The Gemini paraglider / Rogallo Wing

[JAFO]

I wrote a bunch of articles about the paraglider and was surprised this morning to see "paraglider" in a headline in my news feed. This article is several days old. But this is an unexpected use:

I was talking to a guy I knew one day, and the subject of paragliders are terror weapons came up. He said it had been studied and they were surprised to find that while the wing was non-reflective, the spinning propeller was a huge primary radar reflector, and their software could easily distinguish between a slow moving bird and a slow moving propeller/buttfan on a paraglider trying to cross the border. But I think his organization had a little bigger budget/manpower.

[JAFO]

Stumbled across an interesting sidenote. I grew up in Alameda, CA,  and lived about 6 blocks from the site of this mishap when on Feb. 7, 1973 an A-7 on a night training flight went out of control and crashed into an apartment building. More then 30 people were killed, and another 40 injured.

I was reading about it and taking a trip down memory lane  when at the end it mentioned

A Loss to History...
While the human toll is regrettable, one of the lesser known losses from the mishap were the personal papers of famed civilian test pilot Scott Crossfield, spanning from 1958 to 1967.

According to Crossfield, "My ex-secretary from North American lived in that apartment house, and she had all my papers. I’d asked her to organize them and put them all into some kind of useful form. They were just the way we’d packed them up in boxes when we left Los Angeles. She’d gone out to dinner and this airplane burned the place down. All of those papers are gone, every note I ever took on the X-15, every bit of correspondence is gone.”

As Crossfield stated in a letter dated April 6, 1973 to J.M. Tobin - who was assigned to the office of Commandant, Twelfth Naval District and Commander, Naval Base, San Francisco - the details of the record loss were extensive: “The records covered all of my activities associated with the X-15 airplane design and test, the F-100, F-107, Sabreliner, and B-70 programs associated while I was Chief Engineering Test Pilot for North American. Also contained were the documents of the design development, test, and quality assurance of the Apollo, Saturn II booster, the paraglider, and the development history of the full pressure suit started with the Navy in 1951.”

https://www.check-six.com/Crash_Sites/Navy_A-7_CorsairII_crash_site.htm

[Blackstar]

Stumbled across an interesting sidenote. I grew up in Alameda, CA,  and lived about 6 blocks from the site of this mishap when on Feb. 7, 1973 an A-7 on a night training flight went out of control and crashed into an apartment building. More then 30 people were killed, and another 40 injured.

I was reading about it and taking a trip down memory lane  when at the end it mentioned

That is interesting. However, I don't think that's a huge loss for the paraglider history. One of the documents that I think is shared up thread is a summary of every flight test. If somebody wanted to write a more extensive history than I did, that would be invaluable.

[leovinus]

In the course of sleuthing through German archives, I have two or three copies of articles related to paraglider use as means of retrieval for Europa stage, sounding rocket, or even spaceplane. This is all work by Dornier System, 1963/1964. One title is "Research on Recovery and Guided Landing of a Re-usable Sounding Rocket" and author W. Kiessling. There was even windtunnel testing.

Obviously, there has been crossover with the Rogallo parawing and Gemini. What I wonder about is whether Rogallo et al ever met the Dornier engineers? Or whether the Dornier engineers just read the American papers and said "Why not?". Anyone?

[Blackstar]

Just to show that paragliders are still in use today:


https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/us/paraglider-survives-crash-florida-rescue.html?searchResultPosition=1

Paraglider Survives 500-Foot Crash Into Ocean Off Florida, Rescuers Say
A bystander captured the misadventure in a video that drew widespread attention online. Lifeguards and a snorkeler helped rescue the man.
By Neil Vigdor
Jan. 13, 2026

From her familiar perch in a lifeguard tower in Riviera Beach, Fla., Lt. Sara Williamson was scanning the water when her eyes darted to the sky.

A man piloting a powered paraglider had lost control of the flying contraption on Friday afternoon, sending him into a precarious spiral about 500 feet above the Atlantic Ocean, according to Lieutenant Williamson, a veteran lifeguard with the Palm Beach County Ocean Rescue unit.

Nearby along the shoreline of Singer Island, a beachgoer began recording the potentially life-threatening misadventure with a phone. The video of the free fall, splash landing and dramatic rescue drew widespread attention online.

Lieutenant Williamson scrambled with her lifeguard partner, John Wendel, by foot, ATV and paddle board to reach the man, who, she said in an interview on Tuesday, was in good condition and had avoided injury.

[mike robel]

Are there any indicators that paragliders/Rogallo Wing type recovery systems work any better today than during the Gemini period?


Or are other things (that I have no idea about) better?

[Blackstar]

Are there any indicators that paragliders/Rogallo Wing type recovery systems work any better today than during the Gemini period?

Or are other things (that I have no idea about) better?

I'm going to reply by not answering your question. I don't know the answer. However, it strikes me that we certainly have better materials now. The actual paraglider material should be better. We should be able to make better control systems for it so that it could be automated.

But I don't think this technology is the best solution to the problem. If the goal is precision landing on land, the X-38 approach is probably better. But any solution is also going to depend upon the amount of money you are willing to spend. We have decades of experience indicating that small winged vehicles are not ideal, and big winged vehicles are expensive.

[edzieba]

For non-rigid-spar Rogallo wings specifically, the paraglider (ram-air inflated rectangular parachute) has replaced them as more packable, easier to control, and more efficient (both in mass and glide ratio).
For minimally-controlled final descents, normal round parachutes beat parafoils up and down the street and can still be steered with a vented parachute so - parafoil or Rogallo - the niche for a vehicle that needs more control than a round parachute can afford, but less than would require a lifting body, is likely small enough that the few cases where it makes sense probably can't support the R&D needed - given the already known R&D spend (in time and money) on just regular non-steered parachutes during Commercial Crew despite their extensive flight heritage and industrial base.

[JAFO]

Just to show that paragliders are still in use today:

Paragliders have come a long way since the early days when I took lessons on them, and people (mostly in Europe) routinely fly them in thermally conditions. Part of the training is even to partially collapse the canopy and recover/reinflate (they call it"big ears"), as often happens in those conditions. As an old rigid frame/flex wing pilot I liked the idea of the slower takeoff and landing speeds of a paraglider, but never got comfortable with the possibility of a low altitude collapse and after witnessing a couple mishaps injure friends I decided "not for me."

However, in the hands of trained professionals, like the Arithymia Demo Team here at the Sun n' Fun Airshow in 2024 flying powered parawings, they can be amazing. I used to be part of the team that ran the SnF airshow, and the professionalism of the Arithymia Team was right up there with the rest of the acts, even though the Air Boss jokingly called them "buttfan pilots" during the brief..     
https://www.ushpa.org/    https://www.airythmia.com/

[mike robel]

I'm going to reply by not answering your question. I don't know the answer. However, it strikes me that we certainly have better materials now. The actual paraglider material should be better. We should be able to make better control systems for it so that it could be automated.

Thanks for your answer.

[darkenfast]

The "what-if" question for me is: What if NASA had decided to go with a Mercury-style setup from the beginning? You know, couches instead of ejection seats, escape tower, main and reserve chutes, etc. Could Titan II have handled it? There certainly would've been a lot more space inside the cabin! 

[Blackstar]

This is in a current aviation magazine in an article about the X-38. I don't remember seeing this time-lapse before.