What ever happened to.....?

[mchevalier]

Probably most of you reading this don’t know me. I started hang gliding in 1983 with Sport Flight in Gaithersburg MD. By ’89 I had my hang 4 and was flying almost every weekend and getting lots of air time. I was often flying XC and later became a regular at The Tow Farm and then Highland Aerosports.

I was living in Takoma Park and moved to Salida CO in 2003. The 60 to 100 hrs yearly declined a lot after moving. After Ann Dunlap’s death from cancer in 2018, there was hardly anybody to fly with and it just wasn’t fun anymore. Then in early 2021, one of my few remaining flying buddies was badly injured, so I hung it up and haven’t flown since. The decline in hang gliding has been steep and I seldom see hang gliders flying, just a few paragliders. I still have 3 gliders and all the gear to which there is no market for.

Recently I attended an old timers meet at Villa Grove, the local flying site. Only a couple paragliders flew that day but there were many old hang pilots I hadn’t seen in a long time. Including Pete Lehman (It’s Layman, damnit!). We were talking about the decline of the sport and he told me of the big decline in the MD, DC, VA and PA area. Which got me to wondering, what happened to the people and places? I was back there in 2015 for Karen Cara’s memorial. Her death seemed to be a tipping point for many who stopped flying.

There’s a lot of other things to do here. I still fly radio control gliders, fpv planes and quads. I raft, duckie, mtn bike, dirt bike, ride motorcycles, snow board, hike and explore. I rode in a trike last year, the wing being an Ultrasport. Didn’t like that much as the wing must have been loaded beyond spec.

What ever happened to these people?
Joe Clements, my first instructor.
Eric Logan
Santos Mendoza
Mike Norman
Mike Maxson
Cindy Black
Eddy Hyder
Lester Billings
Rob Tedder
Brad Hayes
Fred and Raeann Permenter
Matthew Graham
Joe and Janet Gregor
Roger Rittenour
Tom McGowan
John Middleton
Marc Fink
John Pesch
Steve Kinsley
Danny Brotto
Carlos Weil
Jim Strube
Brian Vant Hull

I occasionally lurk on the CHGA forum and it looks like Mark Cavanaugh and Bacil still fly but most of the names I don’t know.

What about the sites?
Bill’s Hill
Fisher Road
High Rock
The Pulpit
Woodstock
The Sac
Daniel’s Mountain
Zirk’s
Jack’s Mountain

[markc]

Hi Mike! You might find this amusing: I still have a PacAir K5 that I bought from you **WAY** back in the day! It's currently at the bottom of a 5-deep stack of gliders on my basement floor... Kinda/majorly crunched at this point, so it probably needs to be consigned to cloudbase. I remember the wing well because it was so divergent: *Poof*, into a 80+ degree dive. But TBH, it was fun as hell to fly, you just needed to know what to expect!!

You mention:

hardly anybody to fly with and it just wasn’t fun anymore

Well.... Yup. I hear you. And it feels that way to me too a fair amount of the time. Unfortunately.

Long-time (decades-long!!!) instructors who have had to move on/retire/life.

Flight parks that have closed, simply due to economic realities.

The (apparent) lack of interest and commitment that might otherwise engage new/interested students to learn how to fly. Too costly? Too much time?

The unfortunate reality of accidents/fatalities. Their impacts add up and people decide to move on from the sport (be it HG or PG). Heck, that's almost me.

But OTOH: It's not all gloom and doom!!! Bari (a relatively recent pilot in the Mid-A area, compared to you or I), pointed out that there were 40+ pilots up at Ellenville on a a routine weekend, just a couple of months ago. So the key might be to find the hotspots where flying is still common and fun! And then get out there!

Cheers,

MarkC

[mchevalier]

I bought that K5 from Woody Jones I think in 1993 and flew it a lot. The K5 flew well but it had the bad habit of tip stalling in ground effect, leading to 2 blown launches and a lot of broken down tubes on landing. That K5 flew worse with the plastic tips in but better with some foam tips I made. And one day, flying from Ridgley, a cargo plane flew over me when I was flying over Denton. Shortly after, I hit its turbulence. I went inverted and slammed into the keel and was falling. As I was going for the chute, the glider suddenly righted itself. I landed back at the airfield. The sail UVed out and one day, stuffing a batten, a pocket ripped so I bought a Stealth 2. I gave or sold the K5 to Ellis Kim and I don’t know how you came to have it.

In 2012, ’14 and ’16, Larry Smith, a pilot living at Villa Grove, hosted Colorado Fly Week on his property. You wouldn’t have known that the sport was in decline as hundreds attended. There was a bar, live music nightly and a food vendor. There’s a video out called 8 Days at Base. I had a camera on the keel andhave some footage in it, flying my T2 and scraping the clouds.

[markc]

I was pretty cheap, back-in-the-day

I bought several used wings during my early flying years, including multiple K-5s. So my recollections could be a bit suspect... Maybe one of them was yours Mike? Or maybe not?

(Regardless: None of those wings were so UV'ed out that I ever had any concerns about flying them, for example.)

8 Days at Base

That event sounds awesome!

It makes me think back to the annual Pulpit Fly-Ins that we used to have here. They were never at the scale (hundreds!) which you mention... But we occasionally hit 50 or 60 people, including pilots/family/friends.

That was such a fun time!!

And there were so many fun times at Highland!

And there were (and still are!) so many fun times at Woodstock.

I guess we just need to do a better job of making people know how cool it is to fly.

Cheers,

MarkC

[mchevalier]

You have my old K5. When I was back there for Karen's memorial, I stayed at your place afterwards and you showed me the glider. It was my old K5. Black and yellow.