Hi there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Cloudbase Mayhem. I've been trying to bang out these, I've been calling it the legend series. I've never actually officially made it a legend series, but I was reminded most recently with the death of the legend Bill Moyes that I need to work harder at getting these early pioneers on the show, the men and women who just created aviation, mostly around hang gliding in the early 70s, but a ton of fascinating, amazing history there that we're going to lose if we don't get it on the show and all that incredible knowledge and all those amazing stories. And my guest today is Malcolm Jones.
He started the Wallaby Ranch back in the early 90s. It was the first aero towing facility. He was the first aero towing facility in the world. And he has definitely, this isn't contested, more launches and landings than anybody on Earth. We did the numbers real quickly during the show, and it's at least 100,000, a pretty remarkable number. And Malcolm was brought to me as a suggestion by Tom Pagini, who we had on the show pretty recently, another legendary hang glider. Tom's got 54 years under his belt. Malcolm said he had. He said he had 51, so 105 years between the two of these guys of experience. And Malcolm and Tom have been very good friends for a long time, and were on the competition circuit together for a long time, and flew for various companies and sponsored pilots.
But Malcolm has been basically in hang gliding, and that's it, his entire life. And he has brought it, certainly, to more people than anybody else. So there's a ton of history there. In Florida, and a lot of comp experience and history there, and some amazing stories. But when Tom reached out and said, hey, you've got to get Malcolm on the show, and I agreed. I said, well, listen, you should do the interview. I know a quarter of this history, a fraction of that, and it would just be so fascinating to have you do it. So Tom was the interviewer, which was fantastic. I basically got to just sit and enjoy this one and chime in when I really wanted to. So, enjoy this chat with two legendary. It was incredible to see someone who's still remained so passionate about flying.
And unfortunately, this incredible era is coming to an end for him down in Florida. He's selling his ranch and moving on to a boat. So it gets a little bit emotional at the end, but we had a blast with this. Enjoy. Cheers.
Gentlemen, Tom and Malcolm, welcome to the Cloudbase Mayhem. I really appreciate your time. Been excited about doing this. We don't often have three people doing this at the same time. So those of you who are listening in, what we're doing here is Tom Pagini, who has been flying hang gliders for all of his life, and we had him on the show a while back, I think 54 years, something around there, is going to be the main interviewer of our other guest, Malcolm Jones, who's the head of Wallaby Ranch and has been flying for 51 years. Just found out before we started recording and done a lot of towing and just different stuff. And sent me some beautiful videos yesterday, which were a lot of fun. Had Mike Rowe flying around.
You all know from the jobs. What was it? Dirtiest Jobs. I loved those. That show was fantastic. But yeah, so Tom, because he knows the history a lot more than I do, Tom will be the main interviewer here. And I'll just jump in where needed. I'm excited to ask more questions and follow up on stuff. So there's a new format. I hope you all like it. And Tom, take it away, man.
Hey, Malcolm, you and I have known each other for a very long time. And you've always been one of the nicest and most interesting people I've ever met.
You started on a little different path, beginning in hang gliding, through your interest and experience in water skiing. When did you first hear of hang gliding? Or toe kiting? And how did that happen?
I feel sure the first time I saw a hang glider fly would have been at the ski show at Cypress Gardens. I might have seen it on TV or heard about it at something since then. But I do remember thinking, wow, that's scary looking. And it wasn't like, whoa, I want to do that at all.
So, you know, but that's the first time. That's the first time. That's the first time I saw it. And, geez, that would have, I don't know.
Bill Bennett stopped by there with a glider. I think it was his first stop in the United States from Australia. So I don't know when they started transitioning from the flat kites to the little delta wing ski kites, which is what they called them, even though it was just a tiny regalo wing hang glider. But it could have been three or four or five years before that, I guess.
And it was a few years after that when my brother ran into some guy that had bought a little, I think it was called a 13.6 Bennett, you know, delta wing ski kite. And I'm not sure why, what he thought he was doing, because he didn't have a boat. And so he called my brother Matthew and said, hey, so you guys have a boat and I have this ski kite. You know, what if what if you pull me and I let you fly the kite? And I thought it was crazy and scary, you know, but my brother's like, yeah, bring it over. So we throw it in the bay and we pulled him and he and my brother went and then I tried it. And
it was unquestionably my favorite flight of my life. We were really good water skiers. So it was an effective if you had a good boat driver, which you needed for skiing, which we were. It was sort of. Wind tunnel, sort of an opportunity. You're in the base two was like a ski handle ski and then you're on two skis and you come up out of the water and we would give. We were scared of it, which was healthy. You could go just fast enough to clean off the water skis, but not fast enough to lift the person with a little seat. So we'd be flying along. We taught bunches of people. Everybody in the neighborhood and you'd go along.
And the good skiers could keep themselves under the. And then slowly, you know, we had a little mimeographed sheet with drawings about push out to go up, pull in to go down. We've left to go left. That's it.
And once once you could go do shallow S turns, you'd stop in the middle and give me, you know, this was like, OK, in the boat driver, give you a little more speed and the skis would come off the surface. And it was just like, oh,
you know, it's just unbelievably. Fantastic. My first flight probably lasted 20 minutes, mostly under tow. You know, and of course, you you made that last as long as you can, because after you once you land, it's somebody else's turn. Did you when you're doing this with the with the kite like that, or is it kind of like modern ish towing where you got to worry about lockout and stuff? Did you do you have to worry about? They were amazingly docile. You know, I think it was like an 80 degree nose with a lot of bill. And they didn't tend to want to lock out. They didn't have as much performance, but with incredibly easy to fly. And we were going, of course, we didn't know anything about thermal or staying up, you know, so we're running around.
I mean, you pulling in, going under bridges and going back up and, you know, just all kinds of crazy stuff. I got tremendous amount of flying and airtime in a few weeks. I mean, we were ate up with it.
And you and you were you were 16, 17 at the time,
17 years old, 1974 and 74. OK, so 1974. I don't think anybody was thermal and really yet. I wouldn't I probably didn't know what the word meant, but we did a tremendous amount of flying immediately. And the previous to that, I had tried the little kite flat kite, which was 100 percent boat driver controlled. It could have been a person. It could have been a sack of potatoes. But it was all boat driver. Basically, it was a kite and the person which was in a little harness or a seat, very much like the early hang gliders and connected to the kite at this. I guess what would have been the center of mass or whatever. But effectively, the person was the tail of the kite. You know, you remember a kid with a kite that didn't have a long enough tail.
It wouldn't fly right. And if it had a heavy enough tail, it's like, great. And people were heavy enough for this kite to work. And so it was just sat there. It was all boat driver. And. And I had tried that previously, but I didn't go nearly as high as what I saw him do at Cypress Gardens, you know. And I think actually way back in the beginning, I think it was almost an accident that they realized what it would do. You know, I mean, the the first guys in Australia, I think they just thought it was going to be a better kite maybe. And it ended up being, you know, not really a kite, but a glider. There was really no similarity other than the materials they used. You know, aluminum, Dacron, stainless steel cable. That was that's where that's where I started from is out in Tampa Bay flying for hours in a day and a
dozen flights. You know, I mean, you could get good in a hurry. And we just started out with putting two ski ropes together, ski rope 75 feet. So we were we were with an angle. We were probably getting up 120 feet or something. But within. I don't know if it was hours, but within days, we're putting time to get more ropes together. You know, there was it just made the you know, I made that made the flight after you released last longer, you know, instead of 30 seconds. Maybe it was a minute, but it progressed really, really fast. And I just fell head over heels in love with it and barely passed a class in school after that.
You know, it's like it was my soul. Focus of life. And it has been almost ever since.
So that was right out of the out of your backyard. Right on Tampa Bay.
Yeah, they had a dock
right in their yard when he was growing up.
Yeah, our house was, you know, 30 feet from the water.
So what that's your first glider. I had a question about that. And you're the first glider that you bought for yourself. Who did you buy that from?
A guy named Richard. Richard Johnson, who's still a close friend and lives not far from here.
He's getting up there now.
Ninety two or something, maybe.
He's a very, very early water skier in the United States as well.
Yeah, you can go online and see a Tonight Show where he's teaching Johnny Carson how to ski, you know, back in 1950 something.
But anyway, yeah, the first one I flew was of the third with a 13 footer. Had no battens. Had no kingposts. It was topless. You know, when you came to a stop, the crossbar would just sag down. And when you got speed, it would straighten up. But the first one, that was the guy down the road that had bought it. My first one was a 14.6, which had a which had wood battens parallel to the keel and a kingpost. And wow, you know, state of the art.
And I understand that you did do some towing off of dry land pretty close to your house to tell us about that. Oh, my God.
I had a very unusual mom. And it wasn't long. You know, we do this behind the boat. It really has nothing to do with skiing. And my folks had bought this property out on this unusual thing in Tampa Bay. They would build this wall out like a big finger. We call them fingers. And they would dredge up to a certain altitude, certain height with sand as they dug channels. And then they'd stop and they'd put in the infrastructure. You know, the. The power of the water, the sewer and all. And then they'd pump more sand in. And so you had this big, long. What I discovered was runway going out into the out into the bay and no wires, no, no telephone poles, no nothing.
And it was a little cul-de-sac at the end. So I had one. I don't know which this one day I don't know if I'd seen maybe maybe I'd seen some TV of Bill Moyes doing it behind a dune. Buggy or something. But I just tied it to the family station wagon of a rope of I guess it was about 500 feet. And we took the skags off a ski. So because once you start sliding on the asphalt, as you start to it's really tough at first. And then it's then it's actually slippery. And if you need to get off the off the ground real quick or the you'll start sliding off the crown into the gutter, you know. So anyway, I have it all set up. Mom's like, oh, get that thing. Don't call me till you're ready to go. You know, so I'd have the car out there and the rope tied. Tied to the trailer hitch. And I'd have my glider with my we call the kite with skis.
I sit there and call her. She'd come out. I said, go to 45 and stop at the at the stop sign where the where the I just I just tow up and release. And, you know, you couldn't pay me enough to go and recreate and demonstrate it now. But that's what we thought of as fun. I had no idea how dangerous it was. And we 100 percent got away. With it, you know, we come in and lead out and just run like hell. And I'd come back and land in the front yard.
And your mom with a station.
There's no release. The rope would just go up. She'd see the rope in the mirror, obviously, just going up. She can't see me once I get up over the station wagon, you know, with the tailgate down.
She'd stop because we built one of the first houses out there. So it was like a desert finger with a road in the middle with a few. Houses, but there was really nobody to even the rope would just fall on the street. She'd turn around, drive and drag it back. I'd do it again. Yeah, that it's hard to even think about it. But that that happened.
Salary was great. My dad, on the other hand, made me promise that I wouldn't tow behind the car because he'd been sneaking his glider out of the glider. I mean, the ground skimmer magazines had read about what happened with people towing. It was a fairly dangerous thing to
do. The beginnings were smarter. Than the Joneses
for aviation stuff.
So when, when did when and where did you do your first foot launch?
I guess I was well, Crystal Caverns, Chattanooga would be the location. The guy named Kirk Hall had a big I think they call it a Solar Wings Falker or something. You know how in the early days there was about 30 different. Manufacturers, most of them just in the garage kind of a thing, and I ran off a little hill. I ran off one time. It was this huge thing. I couldn't, it was exactly like mine, except scaled way up, ran down a hill and then we put it on this little cable car and went to the top and ran off the top and that was all I might have ran down the hill twice. He's not, you got it.
Let's go. And, and I remember him telling me I was running off. I guess. I guess they'd had a lot of problem with people letting the nose up and then not having enough airspeed, you know, and I was scared, of course. And he said, just run as fast as you can. You can't go too fast. And I ran off that thing and I was treetop the whole way down, just flapping, hauling ass. And, and he goes, he came down after I landed. He goes, well, not that fast. You know, it was wrong. You can't go too fast. It was like, you know, for the next time, you know. Whatever. I did the opposite of whatever, what everybody else would do, which was get too slow. But, yeah, then that was great. And then I kind of sort of dropped out of school and moved to Chattanooga.
And so when was your first soaring flight?
Probably within a few weeks of that over at Lookout. I was probably only there because the wind direction that day.
Yeah, because it was east, northeast facing, yeah.
Dick and Don Guest had already had a, had a... a business going. They were the first wheelswing dealers east of the Mississippi, and they had started a club called the Tennessee Treetoppers and had established a launch there at Lookout Mountain. And there was a wooden ramp there, same place the flight park is now, but it was a club site at the time. And I joined the club and it was up there a lot and helping them with the early days of that. That would have been my first soaring flight. And probably wasn't too long after. And we were flying in a lot of wind. It was ridiculous. And we'd go all the way down to the point and back and all that, all that stuff happened really fast. What, what year are we now? I don't know, 75?
Yeah, 74, 75 probably.
God, I didn't know the Treetoppers had that much history. Oh yeah. And they, they were, they were really the, the biggest thing going east of the Mississippi, I would think. And it was two really nice guys. They had a trust company, Dick Stern and Don Guest. The second one just, just passed away. Recently, they started the whole thing in Chattanooga, the two of them. Absolutely. And it became a really active hub of hang gliding.
And we were jumping way ahead. No,
it's great. Do you remember where you and I first met?
I want to say it was at Dan Johnson's little shop there, Crystal Cavern Motel. Because I think you were doing a Kestrel demo. Yeah,
Dan Johnson, who's, who's been associated with hang gliding, ultralights, and then eventually aviation as a writer and a promoter. He had, you know, Dan Johnson's Crystal Air Sports, which I think was the first pro shop or at least one of the first pro shops for hang gliding in the United States. And it was right at the foot of the Crystal Caverns place where Malcolm did his first high flight. And that was serviced by a little tram. That would take you up there. You wouldn't put a foot in it these days. I looked at some pictures of it recently. It was frightening. But, but it was a really great scene. There was a, a, a bunkhouse near their motel that I think it was a no-tell motel during the day and, and catered to hang gliding people at night.
And it was just a great scene. Yeah. So I figured we met in 77. And I was 19 and you were 18. And we became fast friends.
Yeah. I've, I've met, you know, all the players in the early days of hang gliding and mostly because of Tom. You know, we, I, I hooked up and kind of rode his coattails all over the place, going to competitions and getting sponsored. And it was absolutely wonderful time. What did those early competitions look like for you, for you both? You can both answer that. But what was... That was basically a... What were the... What
were you
doing? And sometimes they'd have a zigzag of pylons and, and then they got real sophisticated and they'd have a speed run. So if you went too fast, you know, you'd screw up your duration. You know, it'd be how fast from this pile, from the launch to this pylon, and then how long from that pylon to the ground. So you had to kind of, you know, balance that. And, you know, funny thing is that as goofy as they were, the best pilots still won because everybody was having to, you know, whatever it was. They wanted you to do. Some people could make it happen. And half the people in the meets were just getting into hang gliding. And they figured, oh, this is a great way to learn. I'll sign up for this meet. And so you had people that were barely knew how to land. And with the towing, you know, I, I mean, we
were just killing it with the spot landings and all that kind of stuff. Most of the guys I was flying with had far, far fewer flights. And I was getting fewer flights up there than I was at home. But, but I was getting fewer flights. I was getting ridge soaring, you know, and that's what it was all about. You could fly, you know, in free flight off tow for an hour. That was, you know, that was just crazy.
So when was your first competition at Cypress Gardens? It was then a very world famous place.
Yeah, 1975. They would have, they would have, they called it a tow kite meet. They had world championships, water skiing competitions, all kinds of competitions. It was a business where they would. They had these big bleachers on the water. And every year they would have a state kite meet and a world kite meet. This was before the days of FAI or, you know, every, every promoter called their meet a world meet, you know.
And, but, but they attracted a lot and they had prize money. They had Delta Airlines was giving away three or $4,000, which was a big deal then. And so they had two meets a year and I went to every single meet they ever had, except for the very, very first one.
And. And met tons of really fantastic people. And Bill Moyes, who was, you know, I got also became very fast friends with who recently passed. And he was a major character and he lived a long life and I don't think he wasted any of it.
During, during your career as a competition pilot, you won quite a few contests. Can you tell us anything about flying from a dead horse point in Moab?
Scary. I think the, I think the Moab chamber of commerce put this thing together and they, they picked the spirit kick scariest spot they could find, which was this rock that kind of went up and it was undercut. And I think it was called dead horse point. It
was dead horse point.
And you couldn't run. You just kind of stood at the end, but you also couldn't hit anything. You just kind of fall off. And I think they had a, I think they had a couple of pylon things. You landed down by the river. It could get away with one flight a day, but it was a lot of, I mean, everybody was there. That was, you know, again, that was the first place was $5,000. You know, there's nothing like that today. There's not that many people. There's not a bunch of companies trying to make sure their glider wins. You know, that was a, but
the thing I noticed about all these big hang gliding meets is most of them only happened once. Cause they found out. There wasn't millions of people to come into watch and buying a ticket.
And you know, we all had fun. You know, I remember that one at Pico peak with everybody. They changed the prize money because the bunch of people didn't show up to watch or, but there was some, some philanthropic individuals involved too. Like the gardens was, they didn't make money on that stuff. And the grandfather mountain, Hugh Morton was like a, a gift to hang gliding for, you know, did first class. First class competitions that were really fun.
I can't, I can't name them all up. That grouse mountain grandfather. I mean, grandpa, what was it called? I can't remember the name of the grouse mountain, I guess is what it was called in Vancouver. It was, you know, so many beautiful places to fly.
It's just, it was just, it was just too much fun. And with our sponsor, you know, I think it was more important to get their logo in the paper than it was to win. So it made it really easy. Easy for us to have fun. You know, it's always been about fun for me. I'm the luckiest guy alive and I've had a lot of it.
Well, whenever it rained. Sometimes
we won, but it didn't matter.
Whenever it rained, we would have a big advantage because we always had hotel rooms. Everybody else sleeping in their van or in a tent, you know, and we were, we had first class. We had the Volkswagen Vestphalia.
It was a magic time because our name, all the little publications, Glider Rider and Hang Gliding. Magazine would have our names in these meets and you'd show up to town. Everybody would want to be your friend. And we had those easy wider cigarette pull rolling paper dispensers. We take off a little sticky every everywhere we went. They'd end up with a cigarette rolling paper dispenser on the wall and a t-shirt. So, so we were popular, especially Tom.
So, yeah, those are some of your memories about the easy water flying team. At one time we had four people on it and we had a professional manager who ended up being our mentor. A little bit.
You also won a big contest in Costa Rica, didn't you?
The president of Guatemala sponsored a big competition one time, not Costa Rica. It was right after the America's Cup. We were in this big meet at Lookout that Tracy Knauss put on called the America's Cup. And it was right after that. So everybody was on the road. You know, all the British pilots and that whole group went to Guatemala right after the America's Cup. And there was a big comp down there. Beautiful place.
Lake Panajachel. The lake at that land. The volcanic, extinct volcanic clear water. Just the most beautiful place. Had fun there, too. I mean, I remember me and, me and, me and Ledford. They had, they had, they had all the different motels and hotels, you know, contributing rooms. And myself and David Ledford were assigned this one. One motel was off the beaten path a little bit. And we're in the, we're in the room one night. And this is right during the time that they kidnapped everybody from the embassy in Iran. And this was a leftist, you know, junta that was in power down there.
And we were, they were a lot of guns and they were protecting us. Like, you know, I don't know. That was just, that was just the thing. They were worried about kidnapping us. And all that kind of stuff. Anyway, we're in the motel. It's about 2 a.m. All of a sudden we hear explosions, gunfire. And the two of us are like, oh, my God, you know. For some reason, I don't remember the exact politics, but the Americans were not in favor there. And we were up trying to figure out, we were trying to get the air conditioner out of the window in the bathroom. So if somebody came to the door, we could jump out the bathroom. And we were literally scared to death. And then it finally just faded out. Nobody ever banged on our door. Nobody ever broke in. The next day we found out it was some kind of a national holiday.
And their tradition was all in the middle of the night after a quiet night. Fireworks. 12 o 'clock or 1 a.m. or whatever it was. Fireworks going crazy, you know. Yeah. It was, it was really, really funny. But we had, we got no sleep. And we were scared to death. Neither one of us spoke a word of Spanish. It was. They take their fireworks down there seriously. I've had nights like that where you're just going, wait, what? Another great meeting in a beautiful place. I remember Rob Kells getting so pissed off because I beat him. I think I was flying a Seagull. I always flew whatever company Tom was working with and designing for, you know. So we flew Sky Sports and we flew Seagulls.
I guess we flew Bennett a little bit. Then later on it was back to Moyes. There's so many stories. I could talk for weeks.
So you had a major part in a Disney spectacular called Surprise in the Skies. And that went on for years. And it involved ultralights and powered parachutes and all kinds of things. Could you tell us anything about that? How that happened?
Well, they, it's a big company. Obviously they employ a lot of people around here. And some of the creative people there decided they wanted to have this because, you know, they had a big show in the lake at Epcot. They always had to have something new for their, you know, for their advertising.
And they wanted to have a show that had hang gliders. And I think they, somebody there was doing research, ended up on the phone with Bill Moyes. And he said, hey, mate, there's a guy right there in Orlando. Call him up. You know, so I ended up putting it all together and selling them boats and winches and gliders and hiring other pilots. And, you know, it took. A year to put the whole thing together. And it was really good money. And we had a ton of fun. And it was the last, the last several months of that show is when I would take off after the show every day and look for a place to start a hang gliding school. Because that's when things had, ultralights had evolved to the point that you could tow with them.
And I thought, you know what? I don't have to be running off to California anymore. Hanging out at Torrey Pines to do tandems. Because that's what I really love to do in the end. As soon as that show was over is when I opened the Wallaby Ranch. And the Disney job allowed me to buy the land. And everybody thought it was a ridiculously crazy idea, of course. A hang gliding place in a pasture in a swamp. But, you know, I really felt like if I didn't do it, I'd be mad at myself forever. And the worst thing that could happen is, you know, a piece of real estate halfway between Tampa and Orlando. So I could probably get out of it. And that's been 33 years.
Yeah. When you first went there, there was like a Howard Johnson's Motor Hotel. Waffle House. A Waffle House. And a 7-Eleven. That's it. And now it's got like a...
The city of Orlando has sprawled out the suburbs and just surrounded my ranch. So, you know, everything has changed a lot. Wow. You know. You know, I would have never been able to buy this piece of land at this point. You know what I mean? It was way, way out here when I got it. And now we're just, you know, the western suburb with a big ranch in the middle of it. Like I said, it's just super lucky. And Malcolm, forgive me for my lack of knowledge with Florida. I haven't spent any time out there at all. But is your ranch where people go to fly Big XC? Is that where they're starting from? Yeah. It's really no accident. They were right on what we call the ridge. There's a dune line that goes from like north of Claremont all the way down past Lake Wales.
That was the west coast of Florida. I don't know how many millions of years ago. I mean, we find shark's teeth out here. And so, there's a dry line, you know. And the sailplane community had discovered it years ago. It's very, very sorable. We get a sort of a sea breeze convergence that we're right in the middle of the peninsula. And so, you get a sea breeze off the Gulf and a sea breeze off the Atlantic that converge somewhere near here most normal days. And so, you have a sort of a concentration of thermal activity. You can look at a satellite picture of the cumulus clouds and it looks like a white mountain range. And as you go towards both coasts, you get these little puffy fewer and farther between little clouds. It's all concentrated right down the middle.
Anyway, we really do have an ungodly amount of stories that probably would be interesting to people. But it could go on forever because I've never done anything else. Flying there, you've never done anything else your whole life. This has been it. In one way or another. In one way or another. Either, you know, helping Tom run off Morningside with a new glider that has to be flown before it's shipped to somebody. Or, you know. Yeah. You know, going to competitions. Yeah. Something related to hang gliding. A show. A water ski show. A thing at Disney. Teaching. I hung out in Southern California a lot. I used to do a lot of tandems at Torrey in La Jolla there.
But with the AeroToe on, it's much safer and easier. And I can do way more volume.
So, when did you buy the ranch? What year was that?
91. 1991.
So, that was the original tow kite. I mean the original towed hang gliding.
It was the first
AeroToe hang gliding flight park in the world without question. There was the first AeroToe. The people that the first hang glider folks that were AeroToeing that I know of was Gerard Thévenot and the French with trikes. And they did a little tour. Dan and his partner at the time bought one and did some AeroToeing. And the Duncans built one. And, you know, AeroToeing was in its infancy. But there was no really – there was no flight park based around it. You know, it was a trike that somebody would go out and they'd pull each other. But there was no facility for AeroToeing. And the biggest difference is it was just a bunch of experts pulling each other up.
There was no growth with it. There was no instruction. It was just experts pulling each other. So, the difference about this was my idea was to teach and teach with dual instruction. Which is really outside the box and weird for hang gliding. But it's not weird for every other kind of aviation and how they teach it. Whether it's a sailplane or a helicopter or an airplane or a hot air balloon. You go up with an instructor. And so, I just thought that would work. And nobody else had tried it. And just put wheels on a big tandem glider and started taking people up. It really worked. Of course, everybody's doing it now all around the world. But it didn't take long to prove that it was the best way to teach people. How to fly. And certainly the easiest way to give them a taste of it.
They call it a discovery flight. Malcolm, I'm sure there are people listening who are confused by the term AeroToeing. Describe what it is. Well, you tow up similar to a sailplane behind an airplane. But it's an ultralight that flies really slow. And it's controllable at really slow speed. And you hook it up to the harness and the glider. At the center of mass on the hang glider. And you take off together. In the early days, we were running off. Now we make these little dollies that makes the list of things that can go wrong a little shorter than the list of things when you're running off.
And you tow to altitude. And when you're teaching, you get still air so that everything that's happening is because of the student. And then once they learn, you fly in the afternoon when there's unstable air. And the tug pilots get really good at finding the best thermal. And they even get into a turn, get you centered, and wave their arm and tell you to release. And when you release from the airplane, you go up.
And it's very comfortable. It's like country club flying, you know. And I get a lot of older guys that would never be getting into hang gliding. It wouldn't last half a day on a training hill. They can learn how to fly this way. With bad knees and everything else because they don't have to. They never lift up the glider. I've got a bunch of guys here that hang for cross country hang glider pilots that never, ever have launched a glider. Wow. And why, Malcolm, why aero towing? Why towing up rather than a payout winch? Oh, my gosh. First of all, there's much, much less stress on the glider. Once you've launched, you can hold the rope in your hand.
Much, much less stress on the glider. And then you can go much, much higher. And maybe the biggest thing is you're not stuck at the end of the runway or wherever the winch is. You're looking for a thermal.
And there's no comparison at all. No comparison at all. We did try some. Of course, we went through that stage, you know, before aero towing. We did a lot of winch towing. But, you know, there is no comparison. This is far superior in safety. And in effect. We did do some winching here. We actually tried to have some pair. You know, I had Dave Prentice, some of the paraglider guys come out. And we put a winch at the end of the runway. And it worked fine. They didn't get up as often as the gliders because they're starting where they're starting. Whereas we're starting where the tug pilot thinks is the best spot at that moment.
But it didn't mix well at all. We never had any catastrophes. But the problem was you couldn't see the rope. You couldn't see the rope. I mean, we got them way up there. But you see the paraglider. And then here you got, I have six tugs, six dragonflies, you know. There's 300 gliders stored here on a busy day. I mean, you've got, you know, tugs flying with a 300-foot rope behind them and other hang glider pilots. And you could just see that it wasn't working out. Because you've got this long rope. Piece of thin spectra goes up in a big curve. And you absolutely cannot see it.
It worked. But it wasn't practical to do in the same place. I wish it was. I wish you could arrow to a paraglider. And there's been some guys do it. But it's almost a stunt, you know, when you get somebody like Bobby Bailey or Dave Prentice in the paraglider. And they're doing a circle. And they just stay inside the circle. And, you know, it's like a movie stunt. But it's not something that's a practical thing. But I wish it was. It was really just the rope. It wasn't the paraglider. There's plenty of sky out here. It was, anyway, didn't mean to get off the subject. No, it's very interesting. No, but that's fascinating. If you were here, you'd see. I didn't know arrow towing was so much safer as well.
Because, I mean, the ground towing makes all of us nervous. Oh, it's much safer. It's much safer. I've done a tremendous amount of both. You know, static line, payout winch, pay-in winch, towed behind, you know, sea dudes, cars, boats, dune buggies, people. You know, we have some little dunes over here where the easiest way to get up on the condos is to have a couple of guys running with, you know, 200-foot rope and a handle. And you can, you know, release and get on the condos. But, yeah, it doesn't mean there's nothing that can go wrong. And there's skills to learn. There's just less to go wrong. And the aerodynamic pressures on the machine are way less.
I mean, just think about the angle, you know.
It's a very flat tow. And you get a big headwind or something changes, it changes for the tow vehicle, too.
It doesn't, like, add to the stress.
Sure. Anyway, again, we could talk about that forever, too.
That's great. You've flown a lot of famous people and actors and astronauts, politicians. Can you name some of them?
Oh, let's see.
Probably the biggest little publicity pop we got one time was back when the Today show, they were going to do a thing about, you know, today goes extreme. Or something.
And everybody picked what they wanted. And Al Roker, of all people, decided, I've always wanted to try hand gliding. So he came down and they were, you know, we had helicopters filming and all kind of stuff. And I took him flying. And he loved it. And our website crashed for two or three days after that aired. Really? And a few months later, this has been a while ago, obviously. But Matt Lauer, he was, you know, out of favor there now. But he was the big dog there for
us. He was there for
many, many, many years. He called me one day and he just, you know, well, when we did the thing with Al, I went up there, you know, to the, you know, did a little interview there at 30 Rock or whatever it was. And so I met all of them. And Matt called me and said, hey, well, I'm on vacation with my wife down in Palm Beach. And she wants to go hang gliding. He had, his wife was some Dutch model or whatever. And he said, we've got a helicopter here at the golf course. Can we just fly in? You know, he came in. They both did tandems. And the helicopter guy went over to Kissimmee to get more fuel. And I called and they came back. And, you know, I've been in touch with him ever since.
There was another, there was, you know, one of those Kate Hudson rom-coms had a sequence planned for it with hang gliding. And my longtime buddy, Joe Greblo, turned me on to that one. And they needed to, the movie was set in New Orleans. So they pretended this was on the outskirts of New Orleans. And they had a, you know, remember that Thomas Crown Affair where they have a sequence with the sailplanes? That's what they wanted. It was kind of an interlude from the story where her and her love interest came. And they were here for a week, spent a bunch of money with us. It was super fun. And they just wanted a sight with, they wanted a view of the two hang gliders sort of flying in tandem.
Joe Greblo took a picture. He took, you know, took one after tandem and I took the other one. And we just did this sort of ballet into the sunset every day. And they got, they shot for days, but it's about, it might be five minutes in the movie, which is a lot for a movie. But, you know, there's some of that kind of stuff. Kermit Weeks is a famous guy that was a neighbor. You know, I did, he had me come and take his whole family, his whole wedding party for tandems. He's, I think he's the biggest aircraft collector in the world. Somebody said, nobody has more airplanes. And he has, that's not in government. And he has a set up right down the street.
You know, Mike Rowe, that piece I sent you, that got a lot of, that got a lot of attention. You know, there's a, there's a real successful, one of the original executives with Google decided he wanted to learn how to fly a hang glider. So he flies his Citation over here occasionally and goes hang gliding.
He also, he also broke the world record skydiving. And he came out here and brought Joe Kittinger and Felix Baumgartner and him showed up and flew and had brunch with us here. Joe's since then passed away, but they were one too. And Alan still holds the record skydiving from outer space. You know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of aviation actually goes on in flight. I remember meeting Chuck Yeager over at Sun and Fun.
Incidentally, he took a tandem discovery flight before he passed and he had a great comment. He said, hang gliding is the flyingest flying.
And I thought, you know, I mean, he speaks with credibility. Okay. Chuck Yeager said hang gliding is the flyingest flying. That's kind of all you have to say.
That's a good one. You had some special pricing offers at the ranch that, and what were those?
I mean, I'm into having fun, you know? Yeah. And so somebody, it probably wasn't me, suggested that, you know, we should offer discounts for girls that wanted to fly if they didn't have any money, you know? I mean, you know, there's a time and a place for that stuff, you know? But half off was half off and all off was all off.
So we did, we did. We did a lot of naked tandem discovery flights. And the thing you, the thing you learn about that that's, that's the good part is the women that are willing to take their clothes off, they know they look good with their clothes off. And the ones that don't, the ones that don't. So this wasn't a nudist camp kind of thing, you know? You shouldn't have asked me that question.
No, I'm sorry. They can always be edited out, but I couldn't resist. We will
not edit that
out. I promise. Your t-shirts.
I'll send you the pictures.
Your t-shirts are legendary. I'm wearing one right now, Wallaby Ranch brand. Yeah. And you're also, there's beautiful Florida orange crate art and other fantastic t-shirts.
Lori Sanchez. She is a fantastic, extremely talented artist that lives in Winter Park here. And she came out and learned how to fly. So, you know, the artists, they usually do, they rep, you know, the wire goes to the wrong place. Or whatever. But she became an accomplished hang glider pilot. And we bartered for art. And we have some, we did some unbelievably complex, you know, that one's, that one you got there probably, I think it was 18 screens. You know, they call it four color process with four screens. 18. I mean, they were really, really works of art and were appreciated by a lot of people.
But yeah, great girl. She's still around. She was out here at our last Christmas party. She's a really nice person.
You unquestionably have more takeoffs and landings as a hang glider pilot than anyone in the world. And I seriously doubt that anyone will ever be able to come close to the record. What's the estimate of how many takeoffs and landings you've had doing all those tandems and the surprise in the skies? Wild-ass guess.
It would be a crazy number. Largely because of the towing in Tampa Bay. You know, one weekend that might do 30 takeoffs and landings.
I don't know. Lori went through the, since I've been here, we logged everything because we got to keep an accounting of it, you know. And she went through a couple of years until she got tired. But she said I averaged about five a day, including all the days that we don't fly. Average. It's less now. You know, the sport is slowly shrinking, which is probably something we should talk about. But
maybe, I don't know, between 65,000 and 100,000 maybe. I don't know. Yeah. Somebody was, Tyson or somebody was talking about that the other day. Oh, we should put you up for that Guinness Book of World Records or something, you know. Yeah, but you
don't drink, so.
I'd say number of flights, number of hours. Just quick math.
Quick math. It's five a day. That's 1,825 a year, 51 years. That's 93,000. Well. And it sounds like that might be conservative. I
do a lot more.
Certainly, certainly I've done more flights than anybody. There's just no way because I've never done anything else. And I'm turning 69 in September.
And I've, the whole ranch happened because I love taking other people up. You know, we talked about my favorite flight the first time with the skis came off the water.
I've been chasing that ever since. And the closest thing I've discovered in getting to that is having it rub off somebody else. Because they're having it. Not every time, not every person. But some people like, you know, you land and the lady's just crying.
And you know that it got to them, you know. And I get, I get a piece of it. That feels, feels selfish. But it's an absolute, I think the best word is magic.
But it's ethereal and it's, you know, I've never been able to get a flight like that first flight. But I'm still trying. We hear that a lot on the show. What I haven't heard, I mean, we all taste that first feeling, right? But what I haven't heard is this passion
that has. Seems like with you the whole way through. There's never been, it almost seems like there's never really been a lull. My, my, yeah, my angle is different than, like Tom and I were a good yin and yang. You know, he was very technical. We always had the best stuff. He knew what was going on. The best ideas. Let's try this. I was very social. You know, it was all about the people and the camaraderie and the fun. I loved having all the best equipment all the time. But yeah, turning other people. I mean, I was taking, I was taking girls on my back with a Moyse Maxi out of a lake. It was sitting on, you sit on your back and just hold the down tubes.
No helmet, no harness, no parachute, off the beach all day long. And I, you know, I discovered that really brought that first experience back again and again and again. Because almost every time it's their first time. And I'm sure it wasn't legal, but whatever.
No law against it.
Yeah. Yeah. I guess it wasn't. But I mean, it was before the U.S. SGA had a tandem rating or advance of that kind of thing. Certainly. Well, whatever it would have been then the Southern California Hang Gliding Association or something. They had never really considered the tandem thing.
So you've hosted demo days for different manufacturers, Wills Wing and Moyse. You're doing a Moyse one, right? Yeah. Around now.
Yeah. Last weekend.
And hosted national championships at the Wrench.
Yeah. We had a competition series. I think we did seven of them. It was called the Wallaby Open. And I put up a, they never made money, but they were a ton of fun. And one year we had 120 pilots. But the other years we had anywhere, probably always over 90. Way bigger than the Meech app today. The Meech app today, it's the same 25 or 30 guys. And there might be one meet. A lot of, probably two thirds of the pilots were from outside the country. Because I put up prize money. We'd give away, I think we gave away $5,000 one year, $4,000. Usually Manfred Ruhmer would come and win it.
But it really put us on the map initially because we had all the absolute biggest names. Thomas Sukonik. And during that period of time in hang gliding, they would come and they would kick ass. And they would find out that Florida is a fantastic place for soaring hang gliders.
I had a buddy, Mike Polescovich, who was, we used to ride up to Chattanooga together years ago. And he was meticulous about his log books. And once we started flying down here, we started air towing with a trike up in cow pastures up near Ocala. Yeah. But he was really meticulous about it. And people always say, what's the best time of year? And he sat down with all his log books and, you know, did the curve. And that's kind of the standing joke around here. What's the best time of year here? We'd always say, oh, well, the best time of year is April 17th. Because he laid it all over in that, you know, one year, March would be a little better than April or one year, May would be.
But if you laid it all out. It was just a little bit north of the middle of April. And you're getting to 8000 feet. And so the best time of year is April 17th. And we just passed it. And every meet I had was determined by the week that included April 17th. And they were all outrageously successful and unbelievably epic flights. And, you know, it was it was it was fun.
There's been even a sociological study done about the ranch vibe and the microculture that they built up there. Can you explain how that happened?
Oh, let's see. One of the local pilots named Joe Rossler used to come out a lot and his daughter would always come with him and hang out at the pool and whatever. And we'd always have a lot of characters coming through. I would say relative to hang gliding, we probably had far less turnover than a normal flight park. And everybody that worked here lived here. You know, the ranch was almost 500 acres. And the clearing we fly in and out of is about 150 acres. But I built these little tiny houses so people could stay here because we need to start flying between 730 and 8. That's a good time for instruction. Well, anyhow, so you end up it's a family. You know, it's very, very much a family.
And we've had a lot of people. There's just all kind of offshoots over the years. All these people, people met out here and got married and have kids. They're out here and whatever. Well, anyway, Cat, his daughter, Cat was super intelligent. And a couple of decade or a half, a decade or two later, she's I think she went to Stanford.
And she did her thesis on the micro. She came out. She spent a summer before her senior year, I guess. She spent the summer out here living with us and wrote a piece about the about the culture. And it was very interesting and positive. It has been magic. I'll miss it. Why do you say you'll miss it? What's going on? I'm going to be 69 next year.
And I've just decided I'm going to go sailing. Oh.
And part of it was the timing. There's a guy, like I mentioned earlier, the city has just grown around me. And the real estate became worth astronomically more than I paid for it. And more than you could justify with a hang gliding business. And I'd said no to developers for years and enjoyed saying no. But this one guy just kept coming back and with a different offer. And I said, well, look, OK, I'll sell it if you'll let me lease it back for two years. Because I can't just do it. I can't drop it like that. There's too many people and things. So anyway, I sold the property last April. And I can retire luckily.
And so I'm keeping things going until – right now it's through October. The folks that bought it, they have no interest in hang gliding, are – the last I spoke to them, behind the curve and all their… their development plans and everything else. So he said, well, Malcolm, you can continue on month to month if you want for – so who knows how long. But I think – it doesn't feel the same.
It doesn't feel the same. I mean it's been my baby. I bought the land. I've never had any partners. It's just me. It sent my kids to school. It kept us all in cars. But it was never really any big pile of cash. It was a ton of fun. And it paid for itself. But the real estate is a different story.
30 years later, you're a real estate genius.
By accident. Yeah. It's funny. I had – Bill Moyes told me that he had this shop in Bronte Beach, which is right – one beach down from Bondi Beach in Sydney. And as he was – he had a car shop. They had panel beaters and all the car electrics and all this kind of stuff. You could walk down from his house to the shop. And he made hang gliders there for decades. And then he finally decided to move. They offered him so much money because the whole area had just become gentrified or whatever they say. And he sold the building and they immediately tore it down and built some big condo. Anyway, he said that one transaction made three times as much as he made in the entire time that he was working himself silly building hang gliders.
Not that he – you know. I don't regret it at all. It's just a different animal. And I don't regret it at all either. Is the Wallaby Ranch going to become condos? No. This particular guy, it's surrounded by wetlands and it's not as developable as some of the land really nearby here is. Like I said, we're right next to the ridge. You go a little bit east of here, the land is a lot higher and drier right next to us. But he – Wow. I guess the vision I get from what he describes is if you see that house in the Yellowstone show where the rocks and the logs, it's a great kind of a place to build. But you can't be next door to another house. It's got to have space around it.
And he's got a financial services building business with offices in Orlando and offices in Tampa, and this is right in the middle. And he likes to hunt and he wants to walk out on the porch in his underwear with a cup of coffee and not see a neighbor. So I think he'd build a barn and maybe a swimming pool and that kind of stuff. But it's not going to be a dense real estate development. It's just going to be a – it's going to be a really nice house and a really nice spot. And it did what I wanted it to do. Like I say, I think I'm the luckiest guy ever. Malcolm, I got to ask you a question as we roll up to our end time here that I ask from time to time again with our – for the show.
With you, this is going to be fascinating. If you could rewind the clock to your 50-hour self, so somewhere in that 1975, you were building up the hours pretty quick, sounds like, doing towing and stuff. But what would you – if you could go back and talk to your 16-year-old self, what would you say?
Skip the aerobatics. You only got lucky with that.
Do what you do.
Don't change a thing. Yeah. You know. I mean I do that stuff. I cherish my friendships. I didn't sell any of them. I just sold the dirt and I'll make a point of putting together some reunion parties and stuff like that because I miss people.
It's a thing. People say, Malcolm, you're going to have psychological problems. Of course, I already do. But it's like it's been my third arm. I mean I've been here making hang gliding happen almost seven days a week since 1991. I've taken very few breaks. Wow. But it doesn't feel that way because I'm doing what I want to do. But yeah, there's sacrifices to it. It's hard to do the family vacation when there's guys showing up from Canada in a van any given day. It's like, let's party. There's another van of guys that just went home. You can barely stand up.
But yeah, I know so many people. It's really been a great, great ride.
My son just told me the other day, I said, how many people have you – because I keep track of people. I get contacts. He goes, well, you can just scroll up in your phone. At the very end, it will tell you how many contacts you have. So I did. I have 9,000 contacts in my cell phone. Geez. Holy cow.
Got Gavin now.
But yeah. I like that. I got to get out to your ranch before things change. Yeah,
come on out. It's a
magical, easy way to see what hang gliding is all about. And that piece you saw from Mike Rowe, if you really watched it – you should if you didn't. But you can see it in him. He was scared. It was impromptu. He landed in a balloon. There was no plan. But he had his film crew for the show. And they're like, oh my gosh. We haven't cleared this with the tire. We don't have any insurance. We haven't – he goes, I'm flying. You guys going to – you going to roll your cameras or not? Because he did what he wanted to do. And he saw – and he's done – he's talked about how he did the skydiving with the Golden Knights or whatever. But he was – he was one of those guys.
And I really love it because you can – watch it again. He was affected in a very sincere way. And he goes, oh my god. It is magic. And he rolled in. And ever since that movie, people call this thing – they refer to bucket lists. And I told the guy – I can't remember who it was. It was in charge of the USHCA. I said, you should take that clip and put it on the website because he rolls in. The camera guy runs up to him. He looks at him. He says, if you're making a list, you need to do this. And it's like, dude. And everybody knows that face. Take that. Run with it.
It's like it's perfect.
But yeah, it's just – I keep up with him. I mean I make friends with people as they go through. And when you're teaching somebody how to fly, it's very personal. And they're here for a week, two weeks, three weeks. We've gone out to eat together. We've had beer together. We're literally touching. In the harness, my mouth is four inches from their ear. I've taught them everything start to finish. They've never touched a hang glider. They leave in three weeks and they're flying solo.
They don't forget you. It's special. It's super nice. It's perfect for me. It wouldn't be perfect for most people. I know a lot of guys that get into the tandems because they just pay for bills and they want to be in the air. But they're more flying for themselves, even doing aerobatics with a tandem person, whatever. But it's not – they're not there for the – not everybody. But I really get charged up out of somebody else getting it. There was a study. You guys remember that? It came out a while back. They did a follow-up thing with women who had learned to fly. I think this was paragliders or hang gliders. I'm not sure if there was a specific category. But – and the response in the survey response was that it was the second – the second most important thing in their life to childbirth.
That's pretty remarkable. Like you said, it's not everybody. I've had hundreds of people tell me in the most sincere way, that's the most fun I've ever had in my life.
Yeah. Yeah. Pretty remarkable.
Gentlemen, Tom, thanks for setting this up and great questions. And Malcolm, both of you, thank you for your incredible contributions to this space. And to this sport and to this community and to this life. We and I, we really appreciate it. Malcolm, I can see how emotional this is for you to have had this ranch for so long. And good luck sailing and good luck with the transition. I don't anticipate that's going to be very easy. But these things happen in life. We move on and do different stuff. But thank you. I really appreciate both of your time. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. It was interesting. It's funny. You don't reflect on things so much and people ask you about it.
It kind of forces it on you. Thanks again.
That's great, Kevin. Thank you.
Thank you. If
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