A MARLBOROUGH-based aircraft designer has enabled a Victorian design for the first heavier-than-air flying machine to take off more than 100 years after its creator met his demise.

Dr Bill Brooks of Pegasus Aviation of Manton, was at the head of a team which built the triplane from the design by air enthusiast Percy Pilcher, who died days before his revolutionary design was due to take to the air.

Had Mr Pilcher succeeded as he intended in 1899, he would have been four years ahead of the American pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright, who managed to get their aeroplane airborne at Kitty Hawk in the United States 100 years ago this year.

The efforts of Dr Brooks and his team to build and fly Mr Pilcher's design are documented on the Horizon programme, due to be broadcast tonight at 9pm.

Dr Brooks said: "We've gained a reputation for making funny planes from our contributions to two programmes in the Scrapheap Challenge series. We built a glider from scrap and then a very effective biplane in the Californian desert near Los Angeles last year, which was broadcast last Christmas.

"The Percy Pilcher project particularly appealed to us because he was such an amazing character and he was so close to being the first man to fly a heavier-than-air machine."

Mr Pilcher was a great hang-gliding enthusiast, more than a century before it became the popular sport that it is today. He was an admirer of the German air designer Otto Lilienthal, and it was on one of Herr Lilienthal's gliders that Mr Pilcher met his demise.

Dr Brooks said: "He had built the triplane with a Walter Wilson engine fitted to it and was within days of testing it in flight when a crankshaft broke.

"He was then killed on the glider a couple of days later, before he could fly the triplane."

Viewers will be able to see the 100-year-old British design take to the air at Cranfield University's airstrip, but not all was straightforward and Dr Brooks has video footage of when the first test flight came to grief.

He said: "The torque reaction to the motion of the engine meant that it tended to twist in flight and there were problems with yaw. We solved them by putting a one-kilogram piece of lead on one wing and fitting fixed tabs on both wings."

On the first flight the plane left the ground but was then caught by a gust of wind. One wing tipped to the ground and the plane crashed. The following day, however, all the problems had been solved and it flew like a bird for one minute and 25 seconds, considerably longer than the Kitty Hawk's first flight.

Dr Brooks said: "We had to land or risk crashing into a nearby garden."

The plane will live at Shuttleworth air collection in Bedford and take evening flights during the summer.

He added: "Pilcher deserves a lot more recognition because he got a lot closer to solving the problems of heavier-than-air flight than the Wright brothers."

Dr Brooks has been designing and making model aircraft since he was seven years old. He graduated to hang gliders in the late 1970s and continued his interest when he studied design technology at Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry.

Microlight aircraft were just appearing. Many of them were little more than hang gliders with chain saw motors welded on. After a spate of fatal accidents, the Civil Aviation Authority stepped in to regulate the sport.

Dr Brooks was commissioned to design a trike base that would lend the microlight more stability and safety.

While still working as a post-graduate student at Cranfield University, he began an association with what was then Solar Wings, set up by Mark Southall, Dave Raymond and Cliff Ingram in 1978 at the former Pelham Puppets factory in Marlborough, but then operating in premises behind Skurray's garage in George Lane.

After a number of mergers, it became Pegasus in 1984. It moved to Manton airfield in 1992. Recently, Pegasus chairman Keith Duckworth acquired Main Air Sports of Rochdale and the merger resulted in a number of redundancies at Manton.