'The Children of the Wind' - A History of the New Aviation 1971-1996 - Ch I, Pt 2

[Larry Dighera, Moderator]

'The Children of the Wind' - A History of the New Aviation 1971-1996

Here is a serialized account taken from Brian Miltion's magnum
opus, 'The Children of the Wind' - A History of the New Aviation
1971-1996, soon to be published by Endeavour Press, a
London-based epublisher. These first few chapters
chronicling the beginnings of man's quest to fly and how the
forefathers of aviation have influenced contemporary ultralight
aviation have kindly been made available to newsgroup
readers. They will be posted here over the next few months.
This first post is the Table of Contents.

You can learn more about TV presenter, lecturer,
journalist, award winning around-the-world microlight pilot,
author of seven books, and born adventurer, Brian Milton on
his web site <http://www.brian-milton.com/>;. You can also
purchase autographed copies of Brian's literary works there too:
<http://www.brian-milton.com/book>. And don't miss the
extensive collection of aviation videos, including Brian's Around
the World by Microlight flight for which he was awarded the
Britannia Trophy, joining a very distinguished list of aviators
who have won that award including Sir John Alcock, Bert Hinkler
and Sir Alan Cobham. Brian was also awarded the Segrave Trophy,
an award presented to great sportsmen; past recipients include Sir
Malcolm Campbell, Amy Johnson and Jackie Stewart:
<http://www.brian-milton.com/video/>

Additional links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Milton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segrave_Trophy


� Copyright Brian Milton 2013, All Rights Reserved


=================== Beginning of Chapter I, Part 2 ================

Chapter 1

Life, work and death of Alvin Russell, my best friend and BHGA's first
Flying and Training Officer. He laid down the regulations for safe
teaching in Britain. Killed on a hill in Ireland on Christmas Eve,
1976, flying a prototype that was rigged wrongly, and which, except
for sheer chance, I should have flown.

Chapter One - ALVIN RUSSELL

I now turned my attention to Graham only to find that he had entered
the latter stages of top landing. I could see him eating height with
consecutive 360s, and then he landed. So here I was, all alone save
for a couple of conventional gliders 500ft or so below me. A very
gratifying feeling indeed.

I can well imagine the looks of utter disbelief and dismay when the
glider pilot had to admit to being "sat on" by a hang glider.

My feet and legs were getting cold now so I decided to land. A series
of consecutive side-slipping 360s lost me 1,000ft or so, then a quick
beat up the hill, three or four more 360s over the top and I was down.

I had been airborne for 90 minutes, prone, and what height had I
reached? We telephoned the glider station. They confirmed cloud base
1,500ft above the ridge, and there it was, 2,200ft above the valley.
What a day, what a feeling and what a memory to cherish! It makes me
feel very humble that God chose me to place His magic upon. I shall
always be grateful.

My wife Fiona Campbell and I resolved to spend Christmas of 1976 with
my parents who had retired to Dublin, driving there in an old VW combi
with our 16-month old son James, and of course, my Phoenix 6B. Alvin
had a son of his own, six years old and mortally ill from leukaemia,
but his wife had left him and taken his son with her. Fiona and I were
not sure how Alvin was spending Christmas, so we invited him with us.
At first, he said yes, but when we passed through Shrewsbury and he
was not at the rendezvous, we phoned him and learned his red setter
had torn open his leg on barbed wire, and he had decided to stay with
the dog. I dearly wanted Alvin to fly with me, and dangled visions of
the flying in Ireland in front of him in an attempt to persuade him to
leave his dog with his neighbour. In the end Alvin said yes, but he
would meet us at the ferry in Holyhead. He got there in his little
Alfa sports car with just minutes to spare, and walked into the ship
carrying his luggage and hang glider on his shoulder.

Alvin had moved on from the Phoenix 6b. He did not blame that summer's
tree accident on the aircraft he was flying, and Ken Messenger was
keen to get such a good flyer on his new Birdman wing. Ken was one of
the pioneers of the sport in Britain, and like other British
manufacturers was trying to stay level with development from the US
and Australia. The Phoenix had been outshone by a new Australian wing
made by the legendary Bill Moyes which had thrashed all-comers at the
1976 British Open, and like other manufacturers, Ken had copied much
of what Moyes invented. The key new idea was a keel pocket, lifting
the sail off the keel and allowing easier control and performance with
a tighter sail. But while Moyes had a keel-pocket holding down only
the back part of the sail, Messenger's new prototype, called a
Moonraker, had a pocket all the way through the sail. Alvin was flying
the Moonraker prototype, which had all sorts of adjustments to allow
him to change the billow of the sail and so on. It was this kite he
took to Ireland.

My parents lived in Howth Head, north of Dublin itself. We were only a
mile away from the east-facing cliffs that look over the Irish Sea and
an island called "Ireland's Eye". Howth is where the Irish Republicans
received their shipload of rifles before World War One, and is a
famous little port in Irish history. But until now, no one had soared
the Howth cliffs, which lay 2,000 feet under the airway leading into
Dublin airport.

On December 23, 1976, Alvin and I trekked to the cliffs with our
wings, rigged, and walked around trying to summon up the nerve to fly.
The wind was on the cliffs, a rare easterly, but there was no bottom
landing. The cliffs just fell into the sea, and if we lost the lift
band, that is what would happen to us, too. But the sea breeze was
smooth so we had good conditions to test the Moonraker against my
Phoenix, which we both agreed was that rare glider in a production run
that is just better, no one knows why, than all the other gliders in
the run. Seagulls were soaring, we reasoned, so why should we go down
into the sea? Prudently, I let Alvin take off first. When he went up,
I joined him.

We had more than an hour each in the air, trying to get higher than
the other, pulling speed to see how fast we could go without losing
height, 360ing back over the top of the cliffs when we were too far
forward. It was smooth easy flying, and the Moonraker showed up well.
But it was late in the afternoon when we came down safely, and I had
no chance to test the Moonraker myself. Next time, we thought.

We sat, weary and content, in my parent's sitting room that evening,
while Alvin told my father how lucky we both were to be living through
such an era. Like me, Alvin would have wanted to have been alive when
Mainstream Aviation started, when no one knew that flying was
possible, and heroic deeds were done. But as we were alive now, hang
gliding fulfilled us, gave us more than we could have expected from
modern flight, put us in the air next to birds flying at the same
speed as us, and the same height.

A group of Irish hang glider pilots picked us up the following day,
Christmas Eve. Flying conditions were poor, with little wind, a slight
mist and about 800ft cloud-base. We were both sated with the previous
day's flying, but the Irish were happy to have someone as famous as
Alvin with them, and wanted to hear our stories of Howth Head. We took
our wings with us, went out for lunch, and just to pass the time of
day, went looking for a hill to fly together.

We were guided to the Sugarloaf Mountain, south and east of Dublin, a
distinctive outline I look for whenever I am around Dublin Bay. It
looks like a volcano from the distance, just a cone, but its peak was
under cloud when we arrived at the landing area and looked up at the
600ft climb to a small ledge for take-off. Alvin took his glider and
gear and, hill-climbing champion that he was, virtually ran up the
mountain. At that time I smoked heavily, so I 'died' six or seven
times struggling up the slope, and was wheezing when I arrived at
take-off to find Alvin talking to a group of pilots while rigging his
wing.

When I came to rig I found, for the first and last time in my life,
that I had lost a wing-nut on the way up. The wing-nut was to secure
the ring-bolt holding the bottom rigging to the wing; without it I
could not fly. I was dismally contemplating de-rigging to walk back
down again when Alvin came over.

"I've lost my wing-nut. I'm going to walk down," I said.

"Don't do that. I have about twenty wing-nuts on my wing. You can have
one," he said, and sure enough, he had wing-nuts everywhere.

"Don't you need it?" I asked.

"No, it's belt and braces. Ken Messenger put wing-nuts on the top and
bottom of everything, and the kite doesn't need them. Anyway, why
don't you fly my machine and I fly yours? You said you wanted to have
a go".

But I felt that even though the wing-nut he gave me fitted, I was
flying a wing that wasn't standard. It would not have been fair to let
Alvin fly it, though he was effectively a test pilot to the prototype
Moonraker. If he had pressed me I would probably have said yes, but he
didn't and I said no, I would stick to my own machine, and completed
rigging. That is how I lived to tell this story.

We agreed, as always, a little competition, closest landing to the
centre of a football pitch would win a beer from the loser. I watched
Alvin line up to take-off, fly off to the left, get in to his prone
harness, and cruise along the mountain losing little height. At the
end of his beat he made a 180 degree turn to the right and came back
towards us, still at the same height, about 400ft above the ground,
and looking regularly at the landing field to judge how he would
approach it. He was keen on winning, however often he had beaten me in
these competitions. As he started to turn left a small cloud came
through, obscuring my view. I turned, ran back to pick up my wing,
clipped-in and took off. I went much further to the left than he did,
thinking I would crow about that when I saw him on the ground, but on
the way back I found I could not see him at all. He was not lining up
on the landing area as he should have been, and he was not at the same
height I was. It was only when I looked vertically down that I saw him
and his glider, one wing completely broken, smashed up against the
side of the mountain.

I shouted and shouted and threw my wing out of the sky, seeing an
Irish pilot scrambling up the mountain to where Alvin lay as I lined
up to land. I jumped out of my harness and ran up too, but the
Irishman was on the way down.

"I'm going to phone for an ambulance," he said.

"How did it happen?"

"When he turned left he seemed to lock into the turn. He just
spiralled down, about six turns, and cracked into the mountain."

Full of dread, I asked, "How is he?"

"He's gone."

I did not believe him (we had been joking together just five minutes
before!) and I ran up to where Alvin lay. He was still. I eased his
false teeth out, thinking he might choke, but I also got a handful of
clotted blood. I sat there, rocking, trying to cradle his head, until
someone else arrived. Then I walked back down the hill and waited
until the ambulance arrived. When they took his body away a group of
pilots started to build a cairn on the hill where he had crashed. Then
someone else shouted "no, no!" and they dismantled it.

I phoned my parent's home to tell them what had happened, and cried on
the way home. At midnight mass that evening I looked at all the shiny
faces and the eagerness to be gone to celebrate Christmas Day, and
left in the middle of the service. My wife Fiona and I made love that
night. In my mind it was for Alvin, my lost friend. Fiona and I had to
keep a surface cheeriness for James's first real Christmas, but Fiona
had lost our first baby on Christmas Eve in Ireland three years
earlier, and Alvin's death confirmed her dislike of the place. I have
only attended church since for funerals or weddings.

Johnny Carr, who went on to be one of the best pilots in the world,
said "all the other deaths, you think, I could have got out of that
situation or I wouldn't have got into it. But Alvin..."

We came to the conclusion, a month later, that Alvin was distracted in
rigging his wing by talking to other pilots. There were three holes on
each cross-boom, which held the leading edges of the sail apart. A
pilot could choose to have the wing taut, or floppy, as he wished. But
Alvin missed his count of the holes, and made one sail floppy, and the
other taut. As he offered to let me fly his wing, it was already set
up to kill whoever flew it. It was, in fact, my turn to have a go, but
the loss of that wing-nut as I crawled up the hill, wheezing, made me
stick with my own wing. Smoking saved my life.

Alvin Russell was buried in a little country graveyard on the
outskirts of Montgomery, within sight of Cornden Hill, masking the
Long Mynd from his view. I was not a pallbearer. I went back to visit
the grave 17 years later; though I looked for half an hour, I could
not find it. I do not know why.

When the League started and did all those things for British hang
gliding that we had dreamed about together, we named the trophy the
pilots flew for, The Alvin Russell Trophy. It is still awarded to the
best hang glider pilot in Britain; only Johnny Carr of the current
League pilots knows why.

Alvin is not just a few lines in a newspaper, or an unfound grave in
Wales. Had he lived he could have been a contender, first for the
British title, later for the title of World Champion. He was one of
hundreds of people who dreamed the New Aviation into life and flew as
Otto Lilienthal flew, and like the rest of us, took a different route
than the Wright Brothers and all who followed them.

Hang gliding and the children of the wind that it has spawned, in
microlighting and paragliding, are normally seen in terms of the
deaths of some of us who try it. In the public's mind, hang gliding is
about death first and then perhaps about flying. That is the wrong way
around. Hang gliding is about flying, face-in-the-air,
wind-on-the-cheek, smell-the-woodsmoke flying. Death is the price some
of us have paid, and will continue to pay, to experience it. But,
contrary to popular belief, it is not absolutely necessary.


PILOT'S CREED

Why do I leap and try
These wild rides through the sky?
Does not the pounding of my heart
Before the start,
The terror of Death's fall
Me appal?

It does, it does, but then
Safe home on lovely Earth again
After that fragile dive
I'm twice as glad to be alive.

Mike Collis


=================== End of Chapter I, Part 2 ================