'The Children of the Wind' - A History of the New Aviation 1971-1996 - Ch V, Pt 3

[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 V, Part 3==============

Chapter Five - LEARNING TO CROSS-COUNTRY

Having nothing with which to gauge my rise and descent rate, and knowing that I
couldn't detect constant lift, only changes in it, I decided that the chances
of a true thermalling cross-country flight were slim and so I headed cross-wind
for Llanberis.

Flying down the pass with the summit still below and behind me and the ground
4,500 feet away was a quite unforgettable experience. I arrived over the
quarries at Llanberis with 2,000 feet of height and circled, gradually losing
height. Finally I crossed the lake to the town, circled and landed on the
shore, much to the surprise of the bathers who at first thought the kite was a
toy!

The whole flight had lasted 40 minutes and I had flown 4 miles as the crow
flies and now I know why the Americans with their various launch points and
super-kites are pulling off 20 mile flights!

(Graham Hobson) - Now I had Snowdon to myself and was beginning to get
concerned at the lack of Phil Robinson's presence in the air. I could see his
glider laid flat and Phil working on it, the wings kept coming in and out and
still he didn't take off.
Meanwhile, up in the air my flight was developing a recognizable pattern. I
discovered that I could spend about 10 minutes very high above the summit and
then, however hard I tried, I couldn't check a slow spiralling descent back to
the level of the summit. I then had to scrape around at this level before again
encountering strong lift and slowly working my way up, high above the world.
Each time I found it harder not to lose the lift and fly down in the periods of
reduced lift. There is no doubt that these periods of good lift were big
slow-moving thermals, the like of which I had never encountered before.

The turbulence was severe and one was never quite sure whether it was wholly
due to the thermal or just some of that mountain turbulence that we had heard
so much about. You could be turning at minimum sink and going up in an
apparently smooth one when the nose would suddenly shoot up as if it had been
given a punishing uppercut and you would have to fight your way over the bar in
a vain attempt to prevent the inevitable stall. Or the tail and wing would
dramatically rise and you'd hang your weight out for all your sore arms were
worth, and still nothing would happen except that the kite would continue to go
up in this crazy position. Then there was the time when you'd made a wrong turn
and flown into sink; here you didn't try any corrective measures (what use
would they be when the harness straps were slack because you were falling so
fast?). All you could do was hang on and wait until the kite pulled out of the
dive and the sail stopped banging, and then set about recovering all that lost
height.

As a rule, however, this massive turbulence was rare and one could readily
learn to accept it as inevitable without much concern. What was far more
disconcerting were the knocks being received when scraping about at summit
level in between thermals. At these times I was flying pure ridge lift, and the
bubbles of heat that broke away from the hot rock face. I dared not get any
nearer to the face than 60 feet for fear of being turned irresistibly into it.
In fact there were times when I sweated as I have never sweated before, but
then another thermal would come though and I could go up and be able to relax.

Phil still hadn't taken off and was clearly having difficulties rigging his
glider. By now I was a little weary and was just waiting for him to take off
before flying down.

It was at this point that a good thermal came through and I managed to work up
in it to the highest point that I had attained all day. I decided to follow it
back behind the West face and if things got really good I would follow it for
as far as I could with no thought to the consequences for those who would have
to go and find me. At about half a mile behind the summit I reached my crisis
point; what should I do? Should I go on, hoping to stay with the thermal,
remembering that I had no vario and God only knows where Paul had landed? Or
should I turn back and be sure of my location being known by the others? I
judged that I had lost height since leaving the mountain and that a true
thermalling cross-country flight would have to wait until I got my new Skyhook
kite and a vario. So I bade my thermal farewell and turned back into wind,
2,700 feet above the ground, 800 feet above the mountain, and with half a mile
to penetrate back to the summit.

This was one of the most worrying periods of the whole flight because suddenly
there seemed to be a great deal of wind and there I was stuck out in the middle
of nowhere in the lee of a great big mountain! I kept thinking about that 26
mph on top of Llanberis Pass. Was I slowly penetrating into one of the most
horrific rotors that God ever sent? I tried to reassure myself that the wind
was only 2/3 mph when I took off and that the reason why the ground wasn't
moving was because I was so high, but still the doubts persisted. I could not
stop myself from pulling on all the speed I had available. The situation felt
crazy because I was flying flat out and yet according to all my points of
reference I was completely stationary, devoid of all motion in any direction.

As time passed, however, I became aware that I had in fact moved forward, as a
lake that I had been over had slid imperceptibly behind. I neared the west face
again and realised that I had lost a lot of height and would pass very close
over the top (if at all?) before the mountain dropped away again on the east
side. The turbulence was increasing but there was nothing too bad, then almost
before I realised it my troubles were over as the kite sailed over the top on
to the east side with almost 100 feet to spare. One never seemed to get used to
the scale of mountain flying, and yet again I gasped at the view which slowly
unfurled before me as I passed over the edge that had obscured my line of
sight, and the east face once more shrank from me at a dizzy rate.

There was no sign of any wind so I concluded that my fears must have been
imagined due to the novelty of my situation. Breathing a sigh of relief I
turned and followed the face around to the right and soared over a shoulder of
rock back into the SE coombe.

On arriving I sensed that there had been a change of conditions. The wind was
stronger and across the face, coming from the left, resulting in very poor
lift. Phil still hadn't taken off but was at last fully rigged and ready to go.
From my vantage point about 150 feet above I could see the sails flapping to
maybe 8/10 mph. Suddenly he was airborne and judging from the way his kite was
yawing about the sky, going through some pretty rough air. I couldn't help grin
when I saw him fly straight out and make no attempt at soaring. A second later
that grin was wiped off my face as the same turbulence reached me. I too just
as readily forgot about soaring and decided that in this sort of air I didn't
want to hang about close to the face any longer, so I pulled speed and followed
Phil. Again there was felt to be a strong 'flat' wind blowing in my face and we
both only just made it out of the coombe to land in a field at the bottom of
the valley close to the road and only two miles from the summit.

On touch down I checked my watch and discovered I had been airborne an hour and
ten minutes. I unclipped and walked over to meet Phil. It turned out that he
had been unable to get his nose catch on (to connect the bottom rigging), and
as a result of constantly shifting winds on the top, often filling the sails
from behind and threatening to blow his glider away, it had taken him over an
hour to adjust the rigging so that the catch would fit. As soon as this was
done and he was ready to go the wind suddenly changed, making it so turbulent
as to be unsoarable.

To my amazement both Sue and Paul arrived in the van. I had been expecting to
have to go and find Paul but in actual fact he had only flown to Llanberis and
had cadged a lift back to the car from there.

Looking up, I beheld the peak once again and tried to imagine two tiny
delta-shaped objects turning to and fro high above that proud head. I promised
myself silently that I would return.

We had talked about thermal soaring in still air and had heard about other
people in other countries doing it but now we had gone out and done it
ourselves. We know just what will be possible in the near future. We drove home
to Manchester that evening in a jubilant mood.


The flight by Hobson and Maritos off Snowdon was probably the last important
hang glider flight in Britain before genuine cross countries began. It was also
one of the last flights like that made without parachutes and early primitive
instruments. Their account was published in November, 1976; Alvin Russell was
killed the following month, and Bill Bennett began selling his first parachute
in Britain the following August (though I know I had one on when I fell into
the sea trying to fly across the English Channel in July, 1977. I remember
drying it out. Looking through Wings!, parachutes don't seem to have truly
caught on until March 1978!). The first Wings! advert for an electronic vario,
essential for XC thermalling, was in February, 1977.

We had begun to hear about big cross-country flights being done in America.
Very few of us subscribed to the key US magazine, Hang Gliding, successor of
Low and Slow, first called Ground-Skimmer. Because news from America was passed
by word of mouth, the oral tradition took over; flights were embellished with
each telling, and the legendary status of US pilots was heightened. We knew we
were on a small island, while they had 3,000 miles to play in, but all their
flights seemed to be of a different order. We would do 7 miles, they would do
20; we would do 20, they would do 50; we reached 50, they would do 100. All the
lessons they learned about XC flying and wrote about would pass on to us, but
it was like they were on another planet. Cloudbase for them was 10,500 feet in
Arizona; we were lucky when ours was 4,500 feet. We had to fly in much worse
conditions than the Americans. For a long while we thought their longer flights
meant that they were much better flyers than we were.

In 1977, cross country flights in hang gliders began to happen all across the
world. Before the end of the year, in the US (where else?) a flight was made of
more than 100 miles. Bill Moyes and his Circus of top Australian flyers had
been travelling the world every year, with Bill like some mythical human
bumble-bee, pollinating development in each country he visited. We had moved
through two generations of hang glider design since Kossen 1975 under the
influence of the Americans, and we leapt into the fourth generation with the
Moyes visit to England for the British Open with his new "Stinger" kite, later
called a Maxi, in August 1976. This was the first hang glider with a keel
pocket and a flat, fully-battened sail that didn't chatter (the noise made by a
sail flapping, as all the early kites did), and it created turmoil among the
British manufacturers. It was Ken Messenger's attempt to produce his own
keel-pocket machine, the Moonraker, that Alvin was still testing when he was
killed. The performance of kites was increasing, and with it, along with at
least a vario, the capability to climb high in a thermal and leave the ridge.
The year 1977 was when we began to do it regularly.

The first British claim for an XC was in April when Ken Messenger's test pilot,
Mark Southall, ironically on a Moonraker, made an 11 mile flight from Hay Bluff
to Pandy, a ridge north of Abergavenny in Wales. But this was really just a
ridge run, philosophically no different than any other ridge run except that
Mark had to jump back from one ridge to another, a gap of a mile. After Mark's
flight, Gerry Breen, another early flying star, flew 15 miles from Tredegar.
But they were superceded by a superb distance record that stood, despite many
assaults, for most of that summer.

Nigel Milnes was a quiet pilot flying with the Avon Club based around Bristol
in the west of England. He did not fly competitions, so he was little-known
outside his area. His club had been a strongpoint for McBroom and Birdman
machines, but this feudalism was breaking down. Nigel owned a 3rd generation
machine built by Bill Bennett in the US, a Phoenix 6B, the same type that had
taken me to second place in the Nationals twelve months earlier. Twelve months
was a very long time in hang gliding in those days, and the Phoenix, though a
superb kite to fly, was already old technology. Bob Wishart wrote an account
of Nigel's flight...

…Sunday, May 15, 1977, saw the Great Thermal Maker get down to some serious
practice to the intense delight (and fright) of all things which fly. Of those
"things

... [Continued next week]
============= End of Chapter V, Part 3 ==============