The Ground

Breakers

The Icarus Cup is an annual event for HPAs

and is organised by the RAeS. I went to get

some inspiration from a team who’d been

there in the early days.

HE competition is run over several

days and involves different challenges

such as the longest flight, a 200-metre

sprint, a 1-kilometre race, a slalom course,

accuracy in take-off and landing, and a race

round a triangular course. ‘But why?’ I hear you

ask. ‘Surely all of these things were done by

HPA teams years ago?’ You’re not wrong, but

the way they are trying to do them nowadays is

very different from the way they were done

back in the day.

T

One of the aims of the RAeS is to encourage

the development of HPAs so that human

powered flying can become a sport in which

enthusiasts can compete against each other –

like hang-gliding or sailing. With that aim in

mind, they are encouraging people to design

their own HPAs, but the new designs have to be

an attempt to make the HPA a more practical

vehicle. The Kremer Prize winners were

brilliant machines, but they were very fragile.

If HPA flying was to become a recreational

sport, the RAeS wanted teams to come up

with aircraft that could be flown under any

reasonable conditions. Not only that, they

wanted aircraft kits that could easily be

transported to a venue and assembled. Our

SUHPA design had a standard racing bike

at its heart, and the rest of it could easily be

broken down to fit into the back of a large car.

It was a fair way from something that anyone

114  HUMAN POWERED AIRCRAFT

Above: The SUMPAC, clad in its full outer skin, looks

reasonably robust, but the slightest damage caused

during any of the 35 failed flight attempts meant long

hours of repair work.

could bolt together at a moment’s notice, but it

was certainly in keeping with the spirit of the

RAeS’s plans for HPAs.

If we were going to fly our HPA in a

competition, I wanted to get some flying tips

from people who had been through what I

was going to have to do – and who better than

the SUMPAC (Southampton University Man

Powered Aircraft) flyers who made that first

historic flight back in 1961. Some never left the

protection of their hangars if there was any

chance of a wind stronger than 4 mph, and

attempting a turn was not something that you

did if there was a wind of 1 mph.