https://www.airspacemag.com/airspacemag/rise-and-fall-of-hang-gliding-180972601

To see the feral origins of hang gliding as a popular sport, do a search on YouTube for the 1971 Otto Lilienthal Universal Hang Glider Championship—the first of its kind in the United States, held at Corona del Mar, California. Young enthusiasts run down grassy hills, holding homemade flying contraptions, some of which were actually made from plastic sheeting. If they do launch, the pilots simply hang by their armpits and swing their legs around in an attempt to steer the glider by weight shifting. There’s more than one crash and more than one run down the hill without getting airborne. The film ends with a glider crashing into the cameraman. National Geographic covered the 1971 event; the article “got a lot of people building hang gliders,” recalls Harris.

Harris got started when he saw a picture of a hang glider in his local paper. “It was an epiphany — a flying machine you could put on top of your car. I couldn’t think about anything else,” he says. Harris ordered a glider, which came with a silent Super-8 film that showed him how to launch and land. With some friends, he took it to Jockey’s Ridge, a giant sand dune on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and they taught themselves to fly. Soon after, Kitty Hawk Kites — now the largest hang gliding school in the country — was born.

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