Wing · Prehistory
1986
The Wind Weapon
Tom Magruder builds a symmetrical wing that pivots on a mast, to fly off the waves; it never catches on.
Wind Weapon
Tom Magruder's wing on a mast, Columbia River Gorge, 1986
In 1986 Tom Magruder took a different route to the same dream. On the Columbia River Gorge he sailed his own design, the Wind Weapon: a symmetrical wing on a mast, attached with a pivot. “It started as a dream to fly like a sea bird,” he said later.
The rig was built from aluminium tubes, a boom with three spars and almost twenty pre-curved aluminium battens, with wing sails in several sizes. It could be tilted flat for short flights, and in strong wind it allowed high jumps.
It did not sell. The large board underneath caused too much friction, and the mast and movable wing were clumsy. It offered few practical advantages over a normal windsurf rig. When a magazine tested a Wind Weapon decades later, a colleague watching the test said he understood why it had never caught on.
Like Drake’s hand sail it came before the hydrofoil.