Modern Living: They Wanted Wings

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Kenneth Piper last April became the first man to fly from Twickenham Bridge into the Thames. It was not much of a flight, actually—about 40 feet, straight down—but the fact that Piper was borne by homemade wings gave it an added dimension of pathos. Walter Cornelius (the "Birdman of Peterborough") can identify only too well with Piper's plunge; in December he zoomed from a supermarket roof straight into the River Nene, because, as he later complained, "the elastic broke on my wings."

Both Piper and Cornelius belong to a flock of Britons fascinated by the dream of man-powered flight and undeterred by a fearsome failure rate that goes back to Icarus. At Selsey Bill, Sussex, this month, twelve birdmen gathered to contend for a $2,400 prize offered by the local Royal Air Force Association to the first man to fly 50 yards under his own power. Some 6,000 turned up to watch contestants take off from a 25-ft.-high platform at the end of a lifeboat jetty. No one was injured, but the splashdowns rivaled any in the Apollo series.

Most grotesque was Roy Bracher, who wore steel-reinforced wings, a bird mask, flippers with claws painted on them, and feathery strips of cloth sewn onto his Mickey Mouse T shirt. Stephen Crouch, dressed as a witch, launched himself on a broomstick. Both plummeted into the water. David Fenwick, a country club owner, sported the most substantial pair of wings: they were 30 feet across, made of spinnaker nylon and spruce and weighed 60 lbs. Fenwick fell like a stone.

It was left to 13-year-old David Cathro, flapping wings made of bamboo and plastic, to make the best flight of the day: he hit the water all of 20 feet from the launch pad. "I talked my mum into letting me have a go," he confessed, "because I hold a bronze medal for swimming."