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You can stunt these things better than those two can." "Duck!" Joe snarled. He let loose a burst at the pursuing gliders over the smaller man's head, and just missing his own tail section. They sped down almost to tree level at fantastic speed for a glider.
In a rather rare monograph, entitled Experiments in Flying, Chanute states that he found the Lilienthal glider hazardous and decided to test the value of an idea of his own; in this he followed the same general method, but reversed the principle upon which Lilienthal had depended for maintaining his equilibrium in the air.
It is not our purpose to give a treatise on this subject but to confine this chapter to an exposition of a few of the gliders and model forms which are found to be most efficient for experimental work. AN EFFICIENT GLIDER. Probably the simplest and most efficient glider, and one which can be made in a few moments, is to make a copy of the deltoid kite, previously referred to.
The machine now gave far better results; on the first glide into a head wind Pilcher rose to a height of twelve feet and remained in the the air for a third of a minute; in the second attempt a rope was used to tow the glider, which rose to twenty feet and did not come to earth again until nearly a minute had passed.
They still found, however, that the lift was not as great as it should have been; while the drag remained, as in the previous glider, surprisingly small. The result of this is that the pressure actually tends to draw the machine forward into the wind hence the small amount of drag, which had puzzled Wilbur and Orville Wright.
"I can promise you a tough problem as well as an interesting one." Arcot smiled. "If the thing works, as I expect it to, you'll have a job that will certainly be a feather for your cap. Also it will be a change." "Well, with that inducement, I'll certainly be here. But I think that pirate could give us some hints on design. How does he get his glider ten miles up?
They found that in order to support a man on it the glider required an angle nearer twenty degrees than three, and even with the wind at thirty miles an hour they could not get down to the planned angle of three degrees. 'Later, when the wind was too light to support the machine with a man on it, they tested it as a kite, working the rudders by cords.
Joe Mauser growled, "What'd you mean, why not?" Freddy said slowly, "Why can't you have some blood and guts combat, right up there in that glider?" "Have you gone drivel-happy?" But the little man was on his feet, pacing the floor quickly, irritably, but still happily. "A dogfight. A natural. Listen, you ever heard about dogfights, major?" "You mean pitdogs, like in Wales, in the old days?"
Freddy was staring below, trying to understand the terrain from this perspective. While Joe was tripping the lever which let the tow rope drop away from the glider, the Telly reporter said, "Both of them used to fly lightplanes for sport. When you started this new glider angle, they must've seen the possibilities and took it up immediately.
In that lecture Wilbur detailed the way in which he and his brother came to interest themselves in aeronautical problems and constructed their first glider.
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