'The Children of the Wind' - A History of the New Aviation 1971-1996 - Ch I, Pt 1

[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 1 ================

Chapter One - ALVIN RUSSELL

When he was a very young man, Alvin Russell set a British hill
climbing record. So far as I know, it still stands. I met him on the
Long Mynd in Shropshire, a ten mile hill running north-south with
west-facing slopes already claimed by conventional sailplanes. It
looked the perfect hill for me to have a go at the hang gliding
duration record, then set at eight and a half hours, but in the event
I never tried. Alvin was the founder of the Long Mynd hang gliding
club, and lived in an Elizabethan cottage, with black wooden beams and
leaning white plaster walls, at the foot of the hill.

He was bearded, heavily spectacled, had an accent I thought came from
Birmingham, but then I am a southerner. He owned a garage in
Montgomery, a market town in Wales which persisted in voting Liberal
decades after the death of Lloyd George; the rest of the Principality
has long gone Labour or Welsh Nationalist. The Mynd seemed to cut off
the region from the rest of Britain and produce quiet but determined
individualists. Alvin was one.

It was early 1975, and in Britain we were moving from standard hang
gliders, so-called bog-rogs, on to wings where it was not always
necessary to fly to the bottom of the hill. If we ran off and turned
close to the hill, it was possible to maintain height, even increase
it, but at the risk of incurring the anger of the gliding club, which
looked upon us with contempt and alarm. They were contemptuous because
they could soar high and it appeared we could not. They were alarmed
because if we started to soar high, as Alvin did and the rest of us
were beginning to, we would get into their airspace. They thought it
was their air to dispose of as they wished.

I drove to the Mynd almost every weekend from my home in St Albans to
stay at Alvin's house. If the wind blew from the west, as it often
did, we would drive to the top and walk over Eddie Bowen's land to set
up our wings to fly. Eddie, a kindly farmer, lived at the base of the
Mynd, and was the president of Alvin's club. We used his fields to
land in if we could not land back on top. Eddie was not open to
blandishments from the gliding club to ban our flying.

Alvin was a complicated man, with skills he never boasted about and
which were a surprise to learn. He played the cello to a high enough
standard to belong to an orchestra. He was a noted rally driver, and
drove brilliantly. During the seven months he took hang gliding by the
scruff of its neck and shook it into safety, he also studied and
qualified as an RAC scrutineer. He collected porcelain of high quality
which was scattered around his house. He had not the intellectual
capacity or education of John Le Carre's George Smiley, but there was
that quality about him; from time to time you learned something new
and startling that he was an expert on.

Alvin was the driving force behind the small group of hang glider
pilots who used the Long Mynd. He was so self-effacing about his
talent that, when we totted up the experts on the hill we forgot to
include his name, though he had taught most of them to fly. He was
curious about the air, not reading about it or learning from books,
but being in it to find out for himself how it behaved.

That winter, 1975/6, he broke his leg on a heavy landing, and had to
stand and watch while the rest of us flew. It was too much. He
persuaded two other pilots, Tony Jones and Graham Driscoll, to go out
on to the Mynd on a moonlit night to rig in the cold rushing air and
launch him gloriously, like a huge paper dart, hopping into the sky in
a seated harness, his plaster cast a ghost in the smooth lift. After
half an hour of sublime flight Alvin swooped into Eddie's field and
hopped breathlessly down for a safe landing. I would love to have been
with him then.

We flew a lot together because I had done a number of soaring flights,
but he was always a better pilot than me. He was there the day I
launched into a high wind, trying to tape-record a flight for the BBC,
where I was a radio reporter, and slipping backwards over the hill
helplessly. I apologised to the tape-recorder because I had to
concentrate on staying alive and Alvin caught me as I landed, running
backwards, before I hit a stone wall and ground-looped.

In the evenings we dreamed of where we were going, and what we might
do. Neither of us, each in our early thirties, was in the first flush
of youth. But hang gliding was fulfilling atavistic dreams of flight.
We wondered where we would go and what we would see. After a visit to
the club by BHGA Chairman Martin Hunt we decided to get more involved
in the national organisation. Martin spoke well about developments,
but let slip he was pushing for a world championships in South Africa.
As he did not fly at all during his weekend with us, despite perfect
conditions, and instead spoke movingly about a system he had for
stowing his hang glider in a garage, none of us was impressed. Who was
he, we thought, to get us into a political row over South Africa? He
doesn't even fly! It mattered more to me than others, because a few
years earlier I had been one of the six journalists a year expelled by
the South African Government under Apartheid. I knew nothing about
politics and little about racism at the time; the expulsion gave me
some opinions.

The club agreed to back Alvin against Martin Hunt for the Chair of the
BHGA the following year. I would try to support him by getting on to
the governing Council. It was not a popular move. Most people at the
AGM were flyers; who cared about politics? All flyers want is to fly.
We played down the South African issue, but it rumbled along
underneath. Alvin lost convincingly to Martin, but I was elected to
Council; the votes of the club were enough for me to scrape in. I
could see that those in charge thought just one of me would be
containable, and they waited for me to raise the South African issue
so they could squash me. I waited, too.

In the Spring of 1976, Bill Bennett, an Australian living in America
and one of the giants of the sport, came out with a new hang glider
called the Phoenix 6B. Alvin secured the Bennett agency in England. I
needed to change my glider and there were a number on offer, including
a British Cobra and the American SST, Super Swallowtail.

"Don't touch the others, Brian" Alvin told me on the phone. "This 6B
is a magic machine, and you must have one"

"Is it better than the Cobra?" I asked, dubiously. I was not happy
about buying an American wing, though it was hard to say why.

"It's in another world," said Alvin. "I am going to fly one, and you
won't live with me unless you do too."

My first flight on the 6B was on a tall hill called Cornden. The wing
was so delicate and responsive that I was as curious as anyone else to
discover where I was going to land. Its performance was far beyond my
ability to judge it in the minutes I had going to the bottom, and I
aimed for the biggest field and just hoped it would deposit me safely
there. It did, to my relief. Alvin, back on the hill where the wind
had risen, showed me how to soar.

That year's National Championships were held in the Hole of Horcum in
Pickering, Yorkshire, sponsored by Embassy Cigarettes and covered by
BBC Grandstand TV. To compete, I had to accumulate 5 hours flying to
get my pilot rating, in a sport where a 2 minute flight was considered
good. The week before the championships I cruised up and down the Mynd
on my Phoenix, putting the minutes and then the hours in, flying
seated rather than prone because I was nervous. In the competition
itself, bedevilled by rain, Alvin and I survived through to the final,
our gliders showing up well against the others. To everyone's
surprise, including my own, the Phoenix 6B carted me to equal first
place with a pilot from the south, Bob Wiseley on an SST He became
British Champion because he was in the air a shorter time than I was.
My performance was almost entirely due to my wing. Alvin placed 10th
ahead of names like Keith Cockroft and Bob Calvert who were later to
reverberate around world hang gliding.

The competition was so arbitrary and unfair that I resolved to make
them better, and I persuaded BHGA Council to make me competitions
chairman to shake everything up. The job was considered a nest of
thorns anyway, so no one else volunteered. At the same time, that
summer saw two early deaths in the sport, Guy Twiss and Barbara Jones,
and an MP, Marcus Lipton, was persuaded by the media to attack us for
being dangerous. Colonel Lipton was a member of the OFT, the Old Farts
Tendency, nice enough in himself, but an old-fashioned rent-a-quote
parliamentarian. He was not particular about the effects of his
attack, obviously knew nothing about hang gliding, but he was happy to
be quoted in the Sun, which labelled us "Poisonous Butterflies". Lord
Boyd-Carpenter, then Air Minister, whom I met in the House of Lords,
actually talked about the drain we were on the National Health
Service, all two deaths and various unspecified injuries. It was easy
to forget about the tragedy of the deaths, Guy Twiss in a downwind
stall, Barbara Jones who put on her harness wrongly and could not in
consequence control her machine. We were in danger of being strangled
at birth.

The governing Council of British hang gliding, on which I sat, had to
meet this threat, but was not sure how. Something had to be done, and
be seen to be done. Alvin, at this time, had sold his garage in
Montgomery and was restless, thinking of going to America to fly. We
talked over the media attacks and decided a public investigation had
to be made into how the sport was taught. Two years earlier, I had
learned by being told how to control the kite - "simple really, just
push, pull, left and right" - and then I was thrown off the 400 foot
Devil's Dyke near Brighton, and expected to learn how to fly the wing
during the one minute before I hit the ground. At least I had been
'coached' by experts that day. Alvin had just rigged his machine, read
the instructions, lined up and ran off. We had both lived and thought
little of it. But it was a less than ideal way of learning. Perhaps an
investigation into training would stop the daily media baying?

Alvin was chairman of the HIA - the Hang Gliding Instructors
Association - at the time a loose collection of people banded together
to look after their own interests, but who had not agreed a common
standard. BHGA Council agreed the princely salary of �19.23 a week, at
a time when �100/week was good money, to send Alvin around the schools
and report back on training methods. We told the media and Colonel
Lipton what Alvin was doing, both of whom subsided and looked for
other stories to talk about, but we realised then that we were just
holding them off for a while.

Alvin toured every school in the length and breadth of the country,
and then borrowed a typewriter, learning to type as he put the report
together. It was full of spelling and grammatical mistakes, causing
snobbish sniffs among Council members who saw the early draft, but it
was full of insight and good sense. He not only pulled together the
various methods of teaching, but laid down a standard, in equipment as
well as teaching methods, for schools to adhere to. BHGA Council
agreed to endorse his recommendations in a hurried fifteen minutes at
the end of a 7-hour meeting - never leave a committee meeting until it
is officially wound up, we agreed later - and journalists appeared
happy that we had come up with something to show willing.

It took a few tough hours of debate to get BHGA Council to agree that
we needed a permanent Training Officer, that he should be paid a
living wage of �3,500 a year, and that Alvin had won the right to the
job because of the work he had done on �19.23 a week. Probably the
main case against Alvin was that he and I both acted together,
virtually as brothers, backing each other in anything. This can be a
dangerous relationship between a paid officer and an elected Council
member. But it was, with grumbling, accepted.

In the Autumn of 1976, Alvin was one of ten pilots who laid down the
rules for the National League of hang gliding, a series of six
competitions I had proposed as a substitute for sending British teams
to South Africa. I had won that vote on Council, with those originally
opposed going off to find out more about Apartheid to put up a case
against me, deciding there wasn't one, and they did not wish on this
issue to press the case to the point of my resignation. I would, of
course, have had to resign if we had sent a team there; as a result of
which, the championships in South Africa were cancelled. I hoped the
League would produce a worthy British Champion, and be the means
whereby teams could be chosen to fly in any other foreign countries.
In general, and again with Alvin as an ally, this was accepted, though
I heard later there were always cabals being formed to find out what I
was doing, and then see if there were ways to stop it.

Alvin was rated one of the best pilots in the country by those who saw
him fly. The only way we would find out how good he was would be in
the League, due to start the following year. But he had been chosen as
one of the group of elite pilots to fly in a meeting called by one
manufacturer, Ken Messenger's Birdman Company, to see which had the
best glider. The Birdman was the best hang gliding competition run in
Britain up to then, testing flying skills and not the landing skills
that dominated competition. Alvin flew for Birdman itself, and had a
narrow escape when, coming out of prone and banked over into a tight
landing area, his foot stirrup wound around the back rigging and he
could not recover from the turn. His glider smashed into trees and was
wrecked. Alvin was unhurt. We learned to put stiff plastic tubing over
our stirrups to stop the same thing happening to the rest of us.
Accidents were often the way we were taught how not to fly. Alvin was
lucky he did not pay a higher price for that lesson.

His reputation was enhanced by a published account of a flight he made
on the Long Mynd in the middle of battles with the gliding club to be
allowed to use "their" ridge....

�Saturday night came with an air of expectancy. The wind was west, 6
to 8 mph. Tomorrow was the big day, the end of four months
negotiating. We were to be able to soar the big ridge at the south end
of the Long Mynd again. After a restless night, Sunday dawned, wind
still west, but had it freshened? By mid-day it had. This was it,
26mph straight on, first time in our new second-generation kites.

Most of the other lads had gone for lunch so I was first in the air.
My flying rival Graham Driscoll with his 21/20 American Swallowtail
had yet to arrive so I decided to get as high as possible and rub it
in as he walked the hill. At about 500-800 feet above the ridge (Alvin
had no flying instruments, nor a parachute), the lift stopped, so I
wandered around doing 360 degree turns and passing the time. Where the
hell is he? I thought. I had been tweaking my Cobra so I wanted to fly
it against Graham's American Swallowtail, as in the past Graham had
always had that 50ft or 100ft edge.

After what seemed ages he arrived. I could see by the frantic way he
was climbing the hill that he wanted to be up here with me. I flew
over his head, holding station, making rude gestures to spur him on.
Eventually he rigged up and was airborne. Well, this is it. I was
high, I knew where the lift was, having had an hour or so feeling my
way around, so I made capital and went for height. Slowly, ever so
slowly, Graham kept coming. He couldn't make the last 100ft or so - I
was delighted. For the first time I was "standing on his head".

I 360'd twice, dropping below him, climbed up above him again and then
did it again to prove it wasn't a fluke. Graham was furious. Off he
went, sniffing for lift. He found some, he was with me and then, while
making my way back to my known source of lift, it happened. I started
climbing, higher, higher, higher (my God, will it ever stop?) and
still I kept climbing. I looked down. Graham was just a small white
kite hundreds of feet below. I could see him coming after whatever it
was that I had found, and still I was climbing. I was beginning to get
worried now. The Long Mynd was three quarters of a mile behind me. It
looked so small it wasn't true. I could see ant-like figures in a
cluster on the take-off area. All the other kites had landed except
Graham, who was gaining height 500ft or so below and behind me.

The clouds were beginning to whisk by, the lift stopped and I began to
get used to the height. Gradually I felt my way around, but the lift
seemed to be everywhere. No matter what I did, 360s, figure 8's or
whatever, I could still climb back up to cloud base. I could do a 360
and lose nothing. I could climb, downwind! In fact, gravity was lost.
I was free. I could do anything I wanted - Oh boy, Oh boy!

=================== End of Chapter I, Part 1 ================