Growing up in Australia, Bill Moyes would spend hours at the beach watching sea gulls soar and glide, marveling at their aerodynamics. At night, he dreamed of flying.

“I didn’t fly like Superman with my arms out in front of me,” he recalled decades later. “Nor did I flap my wings to fly. I wasn’t a bird. I was a boy with wings.”

One winter day in 1968, Mr. Moyes became a man with wings. He took a ski lift to the top of Mount Crackenback, in the Australian Alps, harnessed himself to a device that looked like a giant kite and skied off a cliff.

“As the flight had not been publicized,” the newspaper The Sunday Sun reported, “skiers on the slopes watched incredulously and people ran out of lodges and the hotel to watch the spectacular ‘birdman.’”

Mr. Moyes flew at 1,000 feet for almost two miles, setting the world record for the longest unassisted flight, according to newspaper accounts. The triumph marked the beginnings of hang gliding, a sport Mr. Moyes popularized by flying into the Grand Canyon, soaring off Mount Kilimanjaro and being towed behind an airplane at 8,600 feet.

“Rarely does anyone have the opportunity to do something that they’ve never seen before,” Ken de Russy, a hang-gliding historian in Anacortes, Wash., said in an interview. “That takes a very special combination of crazy and daring. Bill Moyes had that. He was a showman.”

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