At NASA 1964-1972A Story of Failures
We divided Rogallo’s professional career at NASA into two chapters. We see his exchange of letters with John Dickenson as a significant point. We don’t doubt that Rogallo was passionate when trying to realise his dreams, but he wasn’t the one to find the Key to the Kingdom.
His reaction – hiding the solution from the aviation community – reveals the kind of man he was. He was the man who, in the same manner, had hidden the truth about Allison and had lied about his Flexikite being patented. The man who, in a NASA documentary in 1975, stood in front of a Dickenson Glider and claimed that it was his invention.
His 1972 presentation is a well-disguised story of failure.
When Rogallo left NASA, his work had no lasting influence on the engineers in NASA, the Department of Defense, and their contractors. They hardly ever referred to him. His patents and publications had no impact. Rogallo wrote two Technical Notes and three Technical Memoranda reporting on the research of others that was tested in the wind tunnels he ran.
Only the NASA administration seemed to believe in Rogallo. They awarded him a big money prize. They made him their PR man. They used him even when he had left NASA. They supported the myth that Rogallo was the father of everything flexible and that he invented the modern hang glider in a desperate attempt to cover up the almost complete failure that the Paraglider Development Program turned out to be.
Almost… Only one thing evolved from NASA’s research, and the millions spent, the parasail-like reserve parachute that a few hang glider and paraglider pilots use today. They are potentially dangerous as the parachute can enter into a mirror effect with the wing, significantly increasing descent speed. They must be used in conjunction with a main wing release device. They are called… Rogallos !
In the next chapter, we will see how, from the early 1970s, the myth was built and grew to momentous proportions. It started in the USA and spread like a virus, as Rogallo stole the credit for John Dickenson’s brilliant invention. And America stole one of the greatest Australian inventions of all time.