IN AN AGE when adventurers are said to have no frontiers left to conquer, the Italian aviator Angelo d’Arrigo soared to national fame by realising the dream of Daedalus, imitating the gliding techniques of migratory birds to make flights of immense distance with minimal use of power.

In 2003, at the invitation of Russian scientists, d’Arrigo took part in a project designed to help to save the Siberian crane from extinction. Several birds had been born in captivity, but without knowledge of their traditional migration route from the Arctic Circle to winter feeding grounds by the Caspian Sea there was no hope of their being released safely to build up numbers in the wild.

Using the knowledge that the chicks imprint on the first object they see after hatching, the biologists placed several eggs beneath the wings of d’Arrigo’s hang-glider and waited. As they grew, the cranes came to regard d’Arrigo’s craft as their surrogate parent, and when the migrating season came he was able to coax them into flying alongside him.

Waiting each morning for suitable winds on which to drift, they travelled the 3,300 miles across Central Asia from their breeding habitat on the banks of the Ob.

A similar method had been used before in North America to educate sandhill cranes and Canada geese (as seen in the 1996 film Fly Away Home), but the distance of his journey validated d’Arrigo’s theories as to the possibilities afforded by studying bird flight.

His researches had begun in 1991, when by flying a single-seat tricycle from Sicily to Egypt he hoped to establish a record for the longest free flight without landing. The voyage did not go quite as planned, and having covered some 1,100 miles over water along a migration route, he landed in Libya, from which he was deported after a month of close acquaintanceship with the authorities’ hospitality.

Nonetheless, his interest persisted in using thermal currents to coast as birds do, and in 2002 he traversed the North African Sahara in stages by hang-glider. Each morning he would be towed aloft by the British microlight pilot Richard Meredith-Hardy, and would then — like the desert hawk — use the updrafts created by the interaction of sun and wind to cross the sands.

At the end of 2005 he and Meredith-Hardy again combined to overfly Aconcagua, the Andean peak that is the highest in the world outside the Himalayas. D’Arrigo employed a craft intended to imitate the slow-beating wings of the condor and, having attained a height of some 29,850ft, became the first to fly over the mountain in a hang-glider.

Angelo d’Arrigo was born in Italy in 1961 to a Sicilian father and a French mother. He graduated from the Paris University of Sport and, after working as a ski instructor, competed in microlight and hang-gliding competitions across Europe.

He was a dynamic, single-minded sportsman, and one sensible of the importance of public relations to the career of a modern adventurer.

In May 2004 he attempted his most striking feat yet, to fly over Everest in a specially adapted hang-glider. After extensive preparation with the Italian Air Force, d’Arrigo was towed towards the peak by Meredith-Hardy in temperatures so cold that tears froze to the Italian’s eyelids.

When still below the summit, the pair were struck by heavy turbulence and the tow-link broke. D’Arrigo disappeared into cloud but, by his account, before being compelled to land he succeeded in becoming the first person to overfly the mountain in a hang-glider. Certainly, reports of the exploit considerably raised d’Arrigo’s profile and proved invaluable in raising funding for later expeditions.

D’Arrigo lost his life when a light aircraft in which he was the passenger crashed while performing at an air show in Sicily. He had harboured ambitions to overfly Mount Vinson in Antarctica, and to release in Peru two condors he had been rearing at his base near Mount Etna.

He is survived by his wife, Laura Mancuso, and by two sons and a daughter.

Angelo d’Arrigo, aviator, was born on April 3, 1961. He died on March 26, 2006, aged 44.