MORE than 500 years after Leonardo da Vinci first sketched out designs for manned flight, British engineers have succeeded in putting his ideas into practice.

A glider based on drawings by da Vinci has made its maiden flight from a hillside in Sussex. It is part of a widespread revival of interest in da Vinci’s hundreds of mechanical designs, many of which lay forgotten in libraries for hundreds of years.

“He was an extraordinarily creative man, sketching ‘helicopters’ and many other flying machines,” said Andrew Nahum, curator of aeronautics at the Science Museum in London. “But Leonardo’s drawings are not blueprints, they are musings, thinking aloud.”

For da Vinci’s glider idea to take to the air, present-day designers had to give some help. They used wood and linen to make the hang-glider-like craft — materials that would have been available in the 15th century — but had to combine several different da Vinci drawings for the design.

“I didn’t think there was a cat in hell’s chance of it working,” said Tim Moore, the owner of Skysport Engineering, which built the plane. It will appear in a Channel 4 series on da Vinci next month. “A firm of structural analysts looked at the design to see if we were barking up the wrong tree and decided we were, but it flew anyway.”

The experiments in flight carried out by da Vinci, born illegitimate in 1452, were just one facet of the artist who typified the “renaissance man”. He was a sculptor, anatomist, engineer and architect and drew hundreds of mechanical designs, including sketches for contact lenses and a water- powered alarm clock. In addition, he painted works such as Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, which he began 500 years ago this year.

When he died in 1519, da Vinci had two regrets: that he had failed to build a giant bronze horse in honour of the Sforza family, his patrons in Milan, and that he had never flown. His studies of birds covered hundreds of pages and he used principles that he had observed to design several aircraft, including a prototype helicopter.

The glider’s wing in the television programme is based on a drawing of 1487, one of many ornithopters — planes with bird-like flapping wings — that are among da Vinci’s more impractical ideas. The wing from the sketch, kept in a library in Milan, was combined with a tailplane and wooden basket for the pilot from other drawings.

Judy Leden, a former world hang-gliding champion, was selected as pilot because of her light, 9st frame.

“My first reaction was that I was stunned by the beauty of the thing,” said Leden. “It was a bit scary when they said I shouldn’t fly any higher than I was prepared to fall, as the glider would probably break up with my weight, but it proved to be much stronger than modern hang-gliders.”

She found she could control the up-and-down movement well but struggled to steer it as she flew the craft about 100 yards at a maximum height of 30ft. “It was like having a car with a brake and accelerator but no steering wheel,” said Leden.

A separate glider project, which also made a successful flight, will feature in a BBC series on da Vinci’s life and work, to be presented in the spring by Alan Yentob, the corporation’s head of drama. The plane was flown only after extensive testing in a flight simulator at Liverpool University.

“It was lucky we did that in advance as the pilot had some pretty dramatic crashes on the simulator,” said Gareth Padfield, professor of aerospace engineering at Liverpool.

“It did crash a bit, although not too seriously, when it was flown later in Tuscany . . . the real problem is stability — the design is very difficult to steer and control.”

Another inventor attracted by da Vinci’s designs is Mark Rosheim, an engineer from Minneapolis in America who built an “anthrobot” — a robot mimicking the human body — for Nasa, the space agency.

“I have been very led by Leonardo’s designs of the human body,” said Rosheim. “I see him as a technical partner. Many of his designs are very modern.”

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