Meet Jack Vine – relentless builder of flying machines, inventor, and artist par excellence
Gigi Lewis had a delightful afternoon of poring over interesting clippings and other memorabilia with Knysna resident Harold S Jackson
Birdmen come in many different guises. Most of them have aeronautical connotations. Some take chances in escaping prison, some have pleasure in gliding or paragliding, and many have fuelled the imagination of film producers.
But unlike the Colditz Cock – the famed glider built but never used by British prisoners of WWII, to escape the camp at Colditz Castle in Germany – the planes that Harold’s grandfather, Jack Vine, built were all high-flyers.
Born in England in 1889 Jack, as he preferred to be called, came to South Africa in 1910, as chauffeur and mechanic for the Rolls Royoe of the first Governor General of the Union, Lord Herbert Gladstone.
During this period, Jack’s ambition to build and fly a plane was highly developed but stifled by the prohibitive cost of an engine. Never deterred, he decided instead to build a man-operated flying machine in the Government House garage in Pretoria, which he completed in 1991.
On a rudimentary frame of sturdy poplar wood, supported by struts, he anchored two large wings that resembled a biplane sans engine, with an arrangement of wires and turnbuckles inside the wings.
Jack Stood inside the wooden Frame with his hands and fore-arms resting along the bar, legs down and controlling the apparatus with the weight and strength of his body.
Behind Government House, on a hill, was a piece of ground from where Jack made his first attempt to fly with the help of a friend, Willie Wells, and two “Africans”.
He dropped over the steep hill and after about 80 feet, was lifted into the air – but before long he started to fall.
“I shall never forget that first sensation,” Jack recalled later, after a hard landing that nonetheless kept the plane right side up. He had flown a mile and a quarter.
“I had 110 feeling of falling at all. I just saw the rocks of the hillside rushing up at me. By swinging and jerking my body to level out when I came close to the ground, I started to pedal. I had worked it all out beforehand.
“1 reckoned that, if I started running in the air, I would keep my feet intact in spite of the speed when landing.”
This he did. Jack was possibly the first South African to build and fly a plane.
He left the government service and during WWI served in a technical capacity in the SA Aviation Corps. He had previously moved to Krugersdorp and set up an engineering business on the West Rand.
In the 1930s, he built three aircraft, all sleek and fast monoplanes. One of them was built for the Rand Gliding Club in Krugersdorp of which he was a founder. He later set a South African gliding record.
When Jack befriended the mathematics master at Krugersdorp High School, PM Goedvolk. they carried out research together, which led to the completion of an A-framed glider called ‘Flip’ in 1930. Using a winch of Jack s own design for lift-off, he taught himself to fly.
In 1931 they produced a more advanced pedal-plane named Avis’. The wing design was modelled on data obtained from Jack s study of vultures in Magaliesberg. It measured about 6m in length and had a wingspan of about 14m. Its longest flight was 6 hours and 35 minutes.
An accomplished artist. Jack’s landscape paintings and sketches of eagle and vulture wings were influential in his study of aerodynamics.
In an interview with James Clarke for his article ‘South Africa’s Birds of Prey’ around I960, Jack reveals: “Aeronautics have a long way to go before a man can match birds. In fact, aircraft engineering when compared with the structure and flying capabilities of an eagle is in its infancy.”
No truer words were spoken at the time. Jack’s ambitious entry of his man-powered aircraft in 1962 to compete for a R10.000 Commonwealth prize ended with a spectacular crash at Randfontein, which he escaped with a bruised hand. He had cruised for 150m.
The reason the plane came down was a cross-wind that sent the plane into a sideslip before nosediving into the ground. Jack was 73 at the time.
Undeterred, he immediately set about drawing and building his ultimate masterpiece in man-powered aerodynamic engineering, Sadly, the aircraft has never flown for Jack William Vine died in November 1964, aged 76, only days before the great day of testing it.
The plane was donated to the Royal Aeronautical Society (SA branch)
‘We bring you the latest Knysna | Garden Route News’