The Moment

of Truth

At four o’clock in the morning one day in mid

July I was standing in the fresh air enjoying

a brew outside a hangar at Lasham Airfield,

waiting for the lads inside to finish putting the

SUHPA together.

E HAD   arrived the previous evening

and had started assembling our aircraft,

but I had been sent off to get some kip

while the rest of the team soldiered on. I’ll never

say a word ever again about students being lazy

beggars, especially the ones at Southampton.

SUMPAC students had worked through the

night on their aircraft and here we were, more

than fifty years later, with another bunch of

Southampton students putting in some proper

graft. Three of them, Jacob, Ruben and Chris,

had carried on working with Alex and Ben while

I got my head down to make sure that I could

pummel those pedals.

W

Also on hand was a very experienced HPA

expert, Dr Bill Brooks. Chairman of the RAeS

human-powered flight group and a highly

qualified aircraft designer, Bill is the man who

runs the Icarus Cup. He had been there in the

background all along, advising us on our HPA

build, and now that we were about to give it

a whirl for the first time he was to play a very

active part in the proceedings. While I pedalled

the HPA down the runway, he would be

keeping pace with the aircraft on another bike,

operating the remote control handset. With

the responsibility of the rudder and elevators

out of my hands – quite literally – all I had to

concentrate on was generating the power to get

us airborne.

124  HUMAN POWERED AIRCRAFT

Above: Once I was sealed into the cockpit there wasn’t

much elbow room, but keeping the SUHPA light meant

no wasted space.

Despite all the work that had been put in, the

sectional foam wing wasn’t quite ready. We

still had a couple of weeks before the Icarus

Cup event, so we were confident that we

would have the new wing on the day, and in

the meantime we had borrowed a film-covered

wing from an earlier HPA model. It wouldn’t

work as well as we hoped our wing would,

but it would let us test out the rest of our

HPA set-up.

As the sun’s rays were starting to light up the

sky, the HPA was rolled out, ready to go. We

were making our flying attempt at the crack

of dawn because we knew we could rely on

still air at this time of day, before the sun had

had a chance to heat up the ground, heat up

the air and produce movement in the air. I

squeezed into the cockpit and was sealed in