By Andy Austin

A couple of years ago Jules Sanderson undertook to teach young paraplegic wheelchair athletes to paraglide from Bald Hill at Stanwell Park and land on the turf below. Meanwhile Pepi Lepre helped tackle the problem of disseminating skills to hang glider pilots which might help them survive water landings. Both programs were sensationally successful and honoured by the NSW State Government.

About 23 years earlier, Wayne Blackmore, a paraplegic hang glider pilot, landed in deep water and was not so lucky. He was born in 1951 in Adelaide, a natural athlete and an aero-nut from the start. At age 18 he won a pilot cadetship in the RAAF, and while in pilot training at Point Cook he attended a rock concert at the Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne where he saw a man in a white suit spiralling down in a kite from way above. This led him to build his own "man-lifting kite" from a design in a NASA magazine article - a typical Rogallo with terylene sailcloth, king post and A-frame. He flew this wearing a harness and a pair of skis behind a boat. On 1 November 1971 he flew it fixed by a rope to a dune buggy on an airstrip. On his first flight he got to 20m, and on the second, after adjusting it to go faster, he got to 30m, at which point the rope snapped and the wing stalled, resulting in a dive into the bitumen. He survived, but was paralysed from the chest down, confining him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
In December '73 his family took him to see friends in California who were raving about hang gliders flying free from a 600m hill at Lake Elsinore, 100km east of LA, landing at the bottom five or six minutes later! Back home he bought a Wings Albatros, made in Melbourne, a delta wing with a curved leading edge, but none of his mates who tested it could get it to fly, possibly because they had no idea how to foot launch from a hill...
On a trip to New Zealand in March '75 he saw a couple of blokes with a hang glider on top of their car. They took him to several sites around Christchurch that were up to 1650m high (Coronet Peak and Arthurs Park) where they were flying around and staying up for more than fifteen minutes at a time! And they were doing it five days a week.
This inspired Wayne to modify the Alby, building in a plastic bucket seat below the base bar and linking a wire from the hang point to his feet, then extending the downtubes to 8ft to take a couple of 35cm wheels with large pneumatic tyres to land on, with the keel as a tail skid. First flight was a nose-up, a blow back over launch, a stall and a broken A-frame. But on 1 June in milder air he managed seven flights, some for 30m at 1ft, and one for 250m at 100ft.
In no time he was soaring the ridges and dunes and landing on top, and from then on things got better and better. Alby could fly for three hours at a time, do 360's, figure of 8's, stall turns, spot landings - the lot. He bought a higher performance kite, a Twister from Free Flight, and first flew it in a 30+ knot breeze. It went straight up and over the back with the bar right in. He survived, but he had diarrhoea for a week. The Twister, though, became the best kite he'd ever flown, and taught him to thermal.
In 1977 long flights were becoming common and the challenge was to fly across Rapid Bay, south of Adelaide. This was a 3km flight over the open sea. They calculated it could be done if you started off with a height of 450m above the southern cliffs and headed downwind across the bay 600-700m offshore to the cliffs on the far side. Plan B was to head crosswind for the beach if your height fell below 215m. Two pilots had succeeded in getting across, and four to land on the beach. He had a go with several others in January '77, but he was too low and made a rough beach landing. However he did succeed in getting across in mid-July. He then tried it again two weeks later. As he began the wind dropped and veered to offshore. About 100m from the beach he was about 10m high. The water was rough. One wheel touched a wave; he pushed out and cartwheeled to the right, and sank within seconds. An RAAF helicopter and police divers brought him ashore next day.
A few weeks before his final flight he was asked to write an article to explain his obsession with hang gliding. In it he said, "For me the fascination, the meaning, the very reason I engage in hang gliding, has little to do with either sport or thrills - it involves much more. To me, hang gliding is life itself, the very reason for living".

Wayne Blackmore is the inspiration for the Wheelchair and Water Landing Programs we conduct today, helping pilots to both realise their dreams and stay safe whilst doing so.

(Some facts for this article obtained from "Born to Fly", M.N.Brearley,1981)