Hi there, everybody. Welcome to a very, very special 80th episode, if you can believe that, of the Cloudbase Mayhem. This one was by far the hardest edit we've ever done because we typically just sit down and have kind of a fireside chat with one person. This one, we bring in quite a few different folks to tackle a tough subject. Can we save hang gliding? Kind of a grim title, but that's what we decided to land on. Most people agree that hang gliding's been more or less a 40-year decline since the heydays in kind of the late 70s. And so we rewind the clock. Bruce Weaver steps in, who runs the largest hang gliding school in the world, Kitty Hawk Kites.
Been at it for a very, very long time. He is kind of our narrator, and he picks up the story from the very beginning. You can maybe call hang gliding the first extreme sport. Long before airplanes, so back in Lilienthal's days, way before the turn of the last century, and then on to Chanute and designs that literally came from Da Vinci. And then those designs inspired the Wright Brothers, which is right down the street from Kitty Hawk Kites. These guys were foot-launching 150-pound contraptions and literally flying, sometimes soaring. They're flying 30 miles an hour. You'll hear all about that. Really shocking stuff. Then hang gliding kind of goes away for a little bit during the First and Second World War, but then it comes back ferociously because of Francis Regalo.
So we'll bring David Glover into the story here, and he's actually still, he owns, well, I won't give it all to you, but he's got the killer van. Pretty funny story there, and he enlightens us about arrow towing and the whole advent of that whole space, which made hang gliding available to a lot more people. A lot more places, but mass is kind of an underlying problem, which is that new people are not being attracted to the sport. So then we bring in Steven Pearson, who took over Wills Wing after Bob died tragically filming a Jeep commercial back in the 70s, and he has been running Wills Wing.
He built his first glider in 1973 and has been running Wills Wing and been in charge of that. They're designing it and engineering, along with a few others, since 1977. So we talked to Steven about the commercial side of things and what he feels has happened to the sport and what needs to happen for hang gliding to make a comeback and compete with paragliding. But there's a lot of interesting things here, and there's a lot of maybe kind of foretelling of what could potentially also happen to paragliding. So super exciting story. It's a great show. Like I said, pretty hard for us to put together, but I hope you appreciate it. It was quite a bit of work, but it was also a lot of fun, and I certainly feel like I'm a lot more educated on a fascinating subject.
And if you're not already, you will be here shortly. Before we get to the show, typically I save the whole all we've asked for is a buck a show to the end and talk about how you can support the show in various different ways. I'm going to do that here at the top of the show, just because I think it's fun. It's pretty important. When we first got going with the cloud-based mayhem a few years back, I had kind of a strangled relationship with asking for money. That always felt really weird to me, and it took me a while to get around to that. Typically, podcasts are seen as free, and they're funded through advertising. And I don't like advertising. I listen to tons of other podcasts, not just this one. But I hate that 5, 10, 15-minute stuff they throw in at the beginning.
The beginning of the show, trying to sell me the greatest and latest mattress or something. And I don't see advertising as free. There's a cost there. We see that in all the stuff going on right now with Facebook and data and the personal side of things. And so without getting into all that, I just don't find that that's a very authentic relationship. If I'm sponsored by a paragliding company and I'm trying to sell their products to you, you're going to wonder about the authenticity of what is being said. You're going to wonder about the truthfulness of what is being said on here. You might not agree with my opinions or my guests' opinions, but they're the truth as we see it. And what we're trying to do with this show is just pass along to you information that makes you a better and safer pilot. And it also makes our community a safer pilot, our community safer around the world.
That's the whole purpose of this. I get emails literally almost every day from people that have said that the show has either kept them from getting hurt or a lot worse. And that's really why I do it. And I hope you all appreciate that. By me asking for a buck a show, that to me is kind of treating it like a magazine subscription or something that you find valuable. But I'm not asking for people to support me financially if that's going to dig in any way into your lifestyle. Even if you've got to cut a cup of coffee out of your life, then you're not the person I'm asking. I'm asking for it to support financially. There are many other ways you can support the show. You can blog about it.
You can share it on social media. You can rate it on the show on iTunes or Stitcher or however you listen to your podcast. You can talk about it on the way up to launch. You can tell your friends because some of those friends might be able to afford kicking us down a buck or so every once in a while. And that goes a long way. So you can support us directly through on. If you go to cloudbasedman.com, you'll find the places where you can support directly through PayPal or you can become a regular supporter through Patreon and be rewarded for doing so. But again, I'm only asking for funds from people who can afford it. This is a lot of work. It does take a lot of time and there are a lot of costs involved. So for sure, the support is absolutely necessary to bring it to you.
But it's a lot of fun. I'll keep doing it. Thank you all for reaching out in your emails. And as your suggestions for topics and people, I take those very seriously. If I don't get back to you right away, it's just because my inbox is an absolute disaster. But anyway, that's what I had to say about support. Thank you so much. I really do appreciate it. It has been a true honor to bring this to you. And it's been great hearing all the comments from people that are getting something out of it. So on to the show. I hope you get something out of this one. Please enjoy this very cool story about hang gliding and the history and where it is and where it may or may not go.
Enjoy.
Bruce, awesome to have you on the show. Thanks for doing this. We've been trying to line this up in some ways for months, although hang gliding has been around a long time. So I guess we've got plenty of time to talk about it. But I'm pretty excited to talk to you about the history of hang gliding. And Nick sent us through this kind of two-page thing on just the background of it, which I know that you're going to expand on, which is just fascinating. I guess it's kind of the first extreme sport there ever was before the Wright brothers and everything. So why don't we give the listeners a real quick background on you and Kitty Hawk, and then let's rewind the dial, go way back, and bring us up to speed with what's happening.
What has happened in all these many decades with hang gliding? That's great. Yeah, thanks for having me, for sure. I'm excited. So, yeah, you know, I've been at it now here on the East Coast in North Carolina. I started back in the mid-'80s and, you know, learned how to get my feet off the ground here on the dunes of Jockey's Ridge. And I've been working for Kitty Hawk Kites pretty much since the early-'90s in the hang gliding industry, helping other folks get up. So in the air, I've done some, you know, a bunch of different types of flying and, you know, just am passionate about it like all the rest of us. So I definitely enjoy talking about it and getting people up to speed on, you know, all the different things that have happened to build up to where we are today.
Yeah, and so let's get – let's, you know, let's take us back to the history of it because I just had no – you know, I had heard of Regalo and, you know, had this fascinating talk a couple years ago with the Prince. You know?
You know,
with Larry Tudor and, you know, just – he filled us with tons of just amazing stories of what was going down in the 70s and, you know, the incredible period of just way too many accidents. But let's go back before that. You know, how did this all – how did this absurdity begin? Yeah, I hear you. So, you know, it's interesting that people have been dreaming about it forever. You know, everyone has seen some of the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, you know, the bird wings. And he's got some great quotes about flight out there. And, you know, we get to the point in 1800s where a guy named Otto Lilienthal really started to put some of this stuff together and make a functioning wing,
bird-type wing that he was launching himself off the hills with. You know, and that guy did thousands of flights and controlling the thing through, you know, sort of through weight shift. He was dangling by his arms. And, you know, like I said, he flew a bunch and loved it. He ended up dying tragically in an accident on the hill. One of his famous quotes, though, was, sacrifices must be made. And, you know, I think that that's pretty interesting when, you know, thinking all the way back there in the 1800s, this guy is so into it that, you know, he's going at it full bore. I mean, he's literally like there. He's
like the original
test pilot, you know. Yeah, you know, it's incredible to think that, you know, especially at that time, you know, the amount of time and energy and, you know, just going off what he sees bird wings looking like and maybe some of the drawings of Da Vinci and, you know, making something that actually worked. It's really, really something. Yeah, it's really inspiring, isn't it? I mean, in that. Yeah. And then he takes us to the next step. That was real influential in the Wright brothers. It was, yeah. You know, and then Octave Chanute was really the next big name that came after him and carried on Lilienthal's legacy and did a bunch of tests with a bunch of wings here in the States.
And the Wright brothers, too, were inspired by both Lilienthal and Chanute. And they started experimenting. You know, those guys had been tinkerers since they were little. They were little kids and were really intrigued with the challenge of manned flight. You know, like everybody else, you know, the Wright brothers weren't any different in that regard. People have been dreaming for thousands of years of, you know, looking up the sky, figuring, you know, what I would do to be able to get up there and fly like a bird. And the Wright brothers, man, they really took it to heart and started going at it hard. Those guys, those guys, that story is pretty incredible, too. You know, and here we are in North Carolina. I'm just right down the road from where they first flew. They flew the powered flight and where they were doing all their testing with the gliders.
And that's one of the things a lot of people don't understand about the glider or about the Wright brothers is that they had thousands of glider flights perfecting, you know, controlled flight before they ever put an engine on that thing. Wow. Really? So they were hang gliding. Yeah. Yeah. They were definitely hang gliding. Yeah, that's so cool. Yeah. So they were, you know, those guys, you know, they were inventors. I think everybody knows they. They. Had a bicycle shop up in Ohio. So they're very mechanical and very persistent. And they took this challenge head on of getting themselves and everyone else up in the air. And they spent years doing it. Finally, in 1902, they came up with a design for a wing that they felt was controllable.
They had made kites, you know, 1899. They made a small aircraft in 1900. Another one in 1901 coming down here to the Outer Banks on the sand dunes and testing it. And finally, in 1902, they had modified their design enough to where they had actually figured out how to control their flight through the air. And it's pretty amazing feat at that point, because a lot of the information they were going on, you know, was from the history books of Da Vinci and Lilienthal. And a couple of things they figured out was, you know, that those guys, even though they were. Getting themselves off the ground, they really weren't doing it right. So they, you know, the guys that were the superstars of what would be aviation at the time, these guys questioned what they were doing and figured out a different way.
And sure enough, they figured out how to get themselves up. I wonder how many broken bones there were. I mean, how many is documented? How many flights ended in a crash? It must have been half or a lot. The amount of carnage they had for those aircraft was pretty amazing. Carnage. Yeah. But they. They did all right, man. You know, we were down here on sand dunes. They had coastal winds. They were flying in. So, you know, those guys came out fairly unscathed, but they definitely, you know, the old the old adage where you got to break a few eggs to make an omelet. They broke a few eggs. That's for sure. And then and then then something kind of weird happens. Right. So, I mean, they figure out how to put a how to put an engine on these things. And if I'm jumping ahead, you should bring me back.
But they and then kind of engine lists. Flight kind of faltered for a couple of a few decades. Yeah. It just kind of went by the wayside. That's right. Yeah. So, interestingly enough, the Wright brothers, there's there's such a great story, just innovation and perseverance. But one of the things that they had their mind set on was personalized powered flight. They thought that they could figure that secret out. In 1902, they figured out the secret of controlled flight. So they went back to Ohio. They built themselves an engine and they put the engine on the aircraft. Then they traveled all the way back down here to North Carolina and took that fateful powered flight on December 17th, 1903.
And that really just changed the course of mankind. Really, at that point, things were, you know, completely different. You know, all the different horizons that were opened up just by those guys doing that. You know, I mean, obviously, we're still feeling it today. The. But they were they were also at that point, you know, they were the rock stars of that era. I mean, they they worldwide acclaimed. They toured Europe. You know, I mean, it was they they were, you know, the most famous living people on the planet at that point. So with that, it just captured the imagination of the entire world. Powered flight did. And, you know, they started evolving power flight and, you know, doing everything they could until we got up to where we are.
But glider flights at that point were not, you know, they were just a means to an end, you know, so they figured the glider flights. Yeah, we figured out how to control it with no engine. Now we'll put an engine on it. Now we've got control and an engine. So, you know, let's not do any gliding. We don't need to do that anymore. We've you know, we got to the ultimate goal. Let's work, you know, let's tweak this. So, yeah, like you say, the glider flights then definitely took a backseat. Interestingly, though, enough that they in. Now, 1911, the Wright brothers with the they had toured. They had, you know, the U.S. military had gotten in on their their the powered aircraft. France was a big supporter. I mean, you know, they had they had spent eight or nine years just, you know, in a whirlwind of powered aircraft building.
And they decided in 1911, though, that they needed to work more on the controls to the glider. Again, so they came back down to the Outer Banks with a glider. So they rebuilt another glider with what they had learned over the past seven or eight years, came down to the Outer Banks and they practiced flying just to work on control surfaces here on the Outer Banks. And in 1911, they stayed aloft soaring for almost 10 minutes.
Whoa, no way. I mean, so is this is this like the is this the bamboo stuff? What are they using? And then for for, you know, what's the fabric? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So they you know, they had they're using Muslim cloths. They they had what trying to think of all the different types of wood they were using, but it wasn't lightweight. Probably balsa. Yeah, it was surprisingly resilient. This wood that they were using and it needed to be because they were definitely, you know, trial and error with that thing. But the the 1902 glider, for instance. That thing weighed one hundred and fifty pounds. And they came back in the one in 1911. I don't know the exact weight of that one, but it was certainly right around that same weight.
So it wasn't a lightweight aircraft. You know what? And they were they were flying that thing in 30 miles an hour wind. Thirty plus. It's just. Wow. Unbelievable. That's insane. I just can't even. It's hard to wrap your head around that. I mean, what is it? What is a modern hang glider way these days? Yeah, well, we you know, we've got them anywhere from the. The upper 40s on up in pounds. But, you know. So these guys are foot launching one hundred and fifty pound. That's made out of like sailcloth. Made out of cotton and wood. You know, that's the thing that I always tell people, too, about these guys is, you know, they're so famous for what they did. You know, their ingenuity, their perseverance and all that.
But, man, those guys were brave. You know, launch themselves off in the 30 miles an hour. Wind and something that they put together. That's that's they soared for 10 minutes. And what year did you say? Nineteen. That's. Yeah, that's just awesome. That is so. So, you know, the original ridge. So how about it? Right. So they they had the soaring record, the powerless time aloft until the 30s when someone broke it in an actual sailplane. I think they're up in New England on the coast of New England. And then no one broke that record of of 10. Minutes down here on the Outer Banks until the 70. Let's see. I think it was seventy six in a hang glider.
That's ridiculous. That's ridiculous. Oh, my God. That is so awesome. Wow. Cool. So, I mean, but there, you know, their inventions led to, you know, just a radical change in how warfare is fought, you know, in World War One, World War Two. Of course. You know, I mean, just if those guys could have been alive 50 years later. Yeah. Like, whoa. Didn't see that coming. Gosh. You know, I mean, seeing the first 737.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, so when do we go to the moon? Was it 69? I think it was 69. 69. Yeah. Right. There you go. Sixty six years later. We go to the moon in 69. I mean, what? That is crazy. Yeah. Just that is crazy. OK. So but great segue. Regalo. Let's talk about Francis. So another bad. Francis Regalo sort of cut from this. Same cloth as the Wright brothers, for sure. Just always fascinated with flight. And his is a great story of American ingenuity and perseverance, too. But really cool guy. Grew up in California. Had always wanted to be a pilot. And back in the day, the easiest way to become a pilot was to join the military.
So he went to join the military and got rejected. Actually, he had an accident when he was a kid. He lost a couple of his toes. And apparently at the time, if you didn't have all your toes, you couldn't join the military. So he so he was out. So so he set to task trying to figure out how he was going to get himself up in the air. I mean, he just you know, that was it. And he was like, well, no one's going to tell me that I'm not going to be able to fly. Let me figure out this thing. So he goes to Stanford. He graduated in their first aeronautical engineering class. Out of Stanford. And he ended up getting hired by this this outfit here on the East Coast called NACA. N-A-C-A comes over here and NACA soon turns its focus to space and changes its name to NASA.
And he's working with him at the time. The whole time is mulling over how he can get himself up in the air. Finally, one day, one evening at the Kibbutz. And he's sitting in the kitchen counter with his wife, Gertrude. He's sitting there. They're eating dinner. And, you know, the proverbial light bulb goes off over his head. He goes over and he grabs a kitchen curtain, pulls some kite string out of the counter drawer and fashions this flexible, triangular looking kite thing and makes the first regala wing, which is we still got that first one. It's a it's a kitchen curtain for sure. And does some pulls the window fan out of the window. You know, you can sort of imagine the era. Now we're here in the 40s, pulls the window fan out of the window and does his own little makeshift wind tunnel test there at the dinner table and ends up going into those guys at NASA the next day and say, listen, I've been trying to figure this thing out for years.
I think I finally got something here. And the whole trick was with it was it was completely flexible. It could be deployed like a parachute and it would slow something's descent like a parachute. But unlike the parachutes of the day, you know, those round parachutes, this one actually had a glide to it. So it could glide forward and it could be steered. So this little regala wing that he invented could do all these things. And he was, you know, the what he envisioned for this thing that, you know, was just limitless. He had actually talked at that time in some of his writings about, you know, imagining the day when people would unfurl these things at the top of a mountain and fly to the bottom. You know, I mean, just it's incredible, the vision of this guy.
But he goes to he goes to NASA and, you know, it took a long time, but eventually they they caught on and they said, yeah, this will be great. We should use this for returning our astronauts from space. So Mr. Agalo, as everybody was back in the day, was all in. So he said, here's my patent. You know, let's get to work. And, you know, they just kept working at it and working at it from there. And, you know, eventually they decided that they were running out of time with the space race, with testing Mr. Agalo's wing, because they just used they ended up using round conical chutes to bring our astronauts back. But they did full scale testing with his wing. There's some great footage of full scale capsules coming down under canopy and landing on dry land.
So cool. And how does how does his wife was quite an incredible figure as well? Right. Gertrude. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there's some great snippets about Mr. Agalo. One of the little history points about Mr. Agalo that I think is so great is that Gertrude was with him at all times, always supporting him, very bright lady. And when he made when he put this Regalo wing together, this flexible wing together, he got a patent for it. And on the patent. He credits his wife, Gertrude, as the co-inventor of the Regalo wing, not only because he used her kitchen curtain to make the first one, but she was also integral, you know, and just, you know, egging him on and, you know, giving her input the whole way.
And during the testing phase of this wing, he would make a large scale versions of the wing and he would take his daughters up and put them up in this kite apparatus and fly them on the beach. And, you know. So his daughters were test pilots for it. And, you know, just the whole the whole family was really into it. Now, like I said, unfortunately, the space race was so we were so heavily involved with the space race at the time. And the Russians at the time were beating us, you know, the United States in this race for space. And so NASA decided that all the testing that was going on with Mr. Agalo's wing was taking too long. And, you know, round parachutes have been around for hundreds and hundreds of years.
And it didn't take nearly as much testing with that design as it was with this brand new design of Mr. Agalo's. So they basically they told Mr. Agalo, listen, you know, it's a great idea, but we don't need it. We're not going to use it for a space program. Yeah, we got to go. You know, we don't have time. So essentially what they did was they said, you know, here's here's the information that you were involved with, you know, all the testing data and things like that. You know, all the stuff that we learned with this wing, you know, do with it what you may. So Mr. Agalo took a lot of information, published some of the findings and some of the magazines of the day. People saw it. And once again, you know, like back in Lilienthal's time or the Wright brothers time, once again, people just became enthralled with the idea of being able to fly free, fly through the air under their own power.
And it wasn't long. It wasn't long after that that, you know, essentially hang gliding was born. People started flying themselves off of small hills and then larger and larger. Here's David Glover. So after graduating college, I had a friend that really wanted me to come out. And a few summers before, I taught windsurfing at Kitty Hawk. And it turns out Kitty Hawk also has this hang gliding school. And so after teaching windsurfing and finishing college, I ended up going back and learning to hang glide. And the funny thing was, is that, I mean, I was. I really knew, you know, I think I might have had my second rating. And the the owner, who's a great guy who's still there, John Harris, ended up firing both managers of the hang gliding school. So myself and Bruce ended up becoming the managers of this hang gliding school.
And he sort of fired him because of paragliding. What was interesting is John felt that, you know, paragliding was where things were going and that they should be doing more of it. But these two guys were very focused on hang gliding and didn't. No paragliding that well. And they thought that, you know, maybe you should bring a paragliding person in. And there was some friction. And whatever happened, we ended up managing that world's largest hang gliding school, just barely knowing how to hang gliding, being a few pages in front of the other people in the learning curve. But that was that was a trial by fire, but a lot of fun. So I'm teaching hang gliding on the Outer Banks, and I ended up buying this very rusted out Volkswagen van. And I got an incredibly good deal. It was it was sort of light blue.
And what had happened was that I got I got a great deal because a guy had committed suicide in it. No, none of his friends wanted to buy it. And they were really upset that I wouldn't paint it because every time they drove it around, you know, they thought he was like it was just weird for him. But so I tell people I did get a killer deal.
But I ended up having to paint it and I painted like a Guatemalan belt. Like. Because we had gone down. We had driven to Guatemala with a friend suburban, which is a whole nother story. And, you know, one of our drivers had rolled that. So that ended up becoming quite an issue. But so I painted it. It was really wild colors. And I had had it parked underneath the Regalo Tower at Kitty Hawkeye right across from the sand dunes. And, you know, I had known Francis Regalo for probably three, four years. This was very early 90s. And up pulls this 1963 Volkswagen van. That's turquoise that has some unusual features to it. And it's like it just rolled off the showroom floor. And I just got off the dune. I'm filled with sand and out steps Francis Regalo.
And I'm thinking, how did I not know that he had this or what's the story on this thing? And he he gets out and he goes, oh, I once a year I have to drive over to Manio to get an inspection sticker. And so I drive it over there and I like to stop here and then then drive there. And he goes, oh, you got one, too. And I go, yeah, but yours looks like it's in a little better shape. It was a 63 West Folly, a camper. It had the cantilever tent that comes off it that I found out later. It's got this little pop up part of that. You can just barely stand up and so you can cook. It's just a little hatch. It's the split window. It's all real wood interior inside. It's got a little hammock for kids. I mean, it's just it's amazing. And, of course, myself, like probably anybody else that ever sees.
Him or anybody else out and around like then you say, if you ever want to sell this, let me know. And he just laughed and goes, oh, you don't know how many hundreds of times people have tried to buy this. I mean, he goes, you know, he goes, I drive it once a week around the around the block. And, you know, I keep it. It was it was showroom perfect. In fact, if you talk to anybody back then, you know, that's the way it was. And so, you know, I thought, well, that's great. I'm just a poor little hang glider pilot. There's no way I'd be able to buy it anyway. And so he called me up and says, hey, why don't you come over? I'd like to talk to you about something. And, you know, I've been to his house a couple of times. I didn't play tennis with Gertrude.
So Mr. Regalo says, well, are you are you serious about wanting to buy it? And I said, well, yeah, sure. But I mean, I mean, it's it's very nice and it's gained a lot of value. Even this was 27 years ago. He says, tell you what he goes. I want to show you a few problems with it. So, you know, you don't if you end up getting it, you won't. You'll be upset with me. And so, you know, he takes me around and there's like no scratches. It's perfect. Except there's this you could just barely see this little piece of paint that was just sort of scraped away a little bit. But it was just like, you know, nothing on the side of the van. And he goes, I just want to show you that because that's where I would I would strap my Brock wing and then take the van up to the top of the dune and fly. And I just want you to see that. So you didn't come back later and say, look, there's some scratches here.
And it's like. Wow, it was. It was nice guy. Oh, and there's some great pictures of him. He I mean, he looks so cool with these sort of Ray-Ban glasses on the side of the side of the dune, setting up his hang glider and flying down there. I mean, he was great. Everybody loved him. And he goes, well, tell you what he does. I've come up with a price and I don't want to haggle. And this is going to be it. And I don't want you to you can't have it for any any anything more or less. You have to pay this. And he pulls out this. Sort of light pink old piece of paper that turned out to be the sort of window sticker for the van. And he pulls it out and he looks at me with sort of this nice glint in his eye. And he points down to the bottom right hand corner and it says three thousand two hundred and twenty one dollars and forty five cents.
Bruce Weaver. It was John Dickinson in Australia, actually, was the one that really took Mr. Agalo's design. He added the control frame underneath it. They were towing flat kites at the time at a ski show in Australia. So they would just tow these guys up on what looked like giant kites. Very, you know, very little dihedral in the wing or anything. It just looked like a, you know, like a kite that you would make except for larger. And they would tow these these water skiers up underneath that. Dickinson came up with the idea to put the control frame underneath it, underneath the kite. And before too long, they were releasing from the line that they were getting towed. Up in the air with and then flying that flat kite down to the ground.
And at that point, the real potential of this wing kicked. Everybody saw it. And that's when people started making their own. You know, the first of all, people are making their own bamboo and cellophane duct tape. You know, they would just make what looked like the design and start flying off the hills. And more often than not, the thing worked. So people started crazy. Right. So I had Miguel. I had. I had Miguel Gutierrez, you know, who kind of discovered Valle. And, you know, his dad was like the first base jumper in the world. You know, he was he'd hang off the edge of biplane biplanes in Mexico, like some of the first power airplanes in Mexico and dive into stadiums, you know, with a parachute. I mean, like in 1910. I mean, just or whatever. It wouldn't have been 1910.
A little bit later than that. But, you know, just crazy. And then he was talking about he and his brothers. There's a whole bunch of them. You know, when they first saw. The first hang gliders in the early 70s, they would build these things out of street garbage. You know, they'd just be cruising around the street and they'd find some plastic and they'd find some bamboo in the forest and some pipes, you know, and and and make a hang glider. It's crazy that it works. But, you know, the design is so stable. That is awesome. But that all came from Regala. I mean, that was really that was his drawing. That was his curtain concept. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So and you know what? He early on. The you know, the Regala wing is what the thing became known as, but he actually called it a paraglider.
Really? So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, the the idea, this idea of foot launch aviation, personal free flight was something that Mr. Regala had been working on, you know, like I said, since he was a young man and finally saw it come to fruition here. You know, really, it was. It was this would have been in the 60s and then early 70s or when a bunch of manufacturers started to get in on it. And, you know, there was a time there where there is, you know, there's manufacturers all over the country and the world making, you know, different types of wings. And every year someone would come up with some new revision and make the glider, you know, from a two or three to one glide.
They'd squeak out an extra, you know, half a point of glide or something like that. And just the evolution of. Of the wing from there, from the 70s, really up until today, but certainly through the 70s into the mid 80s was pretty accelerated pace. And I've seen video like in the early 70s. I mean, what are we getting? Is it two to one? Is it three to one? Yeah. Three to one. Terrible. Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, you might have been able to get a better glide on Mr. Regala's original wing with the kitchen curtain. But. Right. Right. I mean, like way worse than today's speed wings. I mean, way worse. Way worse. Way, way worse. Right. OK. You know what? It caught everybody's, you know, everybody's imagination. It was. Yeah, you're flying. It was the coolest thing that was that was going on back then.
I mean, everybody wanted to fly. And now, you know, you could go down, like you said, you go down, grab some old parts from off the street corner in the hardware store. And you can make yourself something that you could fly off the ground with. I mean, it was. Yeah. And these in these designs, you know, quote unquote designs. They were like you could buy them. Right. They were in the back of magazines and stuff. Yeah. You could you going through, you know, that that era's version of USHPA and go, yep, I'm on the fly. I'm going to go down the hardware store and buy and buy this design and go get the visqueen. And that's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Madness. It is. I mean, like I got to come up with a different word. It just wouldn't be correct. He's a PC. But the cojones.
Like, oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I always joke that it must have been hard for those guys to launch because their cojones were so big to run like that. Right. Oh, my God. It's just madness. OK, so I'm going to skip just I mean, because it goes from there to not good. Right. I mean, Larry talked about that. There was some wing that he was flying that like 40 people died on. It was just like one manufacturer. I can't remember the name of it. I should have done a little more. I should have brought that up. You probably know which one that is. But, you know, I mean, like. I
mean, like the absurd
death rates. Right. That's right. They're off the charts. Yeah. Well, you know, what was going on at that point was that everybody was so excited about it and it seemed so free and it looks so simple. And, you know, so people were, you know, just going out there and trying. They didn't. No one told them what to do. In fact, there's stories of people learning how to do it from, you know, a short letter that was written to them, even, you know, if that much, you know, you know, and they would just go out there. And figure it out. And if they didn't get hurt, they'd keep doing it because it was cool. But, you know, I had obviously that's not going to that's not going to last very long, not a real good way to to keep the thing going. And there was a lot of deaths and a lot of injuries in the early days.
And that's really what led into the Hang Lining Manufacturers Association in the early 70s and USHPA. You know, the you know, the organization there is we figured out that this great. Enormously popular thing, one going to work out very well if, you know, a lot of people are getting themselves in trouble or injured doing it. So there started be the Hang Lining Manufacturers Association that started testing wings and making sure that they weren't going to collapse or fall apart on people in the air. USHPA started putting together, you know, some sort of training. Yeah. Training. Yeah. You know, at least some sort of idea or curriculum for the things. Things that you should do and know and how you should get to the point where you are flying by yourself at altitudes.
And, you know, the it it cleaned up, I guess you could say, the sport, the fledgling sport a little bit. But, you know, still back in the day, Larry's got all got all kinds of great stories. It, you know, it definitely got a little safer, but people are still pushing the envelope. Oh, man. I mean, he talked about like, you know, they were flying the Sierras. I mean, even now. Oh, it's like, you know, when I learned how to paraglide in the mid 2006, like people weren't paragliding in the Sierras in the middle of the summer. That was just like old school. You know, I mean, now they're doing it again. Now, now people are back doing it again, which is which is awesome. Right. You know, back even back then, it was just like that. That had that had been done for like 10 years. And I told that to Larry. Like, do we used to fly that back in the 70s without reserves?
We didn't even know what that was. I just can't imagine flying in like 12 and 15 up on a. Oh, my gosh. I tell you what, man, this the stories and even some of the video. There's, you know, Wills Wing, the the Wills boys. They started up their company in the early 70s. And there's some footage of either Bob or Chris Wills. I forget which one. But flying out there on the coast in a swing seat. So the harness was a swing seat. It's literally a swing seat. Right. I mean, literally from a kid's. Park. That's what they use. I've seen these things. Right. Yeah. So I first got into it. I thought, oh, a swing seat. That's, you know, it's got to be the layman's term for this big, fancy harness you get in.
But no, it's a sweet. You got off a swing. But anyway, there's some footage of him flying. I may have been a Tory, actually, but just way up there in the buttery. You know, the buttery lift there on the coast in a swing seat. And he just goes inverted. In the swing seat. He just flips himself upside down. No parachute, no belt. And he's flying this thing from his ankles. Oh, my God. It's just this is the mentality of these guys. It was just, you know, yeah, I got it. I got this. It's just unbelievable, man.
Here's Steven Pearson with Wills Wing. But in terms of the United States and what really took off, started the whole, you know, hang gliding movement was singularly. And. In Newport Beach in May of 1971, that was to commemorate the birthday of the hundred and twenty third birthday of Otto Lillienthal. And so a year later or a little less than a year later in February 1972, there was an article and hang light in National Geographic with with, you know, a photo spread about this meet. And a lot of a lot of people saw that Bob and Chris will saw that I was 15. I saw that. That Bobby and Chris were a little older than me. And they were in California. I was in New England.
But anyway, Bob and Chris Wills built their first glider in early 1972 from photos they'd seen in that National Geographic article. And then a year later, they founded Wills Wing. And that's pretty much the start of, you know, hang gliding that that 1973 period is when there was just just an incredible number of. You know, hang gliding companies, people building hang gliding and, you know, hang gliding just took off on this meter, meteoric increase in participation and kind of captivated thousands and thousands of people. Anyway, Chris, the first U.S. National Championships were in 1973. And Chris Wills won that.
Then in 1974, Bobby won both those meets on on Wills Wing gliders. Little brother rivalry. Rivalry in the beginning. Yeah. Well, there's yeah, we could spend hours talking about the shenanigans of the Wills brothers. And, you know, I I shouldn't get too far off off off track, but it's I just got I just got to tell you this. I was at Chris's. Chris is now retired. He's an orthopedic surgeon or was for many years and actually did some really good work on my hip. But but anyway, I used to Bobby used to tell me stories of the orange cannons they used to make. They'd make these these these cannons and fire oranges across the neighborhood and, you know, across all sorts of things.
And, you know, you know, they were just incredible stories. And I never really saw these things. And I, you know, years later, I thought, you know, I wonder how much of that was just kind of made up. I mean, because it just seemed kind of like too crazy to be real. I mean, just these were just not like toy cannons. These were like mortars in Orange County was full of orange grows. And these. These things were described as firing oranges, like, you know, a half a mile or a mile, just literally more. That would do some damage if you caught one of those in the chest. So, yeah. So, you know, so now Chris Wells is a retired orthopedic surgeon. So, you know, a couple of weeks ago, he had this this pig roast is at his ranch and invited us out and a lot of other people.
And I show up and there's this like looks like a replica, you know, World War One cannon on. On wheels here. And I, I said, what's that? He says, oh, it's an orange cannon.
I go, what? You know, he says, well, OK, I had I had the wheels made for it, but everything else is original. And he starts describing he's got this pipe and he's got this whole thing put together. And he says, yeah, this is what we had when we were kids.
Oh, my gosh. The rumors are true. And he's loading this thing with his mixture of whatever it is. And. And launching these oranges over the mountain. Just, you know, he's in this rural area out behind Elsinore. And this thing is lethal. I mean, it's like these things, people have these things, they disappear over the horizon. But anyways, all these stories were kind of, you know, there's a lot to them. And he has a lot of he has a lot of old footage of them flying these bamboo and plastic gliders. And and a few years ago, he actually built one for us. And, you know, in 15 minutes. We just got the bamboo and duct tape and plastic. And, you know, he taped one together. And the only thing that was, you know, I just really couldn't get was this thing was a lot smaller than I imagined.
And so you had to be young and run fast to get them off the ground. But anyway, Wills Wing took off along with a lot of other companies. And a few years later, Chris went off to med school and Bobby continued to run Wills Wing until he was fatally injured. In a filming a Jeep commercial in the summer of 1977, the helicopter blew him into the ground. At that time, I was just a flying buddy. Rob Kells, another one of our partners who passed away in 2008, had just arrived with a traveling band of other young misfits that stayed on to be to work at Wills Wing. My other partners, Mike and Linda Meyer. Linda was working in the front office and Mike had recently been fired from Wills Wing.
And was the local dealer. So after Bobby passed away, we kind of loosely formed a friendship. Well, I mean, we were friends, but loosely assumed management of Wills Wing because Wills Wing really had no leadership at that time. And, you know, by the end of the year, you know, I'd started developing gliders and we took over, you know, management and administration of Wills Wing. You know. In that period. So at that time, as I said, there were a lot of, you know, a lot of hang gliding manufacturers and Wills Wing was by no means the largest. There were there was an industry association formed in 1976 with a board of directors of 10 members. And Wills Wing wasn't large enough to get on the board.
We were like number 11.
So hang gliding pretty much flourished through the 70s. But already by the end of the 70s, there were starting to be a decline in the shakeout. And the shakeout really continued heavily in the early 80s. And by 1984, most of those 10 manufacturers were gone. And we'd become the largest manufacturers of hang gliders in the U.S. and pretty much worldwide. And why was that, Stephen, why was that shakeout? And why was there a decline already in the late 70s? Because paragliding wasn't around yet. And I would imagine there was just only more media and more pictures and more Moyes. And more commercials. What was going on there? Well, you know, the technology of hang gliding and innovation, the pace of innovation at that time was really extraordinary.
Far, far eclipsing what we see today. I mean, the product life of a new design was was maybe six months. And with, you know, so many some of so many hang gliding companies in a very contentious industry, there was just. And products so starting out so technologically, you know, simple, there was a lot of room for improvement. So, you know, as the technology, you know, progressed, that put, you know, a lot of additional strain on the manufacturers. There were a lot of accidents. There was I don't know. I mean, we could probably spend hours talking about why that shakeout happened. But I think hang gliders became more difficult to build, more difficult.
To fly, more difficult to teach. I mean, it used to be, you know, a standard joke. And it's kind of continued today that, you know, this year's competition gliders next year's trainer. And that can only go so far because those gliders became as they became higher performance, they became harder to fly and oftentimes more dangerous. It was also during that period that we had to struggle with, you know, the concept of airworthiness. I mean, the initial hang gliders, you know, bamboo and plastic. There wasn't a lot of, you know, aerodynamic analysis, you know, and engineering to those structures. But then as hang gliding started, the performance improved and, you know, soaring flight became possible and airworthiness issues like stability and controllability and structural integrity.
All of those issues became, you know, more important. And how we address those issues and who could do that, address those issues effectively, you know, became. Kind of a factor that sorted out, you know, the major manufacturers. So that was part of the shakeout. And as I said, the performance factor is also an issue and I think remains a big factor today. Higher performance hang gliders are take a lot longer to learn. One of the reasons why, you know, all these manufacturers just sprung up in the early 70s was, I mean, it's kind of a joke, but it's true. I mean. And you could build a glider from a kit one weekend, teach yourself to fly in the next, you know, couple of weeks, you know, a couple of weeks later, you were a flight school and, you know, six months later, you were a manufacturer.
And, you know, that sounds funny, but that's that is actually true. I mean, just look at look at Wills Wing 1972. They see photos, Bob and Chris see photos in National Geographic and they make copies, you know, just with a. By scaling the picture, just looking at the pictures, they go get some bamboo and plastic and make their own gliders. And by 1973, they're a manufacturer. And, you know, I found the first ad that that we published. And there was there's a nine point list of reasons why you should fly, you know, a Wills Wing and why you should participate in hang gliding. Item number two is that the hang line, which may come maybe may come to be called.
Sky surfing could easily become the fastest growing sport in the country in the next couple of years. That was the expectation and kind of energy behind the, you know, the whole thing. And then one of the other items is that a majority of kite flyers in the U.S. who have soared for an hour or more belong to the sport kite. Sport kites is our corporate name before we, you know, have a new name, a new branding of Wills Wing. But it's our corporate name anyway, who have soared for more than an hour belong to the sport kite. So this is where it was, you know, in early 1973, which is not to say that's really the birth of hang gliding. Hang gliding is, I'm sure Bruce told you, starts with Lilienthal and Chanute and many other participants along the way.
I mean, in 1909, there was a famous Bates glider that was published in Popular Mechanics that was a Chanute type. That glider that over the following years, God knows how many people learned to fly or build their own copies of that. In fact, my uncle in like 1927, I have some photos of my, you know, 17-year-old great uncle building a foot-launched weight shift Chanute type glider that was probably modeled on the Bates glider and flying that. And on the back of the photo, it says Hammond. His name was Wilson Hammond. Flying hang glider. This has been around for a long time. What happened in the 70s was just, it just kind of reached a critical mass.
And, you know, with the Regalo configuration and other things, it just somehow resonated with that group of people and took off. Here's Bruce Weaver. So early on, there's, you know, everybody, you know, there's, I forget how many manufacturers. It's probably close to 100. I mean, people just building these things and sending them out of the garages and things like that. Well, obviously, that didn't work real well because there wasn't a whole lot of high-tech research going on. But starting, like you say, in the early 80s, late 70s, early 80s, things really start to get a little bit more high-tech. They start being able to improve the performance of these things. And people start, instead of just going from the top of the hill down to the bottom, they're able to start soaring.
And staying up in the air, you know, and thermaling. And, you know, the wings just started getting more and more efficient. And that's really, you know, from, really from day one, actually even going all the way back to Regalo, that's really what people were looking for. You know, just, okay, here's this really cool thing. How can we tweak this thing to make it be even cooler or make it go a little bit faster or glide a little bit further? And that's, you know, that's still going on today. But, you know, through the industry. The 80s was a real pivotal time. So the manufacturers were really putting a lot of effort into improving the glide and the performance and the handling. And really a pretty interesting time in hang gliding in that, you know, we had finally gotten past this point where people were, you know, sort of worried about dying if they tried it.
And now just more worried about how far. They're going to be able to fly. Steven Pearson. So, yeah, during the next, you know, following years, the shakeout between the 70s and the 80s was in a large part, I guess, to do with airworthiness, with reconciling, you know, something that you could teach yourself how to fly and teach your neighbor how to fly with having to take lessons and having to deal with airworthiness issues with higher performance aircraft. But still the innovation. The progress continued at an extraordinary pace. And I know you've interviewed Larry Tudor and I didn't listen to those interviews, but I mean, Larry is kind of he's an icon for the progress and the experiences of, you know, pilots of, you know, that time.
I mean, Larry, by 19, I think he was. So the first hundred mile flight was, I think, in 1976. That would be Jerry. Cats flying in the Owens Valley. And I think it was the year before that the trip. Millinger and Gene Blythe made the first 50 mile flight from from Cerro Gordo up to West Guard Pass. And then the following year, Jerry Cats flew from Cerro Gordo to Janie's all along the whites. And there's a funny story with that, too. Jerry's a local Southern California pilot. He flies seated and he used to fly this Pacific Gull glider that I guess. You know, had had an advertised elevator, probably 10 or 12, and really had a glide ratio about seven.
But he was he recounted the story, you know, and flying in the Owens up there. I mean, I'd been to the Owens once in that period. I mean, people were kind of flying up there, but not very much. It was pretty, pretty sparse. But so he's flying along the whites, circling up, seated, no helmet flying, seated under this glider, you know, up at approaching cloud base at 18. Grand and a sailplane comes by and the guy starts circling around him and he's just, you know, pointing, pointing down, go down. You don't belong up here. And Jerry's just sitting there in his little swing seat, you know, with a polyprop yellow line, no parachute, no helmet waving at the guy.
How are you doing? Look at me. But I mean, yeah, look at me. Hi, how are you doing? I'm crushing this. I'm flying. Isn't this great? Yeah. So Jerry flew 100 miles. But then Larry, Larry was the second person to fly 100 miles. And then just a few years later, I think it was in 1982, flew the first 200 mile flight out of the Owens. And then only a few years later, he was working for us and had the first 300 mile flight and then the second 300 mile flight. And and so, you know, from the mid 70s to 1990. You know, 90, it seemed like an eternity back then. But really, we're talking about, you know, 15 years. We went from pretty much bamboo and plastic to flying 300 miles.
Here's Larry Tudor. We were approaching that part of Texas and there was this long line of power lines that just been snapped off at the base. These giant power line poles just been snapped off at the base. And we get to where Joe was and we're talking with some of the locals. They go, yeah. Yeah, we had a windstorm come through here a week or so ago that was so powerful that we had this baseball size hail. It was bouncing off the interior walls before it was hitting the floor. And so, you know, you you just have no concept. You know, if the Owens Valley is big for thermals and giant mountains, Texas is big for thunderstorms that defy. Yeah, just they just they just get massive, don't they? Yeah, they're on there.
You can't even. You can't even explain them.
So I'm not sure if we got a big flight that year or not, but the following year I was out there with Ted Boyce. And I got to say that Ted Boyce had the right attitude for long distance flights. He would fly every day no matter what. And he would start early because he said, you never know how early you can start on the world record day unless you just try for it. And he wouldn't try to predict the weather. He wouldn't try to second guess the weather. He would just go for it early and try. I go for it every day. So he had really the right attitude. And I learned a lot from him. Well, there was but he was a racer and I'm more of a floater. I didn't ever race that much. And that's probably why I never got the big competition results either. I'm too patient and like to take thermals, you know, too high and stay in them too long.
But there was one day where Ted had put it on the ground somewhere around Clovis, New Mexico, and I was still in the air. And we still had Josh Forberger as our driver. And on this one particular day, there wasn't much in the way of wind. It wasn't a world record day, but it was a good day. It's just that there was no wind and the dust devils were dancing around in the fields going every way, you know, north, south, east, west. They make little patterns in the fields. It wasn't really a good day for open distance. But at any rate, I made it up somewhere near Amarillo. And. And. And Ted comes on the radio. Ted comes on the radio, says, hey, Larry, where are you? And I look around and said, oh, I'm about 15 miles southeast of Amarillo.
And Ted goes, Larry, what the fuck are you doing in the air when there's a tornado? What? Like, well, this is that's what was amazing. On this particular day, there was no wind and it was an inversion. You see these haze. Homes everywhere. But no, no cumulus.
And I looked around to see where there might be some rain or a storm into the west of me. No, I'm sorry. To the east of me, about 30 miles, 40 miles. There was a little cloud or not a little cloud. It was a cloud that was dumping rain. And Ted comes back on the radio. Larry, what the what the fuck are you doing? And, you know, get down on the ground. There's a tornado. And I'm like, I don't see one, Ted. You must be mistaken. It must just be a really big dust down.
Ted, Ted comes back. He says, no, Josh, Josh has seen a lot of tornadoes. And he says, this is a tornado. This is definitely a tornado. And so I said, oh, OK, I'm just going to I'm just going to go on final and and and land and we'll go back because it's not a record day anyway. And so I turned north again on course and I went, holy shit. There was a cloud. There was a cloud that had popped in front of me that had a tornado going straight to the ground. It was like a solo cloud at no big thunder line of thunderstorms. Nothing like that was just one cloud that had put this tornado out the bottom right to the cloud cloud right to the ground. Oh, God.
So I just about shit because I'd always want to see a tornado before, but never from, you know, never face to face like five miles away. Not flying a hang glider. Flying in a hang glider. Yeah, it's only like five miles away, literally. Oh, and so I turn south. I turn around to start racing away from it. And I, you know, I'm flying as fast as I can in my glider. And I hear this little voice on the radio from Ted saying, don't forget to take pictures. So I'm like, oh, man. OK, OK. So I turned around and my hand I'm by then my I'm already shaking and I'm taking these photos. I'm like, OK, that's enough. And so take some photos and turn south again. And I'm just blazing south. Trying to get on the ground as fast as I can and not not having a lot of luck because something happened that day where everything started letting loose around five o 'clock in the afternoon everywhere all at once.
Just the entire desert started lifting and just clouds were popping everywhere and it was hard to get down. So perhaps what was happening is the cloud off to the east triggered a gust front that wedged underneath all the hot air that had been building all day to the west. And then everything just kicked loose. It was just enough to bust loose the inversion. So after racing south for, I don't know, 10, 15 miles across the Palo Duro Canyon, I was looking down and and I thought my, you know, my eyes were watering or something because everything looked all blurry. And I wiped my eyes and looked down. No, it's definitely blurry. And I realized that the whole desert was just a big windstorm.
And I was like, oh, my God, this is not good. And so. So I start spiraling down to land on the probably the wrong side of Palo Duro Canyon from where Josh and and Ted were chasing me from. And we were already out of radio contact. I spiraled down to land and I started backing up pretty quickly. It was it was blowing so hard that I was backing up at a pretty, pretty fast rate, looking over my shoulder where I was going to land and had to pop it up over a barbed wire fence and just managed to get down on the ground and jump out on the front. So what's your what's your trim speed on a hang glider? Well, I'm pretty sure I was flying about 40 or 45 miles an hour when I touched down and I was still going backwards. I jumped through the control bar and grabbed the front flying wires and my hands were so cramped up from gripping the control bar so hard that I couldn't I couldn't undo my carabiner.
I kept trying to undo my carabiner to get loose of the glider so I could lay my glider down flat. I couldn't I couldn't make my fingers work. And so back about that time, everything's getting black. I mean, the sun's going away. The sirens are starting for the tornado warnings. It's getting really surreal. And people are trying to get out of town. There was a guy leaving with all his horses in the back with his pickup truck. He pulls up at the road next to me. He says, hey, do you need any help? And I'm, yes, yes, help. I need help. And I can see him look at me, look up at the tornado, look at me, look up at the tornado. He got back in his car and just hauled ass. I'm like. Oh, no. So here I am. I'm standing there in this big field and, you know, all hell's breaking loose with the weather. And I can't unhook from the glider.
And fortunately, Josh and Ted show up and we we broke down the glider in record time, threw it on top and started working our way out to try to get back to Lubbock and the whole way out. It was just surreal because there would be these baseball games with all the lights on and people were out there on their lawn chairs. And the tornado is right there. They're looking at the tornado and look at the baseball. They're looking at the baseball game, look at the tornado and look at the baseball game. And it's just life in West Texas. They're just used to tornadoes.
Man, that is terrifying. The hackles on my skin are. Oh, my God.
It was pretty terrifying. But it just, you know, really showed me that weather can change so quickly. And when you're at 15,000 feet and everything starts to lift off, it's pretty hard to get down on the ground in any any short amount of time. Man. And so tell me about that encampment. Did you was that the year you did the record? Oh, yeah. So so Ted and I were trying for these flights and getting some pretty long flights. And there was a competition coming up in Hobbs because Hobbs started to be discovered by then and they were going to hold a toe competition in Hobbs.
And there was one day where we got a really long flight up past Klein's. Corners up towards Santa Fe, New Mexico, which was somewhere around 260, 275 miles. And the next day you got back late, like three thirty four o 'clock in the morning, got a few hours sleep, tried it again and got another flight up to up toward the north of New Mexico. And that was like 280 miles and had another real late retrieval and very little sleep. And there was this was the last day before the Hobbs. This competition was about to begin. But even after having two long flights in a row and being sleep deprived, I just jumped out of bed that morning.
And I had this premonition from the previous night's sleep that I was going to do this flight. And I lived this flight exactly as it panned out. And I knew it was going to happen. We were always doing declared goals, but we never really could be sure where our declared goal would be when we're flying. The flatlands, because if you're off a few degrees, it means miles and miles of difference. But I knew I was going to do it. So I called up Wills Wing and I talked to Rob and all the boys and said, I'm going to call you tonight from Elkhart, Kansas, because that's where I'm going to land. And they're like, oh, that's nice, Larry. That's nice. Hope you're having a good vacation. And which is always sort of an inside joke, because they always figured when I'm out on the road, you know, I'm not at work bending battens or doing real work.
And. Then there was a pilot in Elkhart, Kansas, Ron Kinney, who I had flown with on previous years. And I found his number and called him up, say, hey, Ron, would you sign my witness form if I if I land in Elkhart tonight? He's like, yeah, yeah, right. Whatever. Are you here in town? Are you putting me on? You know, what kind of joke is this? I said, no, no, I'm calling you from Hobbs. I'm going to land next to the Pizza Hut tonight. And I want you to sign my forms. These are like, oh, whatever, dude. You know, just have fun. Have a fun day, you know. Wow. And so then I told I told my my driver, Pat Page, my official observer, I said, you know, find the coordinates for the airport in Elkhart, Kansas, because that's where I'm going to land.
I know I'm going to land next to the Pizza Hut on the grass in Elkhart, Kansas tonight. That's what's the end. And I don't know. I didn't know it was 300 miles at the time. He just said, that's where I'm going to land. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He filled out the forms, took the photos, and the flight played out exactly like I relived it. In fact, the first thermal I took out of the airport, I had a low save above all these oil derricks. I was only about 200 feet off the ground. And there's not much not much good landing around there because it's all mesquite and oil derricks and electric lines. And I wasn't nervous. I wasn't nervous that I was going to land or anything. I think it was all part of the same dream or the same premonition that I'd had the night before.
So all the low saves, all through the flight, it was exactly as it played out in the dream, with the exception that at the very end of the day, I started getting low in the panhandle of Texas, northern Texas. And it didn't seem like there was going to be any thermals left, but there was a big feedlot. The feedlots there are just huge. And so I flew over the – passed over the feedlot and didn't get anything and just kept – I didn't get anything. I was heading north and was thinking that this was just another cruel joke that I was going to get another 280-mile flight and not get the world record. And so just about that time, I started to smell manure and the burials started to be dead and started getting real patient and just working this thermal for what seemed like an eternity and gained enough altitude to turn downwind again and make sort of a dead reckoning toward L.A.
We didn't have GPS at the time, so I wasn't really sure exactly where Elkhart, Kansas was. But you know how late in the day you just get that buoyant air and when you have a good tailwind. I just got real pointy and brought my elbows in really close and kept my head down and tucked my thumbs in behind the control bar and just did everything I could to not move and not detract from my glide and just flew along at minimum sink to let the wind carry me. So
is it literally just a compass? Were you following for 308 miles? I mean, were there roads? Were there landmarks? Were there – or was it just this premonition guiding you?
It's pretty much dead reckoning. Okay. God, this is awesome. Okay, keep going. I don't want to interrupt. Oh, yeah. So I was heading across the Oklahoma Panhandle and with all that altitude I got from that last feedlot thermal. And then I started to make out some grain towers and a diagonal road. And the railroad tracks and all that. And I knew that that was Elkhart, Kansas. And got there with about, I don't know, 3,000 or 4,000 feet. And since that was my declared goal and everything, I hovered down and landed just exactly where I thought I would, right next to the pizza hut at the airport. So you could have kept going.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Even so, I'm still glad I did it. So the most special. The most special part about that flight wasn't that we went more than 300 miles. No, it was that you did what you said you were going to do. That's insane. Well, yeah. And it's not only that I said what I was going to do, but in this life, you hear stories about people that experience things that are beyond what's explainable. Sure. But until it actually happens to you, it doesn't carry the same weight. So just to know that these types of things are possible or just to know that we do have senses beyond what we. Encounter day to day that we're kind of dumbed down to, we have potential. That's just who knows what our potential is.
Here's David Glover.
So as one of my best friends and someone that I spent over eight summers down in Texas with, he calls Zapata, Zapata fucking Texas. Pete, Pete Lehman, I mean, has a love hate relationship with Zapata and so many different people from around the world have been chasing world records. And there's this sort of. Holy grail. And it's probably the way surfers do with big waves. It's like when you find the new place and it could be the place everybody blocks there. We had, you know, all all the Brazilians, Frank Brown and all those guys, you know, came down a bunch of Europeans. Alex Ploner, Manfred Ruhmer from who set the world record in distance angling. As soon as Zapata was discovered, you know, it became the Mecca.
But I mean, it is a brutal place. It was basically found by Gary. Asaba, who is a manufacturer of hang gliders way back in the day, he had pliable moose hang glider. He actually just recently was working for Google's Alphabet, helping create an autonomous drone that might be able to step in the air a long time to create cell service. And he's a very, very interesting guy. Very smart. He was in the oil and gas industry. But he felt that there was maybe some place to where everything lined up, where meteorologists. Geology and geography would line up to be where you could start early in the day, stay up and have strong wind, but also be able to end up late in the day.
On the record day that Manfred went the very first time, it really busted Larry Tudor's record. What happened was the day before, Dustin Martin had been flying and had landed in Rock Springs about 220 miles away. Well, Dustin is frugal. And didn't have the best driver situation. And he was basically abandoned there, lying on his back when Manfred Ruhmer literally flew over his head for the record. And I think it seared sort of a certain resolve inside Dustin that, you know, he's just not going to let that happen again. But the thing is, is waiting in Zapata for the conditions to line up and then all of a sudden the hurricanes to start coming through or rains.
You know, it's hard. So what happened was, is that a lot of people started going in for just trying to snipe it. And so Dustin would would watch everything, would not come to Zapata and torture himself and just wait to see if it lined up. And one time it looked like it was going to line up. But a few years before the day that I think Manfred set the record, Davis Straub, who is one of the most helpful people in the history of hang gliding, running the competitions now, you know, told Alex Ploner, don't worry about flying today. You know, this. It doesn't look that great. And it was like a six hour seven. I mean, I'm not sure we've actually been there when it's been 10 out of 10. And, you know, but, you know, those six out of seven days, sometimes they they break the world record. And that's that's the day that, you know, Dustin and Johnny went far, which hopefully you can talk to them sometime about.
Here's Dustin Martin.
Yeah. In 2012, Johnny Duran and I went to Zapata to attempt to break the world record. World record hang gliding distance. And that that trip was culmination of maybe, I don't know, three or four trips that we had each made down there to try to break that record. That was at the time, I think, four hundred and thirty seven miles. But third worked out and I managed to get up first. And, you know, it's just typical Zapata scratching, scratching at a couple thousand feet or less for an hour or two. And then it. You know, it rapidly gets better. And, yeah, so then on that particular day, Johnny took off a few minutes later, 20 minutes later, something like that.
And I think he caught up with me about a hundred at the hundred mile mark, which goes by pretty quick, about goes by in about two hours or so down there on a good morning. So he caught up with me there and then we flew. We basically raced, you know, the next nine, eight, nine, 10 hours together on a pretty classic day. I mean. It was a 23 mile an hour wind all day, which is the whole secret of the place without the winds. I mean, 23 times 11 is is what to 253 or something like that. So the wind gave us fully more than half the flight.
And without the wind, you know, the thermals are good, but they weren't. It's not like, you know, it's not like a thousand upon every thermal. It's it can be 400. It can be 600. So just like northeast Brazil. You just you know, the wind is the magic. You just calculate how many hours of daylight that you could possibly fly and how much wind you think you're going to get. And there it is. So, you know, we got 250 miles for free just by circling and and another, you know, 225 or so by gliding. And that's that's pretty much the magic of the place. I mean, we were even able to get low and get stuck a few times. And even when you get stuck, you're going 23 miles an hour. So as long as you're circling, you're making pretty good ground. And. Yeah, I mean, it was it was literally a race day all the way until 30 minutes before the sunset.
And then, of course, that was just final glide time. So the last 30 minutes or even more, maybe the last hour was light. The day turned off while we were both at about 10 grand, which is pretty rare. So we were already high and then it turned off. And then we, you know, from the last cloud, we started scratching. I mean, he kind of there's a whole backstory, but, you know, he he flew into a thermal that I was in in the blue. And I'm like, I can't believe it's Johnny again. I thought he landed. So, you know, there we are, like eight or nine or 10 grand circling. And it's like 50 up. And we repeated that process maybe half a dozen times or, you know, four or five times, maybe. And on that last time, he was to my right. I think he
spends a front. And I turned to the left and something that I felt that might have been a zero or a little better. And I actually got like three, three sixties in before he. He. Looked back and realized he needed to be in that and not just glide. It was it was something substantial enough that at that time of day, which is almost sunset, he needed to take it. And by the time, you know, those first few turns were actually productive. It might have been 50 or 100 feet a minute. And that was it. That was, you know, there was a couple that was like a couple hundred feet right there. And there was just no no making that up. And we had been tip to tip until that point. So he didn't quite get as good as those initial three turns I got. And on top, the bubble was still working. And the separation kind of increased. I don't know what it was like 300 feet or so, but it was, you know, 300 feet with a 23 mile an hour tailwind in still air is a long that's a couple of few miles.
So, yeah, that was it, man. That was it. Here's Bruce Weaver. The peak for participation is probably in the seventies, but that, you know, that's not really what we're really what we want to focus on just because it, you know, you know, it really wasn't all, it wasn't that great. You know, there's so many people excited about it. People are getting hurt and, you know, the manufacturers hadn't really gotten everything together yet, safety concerns and all that. So eighties, I think is early eighties is really the, you know, the prime time. It's like a Tay Day. Yeah. Yeah. For, for hang gliding. And and we kept pushing the envelope and making gliders fly faster and further.
And with that, you know, just like a high performance glider. You know, a high performance car or motorcycle or whatever it is, or boat, you know, they got a little harder to handle, so we had to give up our handling to sacrifice that for more performance and eventually the gliders went from being these real docile things that you could bounce down the side of a cliff and laugh about it to these, you know, flying these things that are, you know, blade wings that will go real fast, but boy, they're not all that easy to, to control. A lot of consequence for mistakes. Cause you're flying, you're doubling your speed from where you were in the early eighties. Correct. I mean, you're, now you're trim speed 70 and you're hauling. Right. Yeah. You're really moving and moving that fast and not having as much control.
So it's, we started to get to a point where it was, uh, it wasn't a no brainer is never a no brainer to fly, but early on in hang gliding, you know, they were so docile and slow flying that at least on the small, small airfields we had. smaller hills, you know, it didn't take a lot to get that thing in the air and figure it out. But now you really had to be very current, very up on, you know, whatever your flying skills were and fly a lot in order to make sure that the wing, that you're going to be able to keep up with the wing, really. And, you know, that just kept evolving, evolving, evolving. And the wings still to this day, I mean, the wings that we're flying today, as far as performance, are just absolutely, I mean, it's hard to imagine, you know, the performance that we're getting out of these things.
So, I mean, it's really incredible what we've got. But along the way, what we found was that it, we started to lose a little bit or lost track a little bit of what made the hang gliding, this is my opinion, the, what made hang gliding so attractive. And that was that it was easy and it was exhilarating, but it wasn't, yeah, it was exhilarating. It
was accessible.
It was accessible. And it wasn't necessarily scary. It was exhilarating, but it wasn't necessarily scary. We had gotten ourselves to a point where, you know, it got, it could get kind of scary. But all during that time, hang gliding was, as I said, kind of in decline. And because I think there's a natural conflict or tension between increasing, you know, performance and technology and accessibility. You know, we, there was a there was a great time and towards the end of the 80s, where we, we got into, actually, they'd been towing forever, hang gliders, but towards the end of the 80s, we got into arrow towing.
So arrow towing came on the scene, it made hang gliding accessible to places that, you know, you don't have sand dunes, you don't have a gentle slope of a hill, you don't have mountains, you just have flat areas, and you could still go and tow your hang glider. And it was a fantastic revolution or evolution in the sport of hang gliding. And it allowed us, allowed the sport to expand into places that it never would have been. Here's David Glover. So arrow towing, I mean, basically started when, you know, the bridge guys started doing triking, and they would tow hang gliders with trikes. The thing was, the trikes, you know, don't have as much, you know, control authority, and they're really fast.
People loved it. But, you know, it just didn't seem like it was going to be something that would be available to the masses. And some guys down in Florida, there's a big water ski community down there from, you know, Cypress Gardens, and just people going boat towing, where, you know, hang gliding sort of came from the ski kites. And it continued on and then but they were to go up to, you know, Tennessee and Georgia to go hang gliding. But they really, you know, were pretty good community in Florida that would like to fly. And Bobby Bailey, who was the inventor of the Moyse Dragonfly, had played around with some different tow vehicles that were three axis control, more ultralights. And Campbell Bowen would bribe him with, you know, cans of gasoline and Pepsi to, you know, try to, you know, keep on working on these things and invent something.
And Bill Moyes heard about it. And what was born was the Bailey Moyes Dragonfly. There's been, I'm not sure how many, over 100 produced. And they really radically changed the ability to fly and do training on the flatlands. You know, if you think about it, hang gliding and paragliding are the two stupidest ways that they try to teach it first. They do the two hardest things first, which is the launching and landing, which, you know, is difficult because you're not sure how to fly yet before you get to learn the flying. All other aviation is taught with somebody by your side. You do the flying first, and then you start doing the launching and landing later. And then what happened is with the air towing, it also opened up tandem.
So, you know, Bobby and Campbell Bowen and Malcolm Jones and Russell Brown all basically got together and wanted to start a flight park. And that's how Wallaby Ranch was born. And then an offshoot of that was Quest Air. And then people came from all over the country, from, you know, Brad Kushner in Wisconsin was one of the first people to come to the first people to buy a tug and then take it up there and opening up hang gliding to the flatlands. And it's really made a huge difference. And, you know, but the biggest thing was being able to teach tandem and have somebody by your side. And I've done about 5,000 tandems. There's a lot of people with a lot more, but it really, really lets people, you know, have the experience immediately. And it really made a difference and sort of at that time kind of helped save hang gliding and at least show the way for a possibility.
David Morgan But one of the things I think it did too was it sort of masked that trend that we were seeing of these really high performance wings, because now, you know, you didn't have to foot launch your glider. Every time to get in the air, you could fly it off of a dolly, you get pulled into the air. And, you know, so we had this distraction that actually helped gliders like this get up in the air. So, you know, I think it's really important. So, you know, fantastic. And flight parks today are still, you know, some of the most flying goes on at a lot of these flight parks. So they're still a great asset. But really, what we ended up finding out was that we had lost a little bit of that original magic.
So you were kind of your attrition, the foot launch attrition and the mountain flying was being masked by the flatlands flying. So you've got all these new people coming into the sport, but you're still losing a ton of people. Yeah, because in a way, it's kind of balancing out. So by the numbers, it looks okay. But in reality, you're really losing people. Right, right. And you know what paragliding came along, really at the perfect time, you know, so here we are, we've gotten, we've evolved these wings that are so much fun to fly, and they can do they can perform these, you know, it's just incredible the performance they've got. And everybody who's in the sport already. Just, you know, just, I mean, just eating it up. I mean, they can't, you know, give me more, give me more, give me more.
What's problem is that the people that I haven't gotten into the sport yet are sort of left behind. And it has been relatively, a relatively stable decline for the last 40 years punctuated by, you know, economic factors or, you know, other issues along the way. But recognizing those issues, and also trying to look forward to You know, what can we do to stimulate or build hang gliding going forward. And certainly there are lessons to learn in that experience. But, but the reasons for the decline of hang gliding in the past, even if we could agree on all of them aren't necessarily the solutions going forward. Ultimately, the way we get back is making sure that it is as accessible as it once was and
You know, we'll gradually, you know, more accessible. You know, we've, we'll get more how to do things, you know, certainly the hang gliding needs to learn from paragliding, you know the the there's so many Positive things about pair gliding that you know hang gliding doesn't have, like you say, the, you know, the pack ability of it. You know, I mean, it's just it the whole package just lightweight, you can take it on an airplane. You know, things like that. That's a You know, we need to we need to look at that and figure out how we're going to, you know, how we're going to make it more in that vein, at least at the introductory level, you know, at least to start out with. And, you know, the higher end is going to be the higher end. You know, we're going to have the Ferraris and the Maseratis, you know, we're still going to have that.
That's still, that's still there. But we need to figure out how, you know, that's not what people, just what people see when they're thinking about getting into the sport. You know, you got to have it be something where people are looking at it going, yeah, I think I can do that. You know, it's pretty telling for me. I was up in New England, in New Hampshire, and I was watching a hang gliding lesson. This is about 10 years ago, watching a hang gliding lesson, beginner hang gliding lesson, a bigger beginner paragliding lesson happened. And I'd obviously been in hang gliding for a long time. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, but watching those two first day students learning what they're going to learn on their first day of, or their introductory lesson to the sport was really night and day.
You know, it was the learning how to paraglide. It's a little bit slower, you know, perception wise for someone without any background, a little bit slower, the wing looks softer. It didn't look like they had to work as hard to get the thing in the air. You know, to, actually get their feet off the ground and the hang gliding guys have this big apparatus that they're running underneath running hard and uh you know downhill and the speeds are faster and uh it really uh brought it home to me that you know why wouldn't why wouldn't anybody uh if given the choice standing up there where i was why wouldn't they uh try paragliding and and get into that now as you evolve into it like you say the hang gliding is you know it's the performance and you know the great thing that hang gliding has got going for it is that you've got uh every slight little movement you make in the wing controls your direction through the air so the the the ancient dream of bird-like flight where you know you you sprout wings in your dreams and you fly around i mean really that sensation
is what you get when you're flying a hang glider so it's really you know it's the being that connected to your movements and the controllability of the wing moving through the air there's there's really uh nothing like it you know as i as i said in the beginning i mean one of the reasons why hang gliding um grew so fast in the early 70s was there were so many manufacturers and there was so much competition and innovation in the design space and and now we're kind of reduced to um like four major manufacturers worldwide i mean it's it's Wills Wing here in the u.s it's moise in australia it's ikaru you know in italy and it's you know eros in ukraine and and that's worldwide we used to have that in la um more than that in la we had delta wing we had up we had Wills Wing we had sunbird we had quicksilver um so we had um you know that was just all within you know 45 minutes of where i am right here so going forward um i think there's you know there's a lot of opportunities but there's some fundamental issues that we we can't avoid that we need to address and the first and most important of those issues is um the subject of you know flight schools and flight instructors because we can't there's no opportunity for hang gliding growth no matter what you know one unexpected you know opportunities come our way for promoting or developing the sport but there's no opportunity for growth without some way of teaching people how to fly you know the the dream of flight i don't think is ever going to leave anybody you know i think that's you know almost innate in humans if they see people or they see any birds they you know it's hard not to see a bird and wonder what is wonder what they're looking at you know flying by that's what i was going to ask you is you know because you've been in this so long and you know when when you look back at you know the 70s where it was just like people are buying designs out of the magazines and they're just going for you know like here you know my my good friends who are competent you know outdoorsmen and backcountry skiers and that kind of thing they're just they won't they don't even consider getting into it because they're just they you know they hear about the accidents whatever and and i did that you know when i when i was first introduced to the sport it was like the mid 90s and all i kept hearing about were the accidents and i was like well i'm i'm really stupid i'm i'm gonna be one of those statistics like i you know that just doesn't sound i mean if it's i kept hearing like it's not the gear you know it's people making dumb decisions although i make terrible decisions i don't want to so i avoided it on purpose for 10 years you're not convincing me right yeah exactly exactly so you know but but have are we just different you know are humans different now 40 years later that you know that we're just not
concerned about safety and personal safety and uh you know if things just changed that much you know if we lost some of that you know wright brothers uh enthusiasm for for crazy yeah well i think that's a that's a great question i think there's i definitely it appears that there's truth to that you know i think that uh you know there's a lot there's a lot more things to grab people's attention now maybe that's it maybe it's just a reaction because i mean you know free solos going around i mean you can see you know there there are people doing things you know the red bull rampage just happened i mean the stuff that people are doing these days on motorcycles mountain bikes surfboards you name it it's just you could not have imagined what alex honnold just did 10 years ago no way you know no way anybody could have imagined that and right i mean that that's he's done something that is classified
impossible right and so now it's not impossible and someone's going to be do it better there's something's going to be done harder you know and that's remarkable so it's not like we're getting lazy or there's not those personalities i mean people are still finding a flow state and and pushing it hard but it's yeah it is interesting isn't it yeah it is you know i think i think that we're all gonna you know we're all gonna settle in to our you know to you know our part of uh you know of where we are and we're all gonna settle in to where we are and we're all gonna are as a culture. I think we'll all settle in and we're going to be fine. But, you know, that doesn't mean that we're just going to sit around and hope that that happens. You know, we're going to have to keep innovating and have to keep working on safety and getting out in front of people and showing them, you know, the absolute glorious experience that free flight is, you know.
And as you know, once people do it, I mean, they, you know, that's it. You know, you've hooked them. You've given them the taste. Like nothing else. Literally like nothing else. Like nothing else. I don't, you know, they can go on YouTube and think they want to go, you know, do something else and have a dream of doing something else. But if you can get somebody in the air under their own power, that's, you know, nine times the power. That's going to trump anything else that they thought that they wanted to do. If we want growth, then we have to, as a community and as a national association, we have to prioritize and incentivize new pilot development.
I mean, we talk about a lot of things, but, and there's a lot of supporting elements that might support growth, you know, media outreach and all sorts of other things. But until we get down to, you know, really making new pilots a priority and devoting resources to that, that objective, we're not really going to make any headway. You know, there's an evolution of the sport of free flight, I think that's coming. And, you know, we got a lot of really smart people in both industries that, you know, that I know are always sort of pushing the envelope, not necessarily just, in performance, but just, you know, what ifs, what, you know, what are we going to do next?
Wingsuit, for instance, is an interesting example. You know, I mean, just, you know, who would have thought of that 15, 20 years ago, or, you know, thought it would be where it is. So, you know, there's an evolution that's coming. And, you know, we need to, as a community, we need to, you know, just keep working to show people the, the glory that is free flight. And as we do that, all of us will, you know, continue to enjoy it and share it and evolve it. And 10 years from now, you know, Wills Wing, Moyes, you know, Northwings and other manufacturers, these guys, I think, will continue on, but they're not going to continue on without effort.
You know, it's going to, it's going to still take effort, like it always does with anything.
I hope you enjoyed. That was a tough one for us to put together. We don't usually have a whole bunch of personalities like that, but I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got something out of that history. And I don't know about you, but I am inspired to learn hang gliding. They are amazing aircraft. I've been flying around with those guys on a paraglider, often wondering, God, that, or thinking to myself, that looks so amazing. I got to get into that. And now I really, really need to. So maybe after the X-Alps, I'll, I'll take it up. But, uh, I appreciate it. Thanks for listening. I already said at the top of the show, all the things about the support, but I'll say it real quickly here again. All we ask for is a buck show. If you can't afford it, kick us down some money if you can. And that, that pays for all this to, uh, to happen and reach your ears.
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I appreciate it. We'll see you on the next one. Cheers.