William Edward Norman Bennett was born in Korumburra, Australia, on Sept. 26, 1931. He served in the Australian Royal Navy as a machinist, and afterward continued to pursue activities related to water, in particular water-skiing. He was ranked eighth in the world in barefoot water-skiing in the 1960’s.
Bill Bennett, a pioneer aviator and entrepreneur who helped introduce the fledgling sport of hang gliding to America in the 1960’s and 70’s
Mr. Bennett, who moved to the United States from Australia in 1969, was known for his bold barnstorming flights in hang gliders in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. He circumnavigated the Statue of Liberty in 1969 and landed at its base.
John Dickenson, an Australian electronics technician, saw a picture of the Rogallo invention in a magazine, and used it as the basis for making the first human-carrying gliders in 1963, according to the Smithsonian. Mr. Bennett and his friend Bill Moyes, friends of Mr. Dickenson through water-skiing, took up the sport; Mr. Moyes began making and selling hang gliders in Australia, Mr. Bennett in California.
Mr. Bennett’s company, Delta Wing Kites and Gliders in Los Angeles, was among the first to make and sell hang gliders in the United States.
Hang gliders were originally pulled by boats, then by planes. Mr. Bennett, probably in 1969 or 1970, according to a 1990 article in The Los Angeles Times, was demonstrating a hang glider towed by a car at the Ontario Motor Speedway in California when the rope broke. “Bennett was forced to maneuver and land the glider for the first time without being attached,” The Times reported. “The crowd, assuming it was part of the act, gave rousing applause.”
Mr. Bennett and Mr. Moyes both added design improvements. Mr. Harris said Mr. Bennett’s most important contribution was a better system for bracing the wings.
In 1972, he was hired as the stunt pilot double for the actor Roger Moore, playing James Bond for a hanggliding scene in the film “Live and Let Die.”
But by the mid-1980’s, Mr. Bennett’s aircraft could not keep pace with more innovative designs by competitors, and Delta Wing Kites and Gliders folded in 1989.
In the 1997 book “Sky Adventures,” the editors Jim Palmieri and Maggie Palmieri said Mr. Bennett’s other stunts after moving to the United States included flying higher than a mile and being the first to launch a hang glider from a hot-air balloon, thereby setting a world altitude record of 10,000 feet for hang gliders.
On 7 October 2004, Mr. Bennett was piloting a powered hang glider at the airport in Lake Havasu City, Ariz., where he lived, with an instructor in order to be recertified to fly. In the accident the instructor, Drew Reeves, received multiple injuries during takeoff and Bennett died in the crash. He was 73.
In addition to his fiancée, Mr. Bennett was survived by his sons, Gary and Glenn, of Australia; his daughters, Michelle Martin and Nicole McKinney, both of Lake Havasu City; his stepson, Dennis Firestone of Loma Linda, Calif.; his brother, Raymond, of Australia; his sister, Cheryle Winkler of Australia; seven grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter.
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