloy or composite-framed fabric wing. The pilot is ensconced in a harness suspended from the airframe, and exercises control by shifting body weight in opposition to a control frame.
The NASA Paresev was an experimental NASA glider aircraft based upon the kite-parachute studies by NASA engineer Francis Rogallo.
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 often in pusher configuration, although some can be found in tractor 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.
Paul F. Bikle was director of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Dryden Flight Research Facility from 1959 until 1971, and author of more than 40 technical publications. He was associated with major aeronautical research programs including the hypersonic X-15 rocket plane, and was a world record-setting glider pilot.
A man-lifting kite is a kite designed to lift a person from the ground. Historically, man-lifting kites have been used chiefly for reconnaissance. Interest in their development declined with the advent of powered flight at the beginning of the 20th century. Recreational man-lifting kites gradually gained popularity through the latter half of the 20th century, branching into multiple sports. In the 21st century man-lifting kites are often used in kitesurfing, where brief launches can be followed by safe water landings and parasailing, where kites are towed behind a vehicle.
A glider is a fixed-wing aircraft that is supported in flight by the dynamic reaction of the air against its lifting surfaces, and whose free flight does not depend on an engine. Most gliders do not have an engine, although motor-gliders have small engines for extending their flight when necessary by sustaining the altitude with some being powerful enough to take off by self-launch.
Peter Elbert Brock is an American automotive and trailer designer, author and photojournalist, who is best known for his work on the Shelby Daytona Cobra Coupe and Corvette Sting Ray.
Barry Hill Palmer is an American aeronautical engineer, inventor, builder and pilot of the first hang glider based on the Rogallo wing or flexible wing. Palmer also designed, built and flew the first weight-shift ultralight trike aircraft.
Carl S. Bates was an aviation pioneer from Clear Lake, Iowa. He piloted gliders in 1899, and in 1906 he designed a gasoline-powered airplane that was equipped with an air-cooled engine, a metal propeller and metal wing rudders.
John Wallace Dickenson was an Australian inventor, who developed some liquid flow measuring devices and designed a successful hang glider configuration, for which he was awarded 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.
Charles Richard was a design engineer, who designed the collapsible four-tube Rogallo wing used in the experimental NASA Paresev glider. The wing configuration he created was used for manned hung-pilot kite-gliders and was to be found copied only with slight ornamental variation in a decade of hang gliders. Richards was of the Flight Research Center's Vehicle and System Dynamics Branch. The four-beamed wing folded from the nose plate; one of the beams was the spreader beam that kept the flexible-wing's sweep. Those in the following decade copying the Charles Richard wing configuration expanded kiting, hang gliding, ultralight, and trike flight.
Wladimir Talanczuk is a Ukrainian- born aeronautical engineer known for his hang glider and ultralight aircraft designs.
The Lookout Mountain SkyCycle, also marketed as The Freedom Machine, is an American ultralight trike that was designed by Matt Taber, produced by Lookout Mountain Flight Park of Rising Fawn, Georgia and introduced in 1997. The aircraft was supplied as a kit for amateur construction and also as plans.