In Memoriam -- Jean-Michel Bernasconi

©2016 by John LaTorre

When Jean-Michel Bernasconi passed away last weekend, the world lost a great hang-glider designer and entrepreneur, and I lost a friend. We worked together at Flight Designs, a hang-glider factory in Salinas in the early 1980s, along with a third man named Calvin Cox. When Marty Alameda the founder of that company, died in the crash of an experimental airplane in the spring of 1982, the company’s management fell into the hands of people who didn’t really understand the business. Jean-Michel decided to leave the company and found his own hang glider factory. Calvin and I quit Flight Designs a few months later, and became Pacific Windcraft’s first two employees in the summer of that year.

This photograph was taken at sunset at Sand Dollar Beach, the landing area for the Plaskett Ridge area that we used to call “Big Sur.” I’m guessing that it was in the winter or spring of 1983. I had just landed, and was greeted by Calvin (left) and Jean-Michel (center), who had just landed their own gliders. I don’t know who took the picture, but it was probably either Jean-Michel’s wife Natalie or somebody we’d drafted as a driver.

The picture is precious to me because of what happened just afterward. I remember Jean-Michel having a long conversation with us, right there at the twilight of the landing field, about our responsibilities as fabricators of hang gliders. Our gliders had to be as perfect as we could make them, he said, because people’s lives literally depended on them. If there was a way that the glider could be set up incorrectly, we had to re-design the glider to make that method of set-up impossible. I always remembered that.

That conversation was one of my first glimpses into the standards of design that Jean-Michel would always aspire to. I didn’t realize it at the time, but good writing is like good engineering. I apply a similar rule to my writing now: the goal is not to write so as to be understood, but to write so that it is impossible to be misunderstood. That’s the sort of precision that Jean-Michel admired. As an engineer, he might also have approved of something Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, which is as true for writing as it is for design: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Now Jean-Michel is gone, and when I last heard about Calvin, he was homeless and wrestling with psychological demons whose existence I’d never suspected back in those days. Thirty-three years later, I feel like a survivor. But that picture shows us at the height of our days, with something new and exciting that we could all be a part of and bring to the world together. We had that moment that was more than friendship, but something approaching brotherhood. I am so proud of that, and of us.

Thank you, Jean-Michel, for helping to make that happen.