Bill Moyes, Australian ‘Birdman’ who popularized hang gliding, dies at 92

Growing up in Australia, Bill Moyes would spend hours at the beach watching seagulls soar and glide, marveling at their aerodynamics. At night, he dreamed of flying.

“I didn’t fly like Superman with my arms out in front of me,” he recalled decades later. “Nor did I flap my wings to fly. I wasn’t a bird. I was a boy with wings.”

One winter day in 1968, Moyes became a man with wings. He took a ski lift to the top of Mount Crackenback, in the Australian Alps, harnessed himself to a device that looked like a giant kite and skied off a cliff.

“As the flight had not been publicized,” the newspaper The Sunday Sun reported, “skiers on the slopes watched incredulously and people ran out of lodges and the hotel to watch the spectacular ‘birdman.’”

Moyes flew at 1,000 feet for almost 2 miles, setting the world record for the longest unassisted flight, according to newspaper accounts. The triumph marked the beginnings of hang gliding, a sport Moyes popularized by flying into the Grand Canyon, soaring off Mount Kilimanjaro and being towed behind an airplane at 8,600 feet.

“Rarely does anyone have the opportunity to do something that they’ve never seen before,” Ken de Russy, a hang-gliding historian in Anacortes, Washington, said in an interview. “That takes a very special combination of crazy and daring. Bill Moyes had that. He was a showman.”

Moyes died Sept. 24 at a hospital in Sydney, his daughter, Vicki Cain, said. He was 92.

During the 1970s and ’80s, Moyes was one of the most sought-after headliners at county fairs and air shows across the world. Known variously as Australia’s Birdman, the Sensational Flying Jetman and the Modern-Day Icarus, Moyes typically used a speeding dune buggy to launch himself into flight, like a little boy running with a kite.

He nearly killed himself several times.

In 1972, at a show in Jamestown, North Dakota, he fell 300 feet after the towing rope snapped. He sustained multiple fractures and was taken by ambulance to a hospital, where he spent several weeks recuperating.

“We bled almost every time we flew,” Moyes often said.

On another occasion, he attempted, unsuccessfully, to launch from a speeding motorcycle that he was also driving. He did not break any bones. He also did not try that again.

Flying into the Grand Canyon landed him in jail.

It was 1970, just as hang gliding was taking off as a sport. Thousands of gliders had been sold in the United States, and Moyes had recently started Moyes Delta Gliders, a manufacturer of hang gliders that still exists today, part of a $1.51 billion worldwide industry.

To prepare for the Grand Canyon stunt, he stood at the rim and tossed paper airplanes down to chart their path. A National Park Service ranger asked what he was up to. Moyes said he planned to fly into the canyon.

“This is a park, not a bloody circus,” the ranger told him, according to Moyes’ account in The Chicago Tribune. “Besides, I don’t think you can do it anyway.”

That really set Moyes off.

“Whenever someone says something can’t be done, that’s when I have to do it,” he was quoted as saying in “And the World Could Fly: The Birth and Growth of Hang Gliding and Paragliding” (2005).

Moyes left, but returned a few days later with a team to help him set up the glider.

“A ranger was guarding the rim, but we started nearly a quarter-mile away,” he told the Tribune. “I just waved at him as I flew over his head.”

Moyes was taken into custody after landing. He spent two nights in jail and was fined several hundred dollars.

Appearing on the Australian television show “This Is Your Life” in 1980, he said that it was “impossible to describe the exhilaration” of such stunts.

“From the day you’re born, you’re familiar with the force of gravity,” he observed. “And then one day you’ll step off, and you’ll be free of it. And how can I describe that? I can’t put it into words. But once you’ve done it, you won’t be able to describe itm either.”

William Thomas John Moyes was born on July 12, 1932, in Bronte, a beachside community in New South Wales, Australia. His father, William Moyes, was a police detective. His mother, Mary (Taranto) Moyes, spent much of her time trying to corral Bill during childhood and adolescence.

“He was a scalawag and pyromaniac,” Cain, his daughter, said in an interview. “He very much liked to go out and do reckless things.”

Moyes studied auto repair at Sydney Technical College and graduated in 1949, eventually opening his own repair shop. In his early 30s, he took up water-skiing.

Around the same time, John Dickenson, a television repairman who lived nearby, was trying to build a kite that could be flown while being towed by a boat.

Dickenson’s inspiration was a picture in a magazine that “showed a scale model of NASA’s experimental paraglider research vehicle, a kite-parachute being evaluated as a recovery system for space capsules,” he told Cross Country Magazine in 2023.

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“To me this looked like a really good answer,” Dickenson added, “because I was trying to make a kite that would descend in a controlled manner, even if the rope broke.”

He added a trapeze swing that the pilot could manipulate for steering. His design, which went through several iterations, is widely regarded as the first hang glider.

Moyes was one of the test pilots. In 1968, he flew to an elevation of 2,870 feet across Lake Ellesmere, in New Zealand. A few months later, he flew off Mount Crackenback.

Moyes married Molly Lowe in 1950. In addition to their daughter Vicki, his wife survives him, along with three other children, Debra Gray, Jennifer Lea and Stephen Moyes, a champion hang glider; 14 grandchildren; and 18 great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Susan Harris, died in 2009.

When Moyes took flight, he became a subject of some fascination to birds.

Once, an eagle followed him. Another time, he noticed a bird looking straight at him — and then doing a double take.

“You look a bird in the eye and you know that bird can fly,” he told The Toronto Star in 1970. “Well, so can I.”