Hi there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Cloudbase Mayhem. Just got back from a short trip out to San Bernardino in California to do some training with Ben Abruzzo and Dave Harrington. Dave and I are supporting Ben in the upcoming X-Pyr this June. Flipping the roles here a little bit with Ben after all the many, many years of training and support he has given me in the Red Bull X-Alps. that was a lot of fun and the other purpose of the trip was to go out there and do some podcasts and the first one is released you here today with John Heine. Heine has been flying since 1978 he is still passionate about it he's got 40 hang gliders in his garage we had an exceptionally fun fun talk out at his shop.
He's a machinist, a diesel rabbit aficionado. He is an incredible photographer. He builds all kinds of crazy mounts for hang gliders. He's been photographing the sport since the beginning. He's got over 50 covers in Pilot Magazine and many, many others, done a lot of commercial work. He set the Guinness Book of World Records for for looping, and then did it again, beat his own record, and talks about that along with all the looping. John is also was was also a very competitive aerobatics champion back in the day. He and he and Mitch went head-to-head many times, of course, but we talk about some of that history and how he got into it and chasing the sky crack from upside down.
There's a lot of fun names in this one, a lot of the legends. This is, I guess, one of our legends talks, but talk about Larry Tudor and Mitch McAleer and Jack Lambie and David Kronk and a whole bunch of others. Tom Price and safety and wing testing and just a ton of good stuff. And this is, uh, I gotta talk to more of these guys; the stories could just fill an encyclopedia. So this was a lot of fun. Many many thanks to Mitch McAleer for shouting me some questions on this and giving me some ideas. And I had a great trip, some great flying, and had a wonderful talk with John Hiney. Enjoy.
Just talking about Larry Tudor, the fun story that I heard. I think, I don't know what year it was, but they were having a big contest in Owens Valley. And it was late in his career. And for the first time, the organizers decided to call a different kind of task than they'd ever called before. The task was from Gunter, I believe, up to the end of the range. And then normally you'd go off the end of the range to the north or northeast or east towards Tonopah. But they decided to send them east of Waze and then back down the valley behind the Whites, which is, I think, Fish Lake Valley, to a town, Goldfield, I believe it was.
Ghost
Town or something.
Yeah, and it turned out to be a really tough task. And just about everybody landed out shortly after they turned on that southerly leg, the last southerly leg. And, uh, and Larry Tudor, you know, a couple hours later gets it, comes into goal, and you know, it just points up his, his, the, the great, uh, talent that he had when he was all by himself and nobody else to compete against or anything, just mother nature. He could make, he could
do it he seemed uh uh, incredibly tenacious. It, we, you know, we were down in Texas a few years ago. We were, we were having a run at the, at the distance record, you know, going down to a place that Osoba and all you guys found back in the day. And, uh, he just showed up, you know, there was a crew that came down from Colorado and there was Larry just as psyched as ever. He just wanted to be part part of an effort and, uh, but he's, I think he's got incredible. Yeah, there was a paraglider he got really hurt a few years ago, uh, Eric Reed, who was really competitive for for many many years up in the Bay Area, and they called him the badger, you know, because he just when conditions got brutal and everybody sank out and nobody could survive, he would, he'd make it.
Yeah, Larry kind of seemed like that. Yeah,
That was Larry, Larry's talent. I think he said he'd take five aspirin before he'd launch when he's trying to make a long flight for what I couldn't stay in the air for a long flight because it just got too painful to, oh, to be prone, you know, which is not a normal position, hold your head up all that time, and uh, so uh, just proactively
anticipating the pain. Yeah, I think you
Do that just so he could fly comfortably longer. Wow, you know, that's a little dangerous to do that kind of thing. You know, aspirin is—we used to think of it as harmless, but you know, we know more about it now, right?
Right, I mean, wasn't he the first to break 200 and 300? He did both, didn't he? I think so, yeah.
His first long one was 221, I mean the first 200 plus, and uh, and then that 306 or something like that from Hobbs that
One was crazy because he, he, I remember when I talked to him about that, he, he had it picked out where he was gonna land, but he'd never been there. It was this crazy story, I think it was in next to McDonald's in Kansas and from Hobbs, and you know, he imagined he was gonna land there, but he didn't know, but he'd never been there. It was, wow, pretty cool stuff, stuff. Well, John, it's fantastic to be able to do this with you in person here at your shop. I already feel like I've gotten a little taste for some of the magic. You, I didn't know that you were a machinist. I knew about your photography background and some of your hang gliding background, which we're going to get into here, but I have a million questions for you.
So why why don't we start with this one? How do you describe yourself? Because you seem like a jack of many trades. If you're at a party and someone walks up and, hi, John, what do you do? How do you answer that?
These days, I just say I teach hang gliding, which my dad thought that if you ever got good enough at something that you could teach it, that was the best you could do in your your life. And sadly, he didn't live long enough to see my success. But yeah, at one point when the hang glider manufacturing ended and I thought about what am I going to do now, It occurred to me that I've been preparing my entire adult life for being able to teach hang gliding, and you know, a young man approached me, uh, right about that time, wanted to learn to fly. And and I'd taught a couple of friends a long time ago, but uh, I got into teaching him and uh, and decided, "Yeah, maybe this is what I should do now, huh?" And for the last 22 years or so, it's been working well for me.
Not that much activity right now, but I still get get enough people to stay at it and
Give us a rundown, and not in resume short form, but you feel free to lengthen it out however you want, but I, you, before we got recording here, you started in '78, yes? And let's go from '78 to here. What, what has that, what does that journey looked like from a kind of a bird's eye view, you? Oh, boy. I
started out on the little sand dune at Dockweiler. A friend of mine who had moved to California before me, who I'd worked with at Outboard Marine Research in Milwaukee, took me out, and his friend had a hang glider, and we tried it. That's what you did back in those days. Your friend had a hang glider. You'd run down the sand dune with it and see what, what happened, and uh, and you know, three stalled crashes, and uh, it was the biggest thrill of my life. It was, it reminded me of when I first got up on two wheels on a bicycle as a little kid. It was, you know, that feeling of your world just being greatly expanded all at once by this, by this one simple device, and uh, I was hooked on it at that moment had
You seen it and stuff, because you were here, you were in this area. Then I
had seen hang gliding, um, here and there from, uh, actually, let's see. When I first moved to California in '72, the first thing my friends did was took me to a hang gliding event at Escape Country, and I saw these people. I mean, we pulled into this park and there were people launching these colored wings off hills all over the place, high and low hills, and I just thought, "This is fantastic." And, uh, you know, I, I think at that moment I knew that I wanted to spend my time doing this. But it, you know, I was in kind of a hole in the, uh, at that time, that point in my life, and I, I, it was another five years before I got around to actually get started at it myself, which is probably good because on those early gliders, I probably would have gotten killed.
Well, I mean, in
78, uh, they were thermaling. I mean, you're the people are going places, yeah, not
Well, in '78, yeah, that was starting to happen then, I guess, yeah, the
carnage was had certainly started by that point; it
was kind of dying off by that point, actually. The worst was around 74, I think, as far as the highest death number, right? So, so...
there There was, what did it look like to learn hang gliding in 78?
From what I saw, you took one lesson and you were on your own. Ready to go. You were a pilot then. But I started out with a school in Santa Monica.
And we went out to Dockweiler and I took one lesson. I bought a glider from Iper, which was a poor glider and too small for me. And I had a hell of a time learning how to fly that thing, and because I, you know, I took two lessons and then was off on my own, and I needed a lot more than that. I was not a natural at it at all. Maybe I, maybe, you know, the be having the wrong glider was a big part of it, but I
See, all your, you know, you're a machinist here, certainly, and you got all these, this fancy equipment and welding stuff, and you will get into the photography, but was the, was that, were you an engineer coming into this? Were you bringing that kind of background to flying, or did that grow out of flying? I
Went to engineering college, but I graduated on a just a two-year degree, associate in applied science, and uh, I worked at a research center for a couple of years and then just got of got bored and thought I wasn't doing anything meaningful and just quit like a fool. And then I didn't know what I was going to do. I was kind of interested in motorcycles. And so I have an engineering background, but I'm not considered an engineer because I didn't get a four-year degree. And, you know, my engineering training has served me well. I mean, I really enjoyed what I learned there and, uh, and I've always been a student of science, but um, I've had many jobs.
You know, I found that I could walk into any place that I wanted to get a job at and tell them what I could do, and I always got a job. But then, you know, once I got into hang gliding, I never had a real job again after that. Really always tried to earn some money somehow. Hang gliding, and you know, I got into doing, uh, promotional photography and, and test flying for people making hang gliders and, and, uh, you know, eventually got a steady job for a guy who wanted to become a hang glider manufacturer, and I helped him out with that. And, and we had a pretty good success with that company called Altair and made the Predator and Saturn.
What
years were that was that that
was around uh Ninety-five to ninety-nine or two thousand or so. Okay. Yeah. When I first came to California to get heavily into hang gliding around 1980, I was staying with a friend and not too far from his house was this little flying site called Salt Creek in Southern Orange County, California. California, and when I arrived there the first time, I saw this guy named David Beardsley flying there, and he was just the smoothest pilot I could have, I mean, I haven't seen that many pilots, but the guy was so smooth, and he landed so gracefully, I thought to myself, I want to fly like that guy, and I ended up flying there and observing him, and you know, he was very generous, And and he'd been flying seven years, which I thought was forever, sky god, and uh, but he, he was very talented and very knowledgeable, and he shared his, his wisdom, always mentored the new guys coming in, and uh, and he continued doing that his whole life and still does it.
He still shows up at the flying site at the end of the day, or when the flying starts, wherever he happens to be, and he's done a lot of traveling, and whatever flying site he happens to be at, I figure he's the de facto safety officer because he'll walk up and approach some new guy about to do something stupid, and he'll straighten
it out yeah
that's a
Nice skill to be able to know how to do that tactfully, and you know, make it optimistic and bring people up rather than scare them to death, yeah.
and he has He has a personality that lends itself to that. And so I figure he's probably saved lives and certainly saved many mishaps just by giving of his knowledge to other people. And for 2024, USHPA has awarded their commendation award to Dan Peterson. Oh, really? For what I figure is probably a lifetime achievement kind of award for him. But he did something around 9,000 tandem flights in his career, many of them for free, just to show other people how great hang gliding was.
Wow, cool.
And taught several people to fly.
Your amazing photos adorn your shop here. It's history on the walls. It's fantastic. How did you get into photography?
You know, I always liked photography, cameras, pictures, you know. From an early age, I had a little Instamatic and never really thought much about it. Probably did more documentary photos than anything. But when I got into hang gliding, I was so enthused about it, So thrilled about the idea of flying high in the air, you know, on the mental wing that I just I wanted to tell other people about it. And, you know, I have to say, I saw the pictures of Leroy Grannis and Eric Raymond in the hang gliding magazine. magazine, and I just, I thought that is one of the best things I've ever seen anybody do is creating these special pictures they took mostly by mounting cameras on gliders, and I thought, I think I can do that.
And with my um ability to build things, I think I can make better mounts than those guys have made, and so that was really the beginning was my my thoughts about building building better mounts and taking those great, uh, mounted shots. When I was first thinking about doing, uh, this mounted photography, um, Eric Raymond was my hero. I just wanted to be like Eric Raymond and be able to take those great shots and get them published in the magazine. So, uh, he was, uh, he was my role model and I got to
still, you're still, you were just talking about him before with the three 60 and that's good. I mean, he's still doing it, yeah, yeah.
Eric Raymond is, uh, he's, uh, every, uh, free flight pilot's hero because he just had a storied career of, you know, learning to hang glide and then becoming a competition pilot and a hang gliding photographer, and then when he got bored of, uh, um, building his own hang gliders and and, uh, he decided he wanted to build an electric sailplane and fly it across the country, and he did and did what he wanted.
to do
Yeah, and he's still, uh, still working on his, uh, two-place, uh, Sun Seeker Duo over in Europe and, uh, living over there now and, and, uh, putting out really nice little films, uh, of this, uh, electric sailplane. So, yeah, yeah, he's a hero, yeah.
cool uh
Gil Dodgen was, uh, an early hang gliding enthusiast, and then he, uh, became the editor of Hang Gliding magazine, and he was editor for many years—20, at least 20 years, I think, probably more. And so he was the editor pretty much through the whole 80s and 90s, when I got the majority of my photographs in Hang Gliding magazine, and, uh, I give him credit for, for my having become noticed as a hang gliding photographer, because without that forum to show off my photographs, um, who would have ever known about the pictures I took? But he, um, liked my, my photos, and he, uh, he printed them regularly, and, uh, I, I think I had not just Hang Gliding, but, um, a few other magazines.
I think I had, um, in the neighborhood of 65 cover photos, and as far as center spreads, I think it was something more like 30 or so, but
That's a lot, lot of covers, and any photographer can be proud of that, just
Just from my, um, you know, watching hang gliding magazine over those years, I think it's probably a record, oh.
Yeah, that'll never be beat. That's, that's Kelly Slater stuff right there. That'll never be beat. That's amazing. Here's
kind of a funny one. Um, I had this idea to take a picture stepping on the nose of another other glider as I flew over. You know, Tory Pines is the obvious place to do that. So, uh, a friend of mine, David friend, uh, known as RC Dave, uh, agreed to help me with that picture. So he was flying one of my TRXs and I was flying the other one. I had the camera mounted on my wing and, uh, and I mounted it in vertical format just to have plenty of room to get the other glider below. And plus, I thought might make a nice cover shot. And so, uh, we went out and did the shot and, uh, and we got it.
You know, it worked. It was pretty easy to do and, uh, and gildodge and put it on the cover of the magazine. And the next month, somebody wrote in letter to the editor, "That's a dangerous picture you put on the cover. You shouldn't be showing dangerous things like that on the cover of our magazine." And so the following month, RC Dave wrote in a letter to the editor and said, uh, uh, he said, I had one hand on my parachute, the other hand over my eyes, tell your readers to quit whining. It was all under
control.
There's something about people who are drawn to this sport that I, I haven't really landed on the why too much. I live in a town where where backcountry skiing is a big deal and, you know, pretty extreme mountain biking is a big Denali run around with, with guys who are, you know, take some pretty heavy risks and they have no desire to fly whatsoever. Isn't that interesting? What is it about guys like you who, who just were drawn to it? And this is what you had to do. I just had this conversation with Tom Pagini, you know, he used to fly with you back and still is passionate about it today as he's ever been.
He just loves flight.
I don't know the answer. Um, it's, uh, it's just probably a human psychology thing where people think that as long as they're close to the ground, they're safer. Um, really in flying, Everybody in flying knows that the only time you're in danger is when you're close to the ground. So, uh, it's—it's probably just a difficult mistaken idea that people have about, about, uh, flying that, um, and about dangerous things that, you know, if you're—if you're, uh, kind of sort of connected to the ground, you're not in danger. I don't know, it's interesting, isn't it? I was in New York doing some towing with Paul.
Voigt and his group. They were truck towing at, I think, an airport called Blue Swan. And there was a young instructor there, and he had some students there who were doing their first towing. This young man was going to do his first tow, and I said, where's your parachute? And he said, oh, I don't have one yet. that I've ordered it, but my instructor told me I could fly without it until it gets in. And I said, can't tow without a parachute. And he said, oh, well, let me ask my instructor. And he called the instructor, and the instructor said, oh, yeah, it came in. And I said, let's put it in your harness right now.
So I put it in his harness, got it all ready. And he towed first tow flight, uh, behind a trike, and we're watching him tow, and they're about maybe 500 feet up, and all of a sudden, the hang glider and the trike are both going down like this, tow line still attached. Whoa! And, uh, the, uh, student threw his parachute, and the line broke, weak link broke, or something. The trike ended up pulling out and flying away. Everybody was all right. The student came down under that brand new parachute. Holy...
Boy, he was lucky he came across you. What happened? Somebody...
stalled. Uh, I suspect the the student maybe got too slow and slowed the trike, and then they were both recovering from the stall.
Gotcha. Wow, holy cow, that was lucky. Yeah, incredibly lucky. He
called me a year later on his birthday and thanked me. I
Bet, I bet he did. He owes that birthday to you, yeah, you. I have another generalization; this isn't always true, but it seems that people, when they get into the sport, are drawn towards one aspect of the sport or another. It could be acrobatics, in your case, aerobatics, or cross country, or neither, really. You could be red soaring at Torrey for your career. As I understand it, you were kind of the modern inventor of aerobatics uh talk about that what was what was spinning your mind that you wanted to make these things do things that they weren't quote unquote supposed to do well big
Correction, I was in no way an inventor or originator of aerobatics; most people give that to to, uh, Dan Racanelli. Okay. Uh, he was, uh, he was doing really, uh, beautiful maneuvers back in the single surface days. And, uh, and of course, um, Mitch McAleer was doing aerobatics before I, okay. Um,
I had that backwards and I thought that Mitch came after yours. No, I learned a
lot about about aerobatics by watching Mitch and, and, you know, analyzing his videos. And, uh, I really tried to emulate, uh, what he did. And, uh, one of the biggest compliments of my life was when, uh, when he saw me do loops for the first time and he was kind of, you know, he was surprised and he said, you look like me. me, that is quite a compliment. That was a big thrill, so, uh, but I watched, uh, Eric Raymond, uh, Eric Raymond was probably one of the guys. I didn't see him do loops very much, but one day I was standing at Edwards and he was up, not all that high, and all of a sudden he just pulled in and dove and did this loop, and it looks so easy.
I thought, well, you know, I know it's not easy, but... But once you learn what you need to know, that looked easy. It's got to be something that's quite doable. And then Wayne Denny, Crazy Wayne, also gave me good pointers that really helped me out. He was looping fledges, which is a little different, but still had some good advice for me. And, uh, of course, Ron Young was, uh, he was a monster at aerobatics. Um, the guy had longer than normal arms, which is a perfect situation for, uh, doing aerobatics on hang gliders because you can pull in, get your body weight further forward, you know, and, uh, he was strong guy too.
He was just like the muscle man of aerobatics. He forced the glider to do what he wanted to, and, uh, so all those guys, you, you know, were before me.
So, you know, probably the only reason I got famous at aerobatics was because I started mounting cameras and getting those upside-down pictures and then video, you know, 16-millimeter cameras of Tom Sanders. And, yeah. One year I got to fly in an air show on the Chicago lakefront. My friends Greg and Audrey Fisher were very much into hang gliding organization back then, and they got us a group of hang gliders into the air show that they were putting on, Chicago Air and Water Show. And so, um, the day before the show, we were, um, practicing at Miggs Field.
There was an executive airport right on the lakefront in those days, and, uh, Greg and Audrey thought it'd be a fun thing to bring to rent a limousine and come out and do our towing, uh, that day with a limousine. And so we were towing up just to do some practice stuff at a towered field, Migs Field, and we were there by permission, of course. And, uh, so we did some flights, and late in the day I noticed that there was a nice, I think I took a flight and was up and saw that this nice sunset was starting to happen behind the Chicago skyline. And I thought that would make a fantastic picture.
I need to, and I was totally into aerobatic shots at that time. So I thought I need to do a loop and get a picture of that Chicago skyline with the sun setting in the background. And so I got the camera all set up on the glider and I towed up and, um, you know, we were limited as to how far we were told we were doing a static line tow and the runway wasn't that long, so I was up, I don't know how far, but it was enough to do a loop. So I dove and I did my loop and, as usual, I just pushed the button and held it, you know, thinking that I would get three or four shots as I went over and one of them it'd be the shot, which is my habit at that time. So as I went over and got quiet, as I did went over the top on the loop, I noticed I didn't hear the camera clicking and I knew I hadn't gotten the shot.
Then I remembered I had put the camera on single shot when I gave it to somebody else to take pictures of me. So I thought, oh man, I leveled out. I'm looking at the ground. I knew I I needed to do another loop and get that shot. But I thought, I'm too low. And I looked at that gorgeous scene behind me, and I wanted it so badly, I thought, I got to get it. I'm dope.
What could
go wrong?
Yeah. And probably getting close to the ground, I pulled up a little early, and I was concentrating on timing the pushing of the button at just the right time. And I pushed the button, and I started falling into the sail. Oh, God. And, you know, people talk about an out-of-body experience. I learned about out-of-body experiences that day. When that happened, I knew that I was in a bad situation because I thought I wasn't high enough to recover from a stall. So it felt like I was sitting alongside, almost riding tandem with the guy flying the glider. And I said, you really screwed up this time. You don't have room to get out of this. But the guy flying the glider did all he could do, just hauled the bar in and dove for the ground.
And by the time I got towards the ground, I was back in my body again. And I pulled up, going probably 60 miles an hour, five feet off the tarmac. And I had just enough energy to pull up, turn 90 degrees to the left, and mush over a Cessna and land into the wind. And did you get the shot? I got the shot, and it was in the calendar the next year. So the guy who was, uh, the operator of the airport was in the tower at the time, and he comes down and walks up to me as I was getting my harness off and had a big smile on his face and said, "Did you mean to do that?" And I said, "No, that was the closest I've ever come to smacking myself on the tarmac." Well,
Well, that would have been unsurvivable. Holy cow. Wow. That's amazing. I've never heard. That's a remarkably low save. We talk about low saves, but it's a different kind of low save. Yeah, it was. From in your sail to landing it. Couldn't have been more than, what, 50 feet off the deck?
Oh, when I was upside down? Oh, no, I was much higher than that. It takes more than that to get there. See, that's the hint that what Wayne Denny told me before I did my first loop. He said, it's okay as long as you get upside down. If you get flat upside down, the way the glider is designed, you keep your weight forward. You've got less surface area in front and more weight, more surface area in the back. So the nose is going to come down. So you'll be stalled, and you'll be dropping like a rock, and you'll be in the fastest dive you've ever been in. But you'll come through, and you'll still be flying. You won't tumble as long as you get flat upside down.
And so that gave me the confidence to go ahead and experiment with the first time. Wow,
amazing. What was your loop record, the Guinness one? Oh, yeah.
52 loops after dropping out of a hot air balloon around 12,000 feet up at El Mirage Dry Lake. Tom Sanders made that whole project happen. He organized the Guinness people to film it, and he did the aerial filming for it. And that was a great project, great fun. What
year was that? That
would have been 87. Oh, no, 88. I think that was on the Red Mystic.
What does it stand at now?
Well, I had the record for nine years, and then I did another attempt in Florida, which I extended it only to 58,
because the turbo tug that was taking me up hadn't tried towing that high before, and got out on oil temperature, high oil temperature. Oh, you couldn't get higher. And so I had to pin off low. But then the next year, McAleer did 71 or 77, I believe, 77 down in Rio de Janeiro. And then I think only a year or so after that, Chad Elchins did 95. He towed up, uh, um, to 15,000 feet, I think, and did 95. So that's the record now. You know, Mitch is the, uh, the only living pilot who has, you know, the high, the highest, uh, number is
Forgive my lack of knowledge with hang gliding in history. Is it is aerobatics as I'm going to put this in parades here as safe in hang gliding as it is in paragliding? It's kind of an interesting thing. In in paragliding, the the acro crew has, they don't have a lot of accidents, and they they're they're they get it's really really really good training for any kind of cross country paragliding, and cross country pilots need to do as much as they possibly can because it teaches you wing control and and ground relation and just awareness Uh, it was is it was that the case in hang gliding as well, or are you taking on some huge risk?
I've
taught a number of aerobatics seminars and, um, most of the people who attend them aren't really thinking about getting to the point where they do loops, but they know that it's a good, uh, safety, uh, idea to know how to get out of a bad situation if you find yourself, because you know, anybody can get flipped upside down in a radical thermal, um, so, uh, it's good to have some, some practice and experience at doing wing overs and getting into some unusual attitudes and how to get out if it goes wrong. You've
Done a lot of traveling all over the world. Uh, to fly, was that for aerobatics competitions? Was that for cross country competitions? Was that just for fun? I
didn't have the stamina I needed for cross country competitions; they became iron man contests, you know, mid 80s. And, uh, so yeah, I, I got into aerobatics, just, uh, again, watching the guys who I, uh, um, saw around Elsinore. Elsinore seemed to be a hotbed for guys interested in aerobatics. And interestingly, none of those early guys, Dangerous Dave Gibson, Ron Young, Mitch McAleer, Eric Raymond, none of them wanted to tell me anything about aerobatics because I think they were afraid that they'd be responsible if I got hurt. And so they were pretty much quiet about it.
I had to figure things out by watching them. Break in. Yeah. Yeah. But as I said, Wayne Denny gave me probably the best advice I ever got about it.
It's interesting that, you know, you and Roy and Mitch and you've all kind of made this your place. What is it that's so special about flying here for the audience who hasn't who haven't flown here in this area? You know, I mean, this is kind of the birth, as I understand it, of flying in the U.S. Well, I mean, Kitty Hawk, of course, the other side, but, uh, you know, what, what has been the, what's kept you here? What's been the magic of this, this, these mountains, these, these ranges?
It started in Southern California, certainly, but I've lived in Utah and I really think Utah is the best place I've ever lived for flying hang gliders, paragliders. But Southern California, you know, it, you can fly year round. Any day of the year, winter or summer, can be soarable. You know, less soarable days in the winter, of course. But also, I don't like the cold. You know, I get cold easily, and it's better to be here. I really should spend winters in Costa Rica, probably.
There's a nice line down there. Yeah. It's pretty.
But, yeah, as far as world traveling, Most of the times I've gone has been to do demonstrations at some event, you know, uh, I think it was '96, what was his name? Guy in an organizer, guy in Portugal brought me over to do aerobatics at at and two events he was running. He was running the Portuguese nationals and the Spanish nationals on some mountains up, up in northern Portugal, right close to the border of Spain. And after the event was over, he and I were flying just—we were the only two guys in the area.
The previous days, the air was filled with gliders. Well, he and I are flying just thermaling for the fun of it. And I was downrange a ways by this windmill, thinking there would be a thermal there. And I was up at a good altitude, and I'm just kind of flying out away from the ridge a little bit in some pretty good wind. So I was kind of just hanging there. And I look over to my left, and I see a hawk down below just right next to me doing the same thing. And I got this crazy idea, and I just pulled in and dove and did a loop right next to him. And I pulled up, leveled out, and I looked over. He was above me a little bit at this time, and he dove and did a loop, get out of here, and
that's awesome i
I was, you know, I didn't expect that to happen, but I saw it with my own eyes and I have no proof of it, but I, I have to believe that. You know, I've never seen a hawk do a loop, um, and I don't know if I've ever seen any bird do it, but
That is cool you went. Oh, that's a good idea. You know, I did a an interview a while back with a gal who now she is a pilot by the time she was just studying, uh, migratory birds, and she was is making the argument that birds don't play. It doesn't make sense for them to because because because flying takes energy, and energy is only replenished through eating. Yeah, that they don't, that they, and I said, "No, you have to learn how to fly," because every pilot in the world knows that birds play. We see it all the time. They definitely play, and she's saying, "No, that doesn't make any scientific sense." Well, I promised you that they're they're playing because that we see it all the time.
Well, it's a logical hypothesis.
from her point of view, absolutely, but I
Should check in with her now, because I know now she has become a pilot. So, if you're listening to this, I'll, I'll ring you back up. But yeah, I mean, we see birds play all the time, just purely for the fun of it.
We do, in fact, at Tory Pines, you know, you see the ravens will dive and they'll roll upside down and then roll, roll back the same. Yeah, I finally saw one roll and continue and go all the way, all the way through, which is very rare. They usually go upside down and then back
right i
I went to Norway in 2004 to, um, teach a class on aerobatics. There was, there were eight guys there who had been practicing and were ready to get on with looping and, uh, and it was pretty rewarding. I watched a few of them do their first loops. Oh,
cool yeah
But, uh, been to Japan three times, and that was always for aerobatic demos at contests, um, hang gliding contests back then. But when I went to the Black Forest region of Germany, probably, I don't know, it was 10, 12 years ago, I realized at that point, um, when there were just a few of us hang glider pilots flying this site and about 60 paragliders, they were having a contest, of course, but made me realize that that's what hang gliding is about now, doing demonstrations at paragliding events. So, uh, where
Do you think hang gliding's going? If you could predict in 10 years, you think there could be a resurgence? You think it could? You know, there like, you said, there's—I'm showing up at sites in certain parts of the world where it's still pretty popular. You know, it's not—it's like you said, you've got students coming. Yeah, what do you think? I rub your crystal ball, the
Way I see it happening is kind of maybe like a dystopian novel. Um, uh, we'll go long enough without enough people interested in hang gliding that all the manufacturers will have to close because they just don't have enough business, uh, can't afford to do R&D anymore, and uh, and then at that time, sometime after that, I think that, uh, there will be a resurgence of interest in hang gliding and people will be, uh, looking around in grandpa's garage for a hang glider that might be hanging up in there, and that's where the they'll get their hang gliders from. Old gliders, like, like my collection where you got about 40 back there, you said, where they'll, uh, people will be looking for, for old hang gliders, and you know, somebody will be lucky enough to find one that was flown once and put away and it's brand new, and then there will be old ratty ones that they'll have to do repairs on, maybe even make new sales, and uh, and it'll be a an inter, a really interesting community of, uh, of creative and, and talented people who will resurrect these old gliders and learn to fly them.
That's kind of a nice vision. I like that. And it might even be illegal by that time. So all the flying that'll be done will be bandito, you know, and you'll be running from the authorities. Right. You'll
be like base jumping off buildings as now. Yeah, exactly. All done in the middle of the night.
So it could make for an interesting story.
Are you, uh, you know, many of your brethren have made the jump over, you know, Mitch goes both ways still and stuff, but, uh, if you toyed with paragliding as well, have you spent any time flying, flying the the rags, yeah?
Um, friend of mine, Scott Gresset, was, uh, working for people importing paragliders in the early days, and he, uh, got me started in it, and, uh, and it was, was great fun. I loved soaring little coastal cliffs with paraglider, and light thermals I thought were fine too, but, uh, little freaked out. They were pretty collapsey back in those days, and, um, we're talking about the late 80s, early 90s, and, and I, you know, the first time I ever flew at Tory Pines, I, uh, had a half wing collapse and didn't know what to do, and, you know, I was about 15 feet up, is all so rotated 180 and hit on the ground on a, on a hard plywood seat, and, uh, did a compression fracture and of my T12 vertebra, and so I was out for four months.
And when I got back into flying, I flew paragliders a couple times, but yeah, I didn't really get back into it, mainly, mainly because UP, the company I was working for at the time, was ending their operations in the U.S. and stopped importing paragliders. So I didn't have free paragliders to fly anymore.
Tell me about your design history, UP and just what were you doing? You mentioned you were a test pilot. Were you mostly test piloting? Were you mostly designing? You
know, the first guy I helped work on hang gliders, he was designing and building his own gliders in his garage in Gardena, California, not Gardena, Garden Grove. And his name was George Dyer, and he was a Texan who had been four times world champion at flat kite flying, where they tow these big flat kites behind boats before regalos were developed. developed. He got into hang gliding, of course. He was an engineer. And I ran into him at Crestline one day and ended up getting to know him. And he was building these gliders he called the Hawks, double surface gliders in the early days of double surface. And so I wasn't much of a help to him as far as designing at that time.
But I did test fly his gliders for him. And later, when I made my my first looping glider. I was involved with Bill Bennett up at Delta Wing Gliders up in Van Nuys. And I wanted a glider like Eric Raymond had that he was looping. He had taken a Comet and put an extra rib in between each normal rib station and a few other modifications. And he had a nice looping glider. So I just asked Bill Bennett if I could do the same thing to a Mystic sail. He had the Mystic at the time, and uh, so I did that. And uh, I didn't know Eric well at all at that time, but I, I looked at his glider and and made a few other changes on the glider: bigger leading edge tubes, bigger crossbars, and a high hang point king post hang point, which was in the early days of that.
And uh, the thing just happened to work out great for for looping it. It was an easy glider to loop. Dive it for about three seconds and start letting out, and you had your loop. Later, I got the chance to develop gliders with Dick Cheney up in Utah, who'd been building hang gliders since the early days and had gotten involved with the Japanese who owned UP at the time. And they set up a company to build gliders, And I got on with them doing demo tours and doing promotional photography for them, which I had done for Delta Wing. And so when that all fell through and it was just Dick Cheney and I there, I asked Dick if he would let me take the TRX and do some things to it to make a better glider.
I think he was sick of of hang gliding by that time, but to his credit, he went ahead and really went all out to to help me with that project, and he was the sail maker, you know, and he he was a genius at hardware, and together we came up with some really nice stuff for that glider, made the predator, and then later the saturn sizes, and uh, and so that, you know, lasted a few years, and and we had great fun at it. Peter Radman was the guy who bought the rights to make the Predator after, you know, Dick and I had developed it. And so we had the company Altair for a few years.
And, you know, we all had a good time doing that. But as with most hang glider companies, it wasn't destined to last long.
And what was the death knell, as you say? It was, it... what was the stat? What was the state of the industry pre the first paragliders? Was it already really declining, splitting apart, because I know there was just a lot of companies coming and going, yeah?
You know, by the time paragliding came around, it was down to a few basic companies who are making hang gliders: Wills Wing in the United States, uh, Trampano, I think, was kind of at towards the end of his run, making the sensors, Cameron Blevins was pretty much just getting started making his gliders, and he made great hang gliders. He did some really good contributions to hang gliding. But, you know, the foreign manufacturers, Icaro and Moyse and the ones in Germany and UK, they were all still doing well, I believe. But I think what really led hang gliding in the wrong direction was this idea that you always have to keep making them higher performance, this concentration on competition.
And then whatever the competition pilots were flying, all the rest of the regular weekend warriors had to fly in order to feel worthy. And so when the gliders got into the topless realm, I just saw that I never wanted to build a topless Predator. I just thought it was a step too far in complexity, cost, cost of repair, complexity of repair, weight of the glider, and they didn't handle very well initially. It just seemed like the wrong direction to go, and I think that's what really was what set hang gliding on the decline was same thing that put sailplanes on the decline. You know, once sailplanes got to be 60 to 1 glide ratio and cost, you know, hundreds thousands of dollars, you know, not everybody could afford those.
And so there goes your customer base. So, I think that's what happened to hang gliding, really. This is the
Big conversation right now in the World Cup, because you have to, you know, if you don't have the sub-harness and you don't have the this year's hottest glide. I mean, the Enzo 3 has been has been kind of dominant now for for many years, but it's that's the same thing. We're going to go the same route if everybody's got to have this that stuff because it's expensive. Yeah, it's fragile and it breaks and you get another one and and it's pretty hard to be competitive without it. Yeah, it's interesting. We've got the history books to look at to make better better better decisions. Well,
I think paragliding is going to stick around for a long time. Seems to me that most paraglider pilots realize they have to to stick with a glider that's reasonable to fly from a safety standpoint and, uh, um, you know, even in hang gliding, the topless gliders were quite safe. They, you know, they did their same testing that they did on on all the hang gliders, um, ever developed for strength and stability. Um, so it wasn't really a safety aspect unless you consider having to land one of those things. You, you know, they were harder to land because they just glide forever.
Coming in hot.
Yeah. So, but paragliding has a better chance of surviving it, I think. Well, it's interesting what
I think the Red Bull X-Alps and then most recently COVID, I think, really drove people to hiking. You know, it shut all the lifts down in Europe. And so everybody to stay sane, they had to go outside and go do something. thing, and so there's—there's been this wave of lighter gear technology and and improvements, and and so people can walk up hills, and that seems to be—that's a nice, uh, it's it's helped things I think stay growing, not probably growing very fast, but it's it's brought—it's brought in more interest from people who normally wouldn't do it.
That's a great, obvious advantage. Paragliding is the hike ability to
carry stuff, yeah, I
have friends who, uh, carried one friend—I'm thinking of Steve—Aiden used to carry his glider up to the top of the butte and where he lived in Oregon, and, uh, he would be up there soaring when his friends down at the normal launch down below couldn't, couldn't fly because it wasn't so horrible down there yet, but he would throw his 38 pound glider on his shoulder and hike up there, and, uh, and so, yeah, but you know, gliders got, got to be to where they're most of the gliders that are strong enough to be safe are, you know, 55, 60, 65 pounds these days, and I have been for a long time, and that's, uh, you know, we really should do something to make gliders hang gliders lighter, but now it's a little late.
There's, there's no customer base to make it worth doing development, so, but, uh, yeah, the weight of the glider is another, other fact I
So I just watched Oppenheimer. I don't know if you've seen seen the film, but there's this, there's this, uh, you know, when they're they're creating this bomb, there's a lot of science, but there's a lot of unknown still. And there's this moment where they're going, "Hey, when we light this thing up, we don't know if it's just going to keep going and incinerate the atmosphere." And there's, you know, I'm sure some of that's Hollywood, but I think there's there's some historical basis to that. They really didn't know as an atomic bomb when you guys were getting this—isn't a perfect comparison—but when you guys were, you know, the the first person who looped was there, uh, "Is this thing gonna hold together? Is it gonna?" There's quite a bit of force there, isn't there? Yeah.
Well, thankfully for me, Racanelli and, you know, other guys found that out ahead of time, so I didn't have to worry about, so it wasn't a
complete crapshoot when you were building a glider to a loop that you, you bet you knew the basics of what it had to do, yeah.
No, I was, uh, I kept the the basic parts of the glider, you know, stock, or at least I knew that I was making them stronger than stock. So, yeah, that wasn't anything I was concerned about. The
the the guys who set the infinite records on a paraglider and looping on a on a paraglider, it's uh, you know, they they talk talk about the physicalness required of it, you know, the g-force and the whiplash in your neck, and it looks smooth, quite a bit smoother on a hang glider, but how how fit did you have to be to loop 70 something times? Is that was there a lot of physical training involved before you did it, and as
I recall it's too close to the project. I decided, you know, maybe I should do some pull-ups and get my muscles built up. And so I actually hurt myself by trying to train too soon before the event, too close to the event, and my arms were sore for days after that run. But I guess I was just in good enough shape. I've never been much of an athlete, but I had enough being 30 years old or whatever I was.
What gets you excited about flying these days, um?
mostly, uh, shooting video, you know, again the idea of showing other people how cool it is and and, uh, what a thrill it is to be up there and how beautiful it can be. You know, you're always trying to get the sunset shots or the beautiful clouds, stormy cloud shots, and and, uh, shots close to other gliders and and, you know, doing touch and goes and whatever trickery and clowning you can come up with. So yeah, that's—I'm just mainly trying to make the hang gliding Moyes that I always dreamed about, even way back in the 80s, but never really got the chance to do. And now I've got all the equipment to do it that I need myself to to film and edit the the things. I just have to get friends to help me and fly with me and and and I'll
come up with some nice Moyes the
Uh, Telluride. Tell me about Telluride. There's, there's a mysticism behind that place. The, for I think most Tanglers that have flown the states, you guys used to have comps out there. You had aerobatics comps out there too, right? Yeah, the Green Machine and all this stuff that there's, uh, there's mysticism there. Is there something that many people have not flown Telluride? I mean, even these days, it's, it's not, not flown a ton. It's, you know, it's way up high. Uh, what is it about that place? I
Think most of us who went there had never been to such a beautiful little mountain village as as was there, and then to to get up on launch at 12,250 feet and and look at those great peaks above the timber line all around you. You know, it was, uh, just spectacular. And and then to have, you know, um, a couple hundred other hang glider pilots show up in town and all going up on trucks to fly every day. It was, I mean, you just you got to socialize with other people who are passionate about what you were, and and uh and then they always had that aerobatics contest, you know, from the early days. They were, uh, they uh, the Telluride Air Force people, uh, called their contest the World Aerobatics Championships.
Nobody else in the world was doing any kind anything like it, so I figured they had the right to call it that, even though there was no official sanctioning from anyone, right? And uh and they did it for so long, you know, every year in a row, that uh that gave them credibility. And it was everybody there was just like floating on air, literally, you know, because they were just having this great experience of getting together with like-minded people. You mentioned
the one accident on a paraglider. Have there been others along the way? Have you been pretty lucky? Have you been? I've been very lucky,
yeah. I have had hang gliding accidents. incidents, uh, seem like every couple of years. When I, from the time I started, I had some mishap, but I was always lucky enough to get out of it with a minor injury, a recoverable injury. And you know, I, I guess I can't deny that I'm a bold pilot, but um, and there are old bold pilots, but the uh, uh, they exist only by luck and you can't count on luck. I tell my students, uh, it's good to be lucky, but the only luck you can count on is that which you've had in the past.
Better lucky than good.
That's Nate and my buddy Nate skills likes to say all the time. Uh, yeah, you instruct, you've had 45 years or 46 years of flying. I think if I did the math right there, What do you try to pass on to those who are getting started and have no understanding of what they're getting into? Really, I mean, we're all ignorant for quite a long time.
Yeah, I feel that my main job is to keep them from getting hurt while they're learning to fly.
And it's hard to know how to do that. Had a pretty good safety record; haven't killed anybody yet. Had a few broken bones. Yeah, it's just, uh, I start out on a very shallow training slope that's so shallow that a person can't possibly get into a turn and turn downwind before they hit the ground. So that takes out the the prospect of a downwind crash, and we do 100 to 150 takeoffs and landings on that small shallow slope before progressing to a higher launch. And I've had people do over 200 takeoffs and landings on the shallow slope, and then, you know, it's always, uh, it's
always a little nerve-wracking to send them off a higher launch for the first time but in most cases you know It's intuitive enough, the control of the glider is intuitive enough that most people just pretty much get onto it right away. Try to do tandems, at least one tandem with a student before an hour-long tandem at Torrey Pines or Crestline, if possible, to get them, satisfy myself that they're doing the right thing controlling the glider. and then you know the next flight they're off the mountain on their own and that's worked mostly
tell
me about when you're sitting here looking at all these amazing photos, you said you recently did a presentation. It's so easy to tell stories when you see, you know, all the images you've taken over all these years and video these years. Uh, pulling out that is still very memorable for you, just in terms of, uh, there I was. What an amazing, you know, wouldn't it be nice to? That's the coolest thing to me about flight is we never do the same thing twice. It's always different, and there's always something different about the air and the and, uh, the the sky and the light and the time and where you are in the headspace. But is there a particular flight that just really stands out?
Probably the one that stands out the most is the one that hurt me the most. I had this idea that I wanted to take a picture with the camera mounted on the wing of the glider while flying over a body of water with my finger stuck in the water as I glided over. I just thought it'd be a cool shot and, uh, and I think, uh, it was Dan Racanelli's, uh, actually it was a guy named, uh, was it John Minnick, I think, who, uh, took that picture of Dan Racanelli gliding over, low over a lake, man.
That reflection is beautiful, yeah. Wow, and
Uh, so the the idea of having the glider reflected on the water, and then I thought the extra little thing for it would be to put your finger in the water. And so I planned to do that at Lake Elsinore. And my plan was to take off in sled ride conditions with the camera on the glider, fly out over the water and turn around and glide back towards shore and dive, get up some diving speed so I could plane out over the water, to have a few seconds, several seconds to, you know, get my finger in the water before I landed on shore. So, you know, I chose to put the camera all the way at the tip, which was a mistake from a safety standpoint.
They made a nicer picture. And then before I launched, I thought, you know, I've got it counterbalanced with a weight, But the drag of that camera out on the tip just could make the glider kind of hard to control. So I think I taped a tin can on the opposite tip of the glider just to create some drag out there. And I told myself I was going to practice dives on the way out. And if the glider didn't feel really controllable, I wasn't going to do it. I would just cancel. Well, of course, I got out there and I did the test run, and it wasn't right. It still yawed to the right pretty badly.
Where
the camera was? Yeah. So you didn't have enough drag in the can. Exactly.
So I ended up going for it anyway, like a fool. And I don't know that that hurt me, but everything worked out great. I dove. I got my speed up, my energy built. I pulled up just over the water. I had already arranged to have the button for the camera right in the middle of the base tube, so I could put one hand on the middle of the base tube and not have the glider turn on me. And then I put my finger down and went in the water up to the first knuckle, and then it came out again right away. And I thought, oh, maybe I didn't get the picture. So I thought, my first foolish thought was, well, I'm going to pull in a little bit to get down close to the water and, you know, go for another try.
And I learned a lesson there about aerodynamics. And that is when you're gliding along at a certain glide angle and for the speed you're going, if you lower the angle of attack, the glider drops some altitude instantly before it settles into the new glide angle. And, you know, when you're up high, you don't notice that little bit of loss of altitude. But when you're within arm's reach of the ground, yeah, when you're within arm's reach of the surface, it becomes quite obvious that you lose some altitude. And the base tube hit the water, and I slammed through. I was probably going 50 miles an hour. And fortunately, the water was only a couple feet deep.
My head went through the bottom surface of the sail and did some damage to my larynx. I couldn't talk for a month and a half. Spent the night in the hospital.
But, you know, if the water had been deeper, I would have drowned. If I had gotten knocked out, I would have drowned. So it was an expensive photograph. I see. And, you know, I get a lot of compliments on the picture, but it certainly wasn't worth doing. was
that similar doing very different things, you know, Mitch was doing the show over in—was it Austria when he did that?
yeah and
It was his third loop, and man, the footage of that is just, you know, 50 miles an hour to zero is, uh, some—that's a heavy hit.
Yeah, he might have been going faster than that. He was moving; he might have been going
Faster, you're right, but holy smokes, that's a a, that's a hard stop. I
would have killed a normal man
He does have some superhumanness in him; that's for us, for sure. That is some incredible footage. Yeah, those of you listening, I'll put that up in the show notes again. That was amazing. That's hard to watch. Oh god, it's terrifying. Uh, you've got some history in motorcycles, motorcycles, yeah. Oh,
Just, uh, you know, I, I watched the movie Easy Rider and, uh, and I just like that idea of the chopper and going on long motorcycle trips. So, uh, so I got an old Harley and, uh, built the chopper and actually went to work for a guy in, uh, Torrance, California, another one of those places where I, I walked in and decided I want to work here, and I told the guy what I could do. He, He, it was a custom motorcycle shop, Walker's engine and frame, a guy named Ed Walker. And, uh, and I, you know, I was enthusiastic about this stuff and I knew how to weld and build things. And so he hired me as his frame builder and welder.
And, uh, and I worked there for a fair amount of time and had a lot of fun and built, uh, built my old Harley.
You like building things. uh you're also fascinated with what did mitch call it diesel rabbit yeah well this is the volkswagen rabbit right
Yeah, that's, uh, I, I bought a brand new diesel Rabbit in 1980. My friend Gary Bakely and I went to Oshkosh, the air show, one year, uh, around 1980, and, uh, yeah, and we drove his little '78 diesel Rabbit up there, and he let me drive it on the way home, and, and it drove nicely, and it got 55 miles per gallon, and I thought, "This is, I'm going to get one of these," because I'm getting into hang gliding and I want to be able to drive wherever I want to go without the guilt of wasting fuel. Fuel was cheap back then. Yeah, so, uh, so I, I bought a brand new one and drove it 379,000 miles, and it got 55 miles per gallon, and, and I've, uh, I bought a van after that, but then, um, when I got back down here to Southern California, I started finding these used Rabbit diesel Rabbits, and, uh, and I'm on the fifth one now, and, uh, and you know, when I find something that works for me, I stick with it.
Uh, yeah, that's 44 years of Rabbits. Yeah, right?
That's a two years less than you've been flying. That's, that's, that's very impressive. It's a
great little efficient automobile, and and I know how to work on it myself, so I I just keep going and don't think about buying. I think about buying a new car once in a while, but then I I procrastinate on it and forget about it, uh
Looking back, you know, when you're editing your films and thinking about all your years in the sport, anything that you wish could have gone differently? Uh, let me phrase that a different way. When you—if you could have talked to your '78 self, you know, when in '78, however, however old you were at that time, and said, Hey, John, uh, here's what you need to know. What would you have told yourself?
Yeah, I've had my mishaps and injuries, but the way my life has gone, I don't think I'd change anything because I just feel good about my life right now. I never made much money, but I made some accomplishments, some satisfying accomplishments. I, uh, I just, I enjoy my life as it is. If I, if I did anything differently, um, you know, any, any little change could have changed a lot of stuff.
Jeff Shapiro said that when I had him on, he said almost the same thing. He said, I wouldn't change anything for fear of changing everything. yeah that's a nice way to put it good way to
put it
yeah yeah
Jeff is a cool guy, you know. In the earliest of days, I would obviously, uh, say a bunch of things about how hang gliding works, and maybe I've avoided a few of my mishaps and and injuries just from being illiterate about it again. You know, that's that's
how you learn
yeah it's a meaningless question because you you can't yeah can't go back I can tell you, but I guess, you know, the point is you can tell other people, uh, who are starting out and to that point, just, uh, be very conscious about safety, you know, and, and, uh, decide whether it's a day to fly or not, uh, based on conditions and how you feel, because it's much better to miss a flying day and be able to fly again the next day to fly in the wrong conditions, get hurt or killed yeah
I don't think I've heard too many people that have been hurt go, "Yeah, I wish I, you know, I wish I'd done, I wish I'd flown." Yeah, right. You just fly the next day. Yeah, an
interesting uh aspect of my learning to fly, and I think the one person who's maybe, maybe more responsible for my accomplishing what I have in hang gliding is an old gal named Elsie Garut, who lived down the street from me when I first lived in San Clemente, California. And I got to know her because I was doing electrical jobs to earn my rent and food money at the time. And I ended up doing some little electrical repairs for her and her husband. They lived several houses down the street and, uh, so I got to know them. And after her husband died, she, uh, told me that I could use her spare bedroom in her house.
She was living alone and so, uh, I moved into her spare bedroom. Didn't have to pay rent for the next few years. That meant I didn't have to work very much and I could go flying almost every day. And I think that That is why I, you know, gained the skills I could to win some aerobatics contests. What a gift. Yeah. And, you know, I cooked meals for her and took her places. She was legally blind. And so, you know, it was a symbiosis. Yeah. But it was great. And she loved me like a grandson. son. You know, I think it was Spanish Joe who told me one time that John Pendry was just a normal hang glider pilot, just another pilot in England until he got a sponsorship and didn't have to work.
And he had a girlfriend who drove for him. And so he could fly every day and he could try going cross country on any day, even if it wasn't a great looking day. He just left and went cross country because his girlfriend would always pick him up so it was convenient and spanish joe said that was when john pendry went from an average pilot to being world class time Yeah, and so that's a similar situation. I, of course, didn't have a girlfriend to drive for me, so well...
My wife drove for me at the time; my girlfriend, she drove for me once. And near the end of the day, when we were on our way back, she said, "Gavin, I want you to know that I'll never do that again." She never has. I
have a friend who, uh, whose girlfriend was really enthusiastic about his hang gliding. She wrote poems about it, she made drawings and made picture books and stuff to give him, and the day they got married, she never drove for him again. Yes,
there is pre-marriage and after. My wife now, who is amazing, she also, until we got married, she listened to every one of these podcasts. Hasn't listened to one since.
She's very supportive of the flying, but she's not going to pick me up and she's not going to listen to the podcast.
Makes sense. John, thank you for your time and sharing all these fantastic stories with with myself and the audience, and sharing your little nook of the world here. This is a cool shop. I appreciate it, and I appreciate all your photos and all your contributions to the sport, and uh, you're quite understated, I think we, but we got to have a nice journey there with you. Thank you very much.
Nice to talk with you.
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