Percy Pilcher Dies in Glider Crash

On October 2, 1899, the British aviation pioneer Percy Pilcher died from injuries suffered in a glider accident in Leicestershire, England. He was thirty-two years old. Pilcher had been one of the foremost glider designers and pilots in the world, inspired by and corresponding with the German gliding pioneer Otto Lilienthal.

Pilcher was demonstrating his glider, the Hawk, when a structural failure, reportedly in the tail or wing assembly, caused the craft to collapse and fall to the ground. He suffered fatal injuries in the crash, two days later succumbing in a manner strikingly similar to Lilienthal, who had himself been killed in a gliding accident three years earlier.

At the time of his death, Pilcher had been working toward a powered aircraft and is believed to have designed a small engine and a triplane to carry it. Some historians have argued that he might have achieved powered flight before the Wright brothers had he lived. His death cut short one of the most promising careers in early British aeronautics.