Pilcher bilger (or Jarrett's reputation goes down the plughole)
Facts from tonight's Horizon tosh:
1. Pilcher based his later designs on Otto Lilienthal's gliders. His flawed weight-shift control system exposed him to the same danger of stalling as Otto's. Had his Hawk not killed him through plain structural failure, he might well have died in a stalling accident.
2. Pilcher copied his multiplane powered aircraft design from Chanute. Like Chanute, he'd not thought of effective (Wright-pattern wing-warping or aileron) lateral control.
3. Pilcher's i.c. engine blew up.
4. The surviving Pilcher drawings show a quadraplane - not a triplane, as 'replicated' in the asinine TV programme.
5. There is no record of Pilcher's propeller design - so, naturally, he would have copied the props from Maxim's non-flying heap of junk (yes?)
6. Pilcher's multiple lift panel wings did not work and were a retrograde step from his earlier single-panel efforts, suggesting he had a limited idea of where he was going - or even that blind guesswork played a significant part in his research.
6. Pilcher had not though of, nor left any record of, the pilot suspension sytem used in the replica, nor the problem of propeller torque effect, nor the Wright-pattern wing warping that allowed the 'replica' to fly.
And then the credulous viewer is expected to believe that dear old Percy nearly beat the Wrights to it.
Absolute balls.