These are stills of the video you can find more below. I was amazed by its speed when comparing it to the other gliders at this competition.Īlthough this construction is a wooden one, the glider is still light enough to be carried by its pilot. In this competition he overshot the target, which was very very hard to avoid due to the much higher speed of this glider. Control is by those surfaces just below and behind the wingtips trailing edge and by spoilers which come out on top of the wing (see next chapter). Here you already see that this glider is totally different from any other early hangglider. The video also has a Easyriser competing. Thanks to jcoyier of the Rigidwing yahoo group, i found this video again in which a Mitchell Wing competes with a lot of different hanggliders. Video of Howard Long's Mitchell Wing glider

George Worthington, holder of eight world records in hang gliding and author of the book In Search of World Records, wrote in the book.'I predict that the Mitchell Wing will be the highest performance foot-launced hang glider we'll see for a long time.' He was right and it was from this preliminary design that Mitchell developed his later powered models. The result was the foot-launched Mitchell Wing and it astounded the world of hang gliding. Howard Long took an interest in the half-forgotten project and asked Mitchell to make him a flying wing hang glider. Then in 1974, with the advent of hang glider mania, the Mitchell Wing resurfaced.

The War's specific needs for large payload capacity and space ruled out the flying wing design and Mitchell's vision lost its place in aviation history. But WWII interrupted his research and experiments. It was back in the early 1940's that Don Mitchell first became involved with flying wing glider design and construction.

Rigid wing hang glider plans