My Life as a Hang Glider Maker

©2019 by John LaTorre

Note: I wrote this rather long piece as a response to a request by a friend of mine, who was documenting the early days of hang gliding. I told him that I was by no means one of the movers and shakers in its development, but merely somebody who had made his living from it for twenty years. During that time, I had a chance to see it from an angle that few other people had shared. It turned out that this was exactly the sort of thing my friend wanted. Since then, others have expressed interest in the early days of the sport, and this is for them as well.)

I first became interested in hang gliders in the fall of 1974, when a friend of mine named Don Clarke invited me out to Oregon Ridge, just north of Baltimore, Maryland, to watch him teach some people how to fly them.

Don was living with me and my first wife at the time, sleeping on the couch of our living room on the third floor of a row house on University Parkway. On weekends, we'd hear him come up the steps, slowly and painfully. He'd let himself down on the couch with a groan, and we'd hand him a beer. And he would proceed to tell us how great a sport hang gliding was! If a sport could cause so much pain and yet be rewarding enough for him to evangelize it, there must really be something to it, I thought.

So one Saturday that fall, I went out to watch him. He worked for a hang gliding school called Econ-o-Flight systems, a shop in nearby Randallstown that also built hang gliders. The school was run by Bob Martin, who had just quit his day job at AT&T to devote all his attention to the sport. The gliders I saw that day were all what we used to call "standard Rogallo" wings, using a membrane wing that inflated to a bi-conical section when in flight. The airframe consisted of four large aluminum tubes – a keel, a cross-bar, and two leading edges – that supported the membrane airfoil, along with a triangle "control bar" attached to the keel. The control bar was stayed to the airframe by six stainless steel cables radiating from the bottom points of the triangle to the nose, tail, and ends of the crossbar. Extending from the keel upwards was a kingpost which was attached to the airframe by four additional cables. I was to learn much later that this was the aircraft that would later be called the "Dickenson Wing" after the Australian who first put all these elements together in a single aircraft (although the kingpost was a later refinement of his original design). Bob's training gliders also sported lawn mower wheels that were mounted at the ends of the control bar's base tube, and a "wraparound" nose plate; these features would help the glider roll and skid to a stop in a hard landing, instead of digging into the turf. They all had sails made of 1.5 oz. Ripstop nylon, making for a package that weighed less than twenty-five pounds.

It was obvious to me why teaching hang gliding was so grueling. The instructor would run down the hill alongside the glider to stabilize it until the student had things well in hand, or until the glider was going too fast for the instructor to keep up. Sometimes the instructor would be holding on to the tail of the glider, either to give it more airspeed or to force it in the air by pushing the keel downward to pop the nose up. (That was the famous "keel launch" or "keel assist," and it was a favorite method of accelerating the learning curve in those days.) Since each student had five such flights, at least, and the instructor was usually teaching three or four people, he would be running full tilt down the hill fifteen or twenty times a day, and then climbing back up it. No wonder Don was exhausted!

Finally, Don or Bob invited me to take a try at flying one. I had some leg injuries that prevented me from running very fast, but with the aid of a push on the keel, I was able to get airborne. I had a flight that was perhaps five seconds long. I remember taking the landing on the glider's wheels, either because I misjudged the landing flare or I was afraid to trust my legs to run the few steps that were necessary. That was my first flight on a hang glider.

I can't say I was hooked at that point, but I went out frequently with Don to watch him train people, and I got to know some of his friends. When spring came, I'd go with them on "fly-ins" to various sites in Maryland and West Virginia. I still wasn't doing any real flying, except for occasional flights on the training gliders, which were largely unsuccessful due to my weak legs. I needed a fairly stiff breeze to get off the ground, and those breezes were few and far between at the training sites we used. I remember driving my Renault 16 down to Nag's Head, North Carolina to attend the "Tactile Flight Meet," an annual fly-in sponsored by Kitty Hawk Kites, where I saw somebody in a Seagull break the Outer Banks soaring record set by Orville Wright over fifty years before.

At the time, I was working for the Baltimore City Health Department as an educator, but the federal program that paid my salary was winding down. So it seemed like a good time to change careers. Bob, by that time, was taking enough orders to warrant hiring somebody to help build the gliders. So I quit my job and began working for him full time, in August of 1975. It was mostly building airframes and cable sets, and helping him do the final assembly of the gliders, but I also became acquainted with cutting the sails and preparing them for sewing (which was done by Bob's wife Mary). And I read everything about hang gliding that I could get my hands on, from Joe Faust's "Low and Slow" newsletters to Dan Poynter's self-published books on hang gliding and kiting.

By the fall of 1975, Econ-o-Flight had already outgrown the small shop we had in Randallstown. We'd been buying some of our hardware from a company called Mil-Spec Fasteners, which had a large steel building in Hampstead, north of Baltimore. The north end of the building wasn't being used, so Bob rented the space and moved the shop there at the beginning of 1976. The new space was twice the size of our old shop, providing space for  a large fabrication area, an office, and two classrooms.

But as the shop was being moved, business slumped. The winter weather wasn't conducive to training, and we weren't selling many gliders. I was laid off for about two months. Business picked up again in the spring, as the weather got better and we were giving more lessons.

We were still struggling, though, as were most of the hang glider shops we knew about. The only really successful enterprise in the area was Kitty Hawk Kites, which got much of its business from tourists who were attracted to North Carolina's Outer Banks. It was located across the street from a state park with many huge sand dunes, which afforded perfect training sites for what Bob called "hang glider rides." After a modicum of orientation, the student would be taken to whichever dune afforded the best orientation to the wind that day  and strapped into a glider. The student was almost guaranteed to get off the ground, particularly with the aid of a keel assist if the winds were light that day. That person would probably never take another lesson, but it didn't matter, because there always new tourists to ensure a steady stream of would-be aviators.

In 1976, Bob Martin got the idea that the Deep Creek Lake area of western Maryland would be the perfect place to establish a branch of his hang gliding school on the Kitty Hawk Kites model. At the time, Deep Creek Lake was a center for recreation in the area, with an operating ski slope in the winter and plenty of camping and boating activity the rest of the year. The people operating the Wisp ski area were looking for ways to use their facilities year-round, and were willing to try to have a hang gliding shop use the slope during the time when there wasn't snow on it. The idea was to rebuild an old building (formerly a skeet shop) on the ground of the Wisp ski area, open a hang glider school and pro shop, and rake in the money. We'd live at a campground on the lake, where I could live in my VW bus and he and his family would live in a little tent-trailer.

Well, we did live at the campground all summer, and we started to rebuild the shed. I commuted between the two shops, returning to Hampstead to do glider builds and repairs while Ed Stubbs handled the school end of the business. I would also start flying again; my legs were getting stronger and by this time we'd had a few Seagull 3s and a Seagull 4 around to use as trainers, which I was able to get off the ground fairly consistently. When Bob and Ed and Don saw that, they promoted me to instructor, which helped me augment my income. It was the Baltimore shop that kept Econ-o-Flight alive that summer, but the Deep Creek Lake shop never made a dime. The tourists didn’t materialize. The economy was bad, Bob explained. Next year would be better. Next year would work, for sure.

In the fall, we suspended the Deep Creek Lake operation for the winter and moved back to Hampstead. Bob could pay me only about a hundred dollars a month during the fall months. I couldn’t rent an apartment for that money, so Bob made a suggestion: live at the shop, in my bus. I could pull it into the shop at night, and move it back out in the morning. During the rest of the time I was working at Econ-o-Flight, that would be my living arrangement.

We made enough money in the fall to keep me employed, but in December, Bob formally “laid me off” (in the sense that he said that there was no longer any money to pay me). I drove down to Florida and spent that winter with my parents. A short-term job with the Polk Company allowed me to rebuild my financial resources and make some needed repairs on the bus.

In the spring, Bob called to me that the business was again making money, he was re-activating his dreams of a hang gliding school at the Wisp ski area, and he needed me as an instructor there. I drove back to Maryland, and Bob and I headed back to Deep Creek Lake. There was no money for a campground this year, so we camped in the meadow behind the skeet shop -- me in my camper, and Bob and his family in a new, larger pop-up trailer. I cooked all my meals in the bus and used the toilet facilities in the ski lodge. When I needed to take a shower, I headed up the road to Grantsville, where some old friends of mine were renovating a hundred-year-old hotel on the old Cumberland Trail. The scheme this year was to finish converting  the skeet club shack into a hang gliding shop, while charging for Parasail rides on the lake. To that end, Bob bought a speedboat which we restored to seaworthiness and obtained a Parasail and a Paracommander (a similar round parachute which was intended for free-fall deployment and steering rather than simply being towed). In the waterways near the Chesapeake Bay, we all acquired some proficiency in flying Parasails and piloting the speedboat, and did some tow kiting on the side. But Bob wasn't able to make arrangements for a reliable lakeshore launch site at Deep Creek Lake, and what Parasailing we did at the lake wasn't generating much interest. And whatever commitments Bob had received over the previous year for glider training sites had evaporated, including the use of the ski slope. So apart from hosting pilots from the Baltimore area and taking them to the flying sites we had, there was no revenue at all from the Deep Creek Lake operation.

 At the end of the summer, Bob admitted defeat. The tourist base to support a school just wasn’t there, and the Wisp people now saw us as a potential liability rather than a summertime revenue-enhancer. So all the hundreds of man-hours of our time and the hundreds of dollars he and I had invested in the facility were a complete write-off. So we all went back to Hampstead and put our resources into the shop there.

By that time, we had ceased manufacturing operations and were dealers for gliders made by other manufacturers, which were clearly better than the ones we were making. Through an arrangement with Kitty Hawk Kites, we became dealers for all the lines they were carrying, which included Seagull, Eipper, Bennett, Sky Sports, and Wills Wing. We also had separate arrangements with Electra Flyer and UFM, the makers of the Easy Riser kits. As I recall, most of our sales were Electra Flyer and Seagull gliders.

It was my job to do whatever repairs needed to be done on the gliders, share in the instructor duties, and to transport the gliders to the training hills we used. I had built a roof rack for my bus that could accommodate four gliders when the pop-up roof was raised, and up to eight when the roof was lowered. And it was the bus that all the students followed, like a line of chicks follows its mother, as we traveled through the countrysides of Maryland, eastern Pennsylvania, and northern Virginia. It was not uncommon for me to lead a caravan of up to ten cars to the training hills. CB radios were quite the fad back then, and I had one in the bus. If any student's car was similarly equipped, we would put that car at the rear of the caravan, so that between us we could keep an eye on potential stragglers and traffic stops. Somehow, the system worked and nobody got separated.

The bus came in handy in other ways. I remember one autumn day near Spring Hill, Pennsylvania, where we had about five gliders set up on a windswept hill. Unfortunately, the wind chose to sweep the hill in an unfavorable direction that day, and carried rain squalls with it as well. After an hour of huddling under the gliders and waiting for the wind to cooperate, we piled into my bus, where I fired up the Coleman stove and made hot tea and cocoa for everybody. We were able to seat all six of us inside, all cozy and out of the weather. I can't remember whether the wind eventually straightened out, dried up, and allowed us to complete the lesson, but I will never forget how people responded to my impromptu hospitality wagon.

 In addition to selling and repairing gliders, I was flying many of them myself, having learned enough of the rudiments of the sport to advance to a “Hang Two” or novice level of proficiency. (The “Hang Ratings,” then as now, were Beginner, Novice, Intermediate, Advanced and Master.) This was, at the time, the minimum level to be certified as an instructor by the United States Hang Gliding Association. I also test flew any glider within my skill range that I could get my hands on, learning about the strengths and weaknesses of the various designs.

Fall turned into winter, and it was a hard one. Snow piled up on our training hills, and instruction was impossible. The economy took another downward turn, and people for the most part stopped buying expensive toys like hang gliders. Since Bob couldn’t support his family on the non-existent winter revenues of the hang glider shop, he traveled to Louisiana to work as an electrician on the oil rigs on the Gulf of Mexico, sending money back to his family. I survived on what little revenues I was making from lessons, repairs, and spare parts sales.

In early April, 1978, Bob came back from Louisiana and told me that he was shutting down the business, gave me some equipment in lieu of back pay, threw a couple of his personal gliders onto his car, and drove off. I had just turned thirty, and not only was I jobless, but it fell to me to tell all our customers that there would be no refunds for pre-paid lessons or deposits on gliders. This was because Ron Higgs, who was nominally the business manager, made himself very scarce for a while. The day that I announced to my students that the business had gone bust was one of the worst days of my life. (I remember crying in my bus after the lesson was over; a friend who was also our customer and former student came by to console me as best she could.) That was the last time I ever taught for pay, although I would continue to mentor novice pilots for the rest of my career, giving them pointers and lending them gliders until they could buy their own.

Over the next few days, I moved my few personal effects from the shop into a friend’s apartment for storage. A meeting was called for later that week at the shop, where all our former customers, instructors, and associates would discuss what was going to happen next. There were some angry words and stony faces at that meeting, although very little hostility was directed at me; I was as much a victim as they were. A lot of people who had partial ownership in the company, of which I was one, were out all their investments, but there was nothing I could do about that, since the company's assets at the time were virtually nil. Others had put down deposits on gliders and wondered if they would ever get them as promised. (Most of them would.) Customers came to pick up the gliders they’d stored at the shop. I made sure that all necessary repairs were made to them, charging only for parts.

One of the shop’s major glider suppliers was the Electra Flyer company, at that time the country’s biggest hang glider manufacturer. A few days before the meeting, I had called Ruben Baca, one of their factory managers, about the status of some gliders we had on order there. During the conversation, he told me that while our gliders were ready for shipment, we could expect future delays because they were desperately short of workers. I answered that there weren’t going to be any more orders, because the shop was going out of business. What were my plans, he asked. I told him that I had none. He said that I had a job waiting for me there if I could get there within a week. It would be minimum wage, but at least I would still be in the industry. I took care of a few loose ends, loaded what I could into the bus and headed west. Five days later, at around midnight, I pulled into a UPS parking lot on the north side of Albuquerque, drew the curtains, and slept.

The next morning, I found the factory and claimed the job. At first, they put me into final assembly, but when I told them that I'd had a little sailmaking experience, they transferred me to the sail loft. And for the next fifteen years, a sailmaker I would be. Within two years, I would be running the sail loft, having learned every sailmaking operation from making the patterns to giving the sail its final inspection. At one point, I think I had thirty people working for me, in two shifts. When I started work at Electra Flyer, we were making the Cirrus 5 in four sizes, the Olympus in three sizes, and something called the "Trainer," a glider with fiberglass rear leading edges. At the end of my stint there, we were still making the Cirrus 5 but the Trainer had been replaced by the Dove and the Olympus by the Floater, which was in turn replaced by the Spirit. We were also making sails for the Eagle, an ultralight aircraft. Along the way, I'd picked up sailmaking techniques from Tom Price and Tom Peghiny, who were working as designers there. Tom Price also taught me how to make sail patterns.

My own flying career had some big changes, as well. I had never owned a glider, and the only equipment I had was a helmet, a prone harness (which I'd never used, having flown seated up to this point), and a pair of plastic wheels, all of which I'd collected from Bob Martin in lieu of back pay. The shop allowed me to use their prototype Trainer and Cirrus 5B, and I set about  learning how to fly all over again. My training hill was now at five thousand feet MSL rather than five hundred feet, so I had to perfect my takeoffs to spare my weak leg, and that was not easy to do on those gliders, which were murderously tail-heavy until you got them flying. One of the rules in hang gliding is that you could change your glider, your harness, or your flying site, but you must change only one of those elements at a time. Well, I changed all three, which put me back at beginner level. It was in New Mexico that I finally got enough experience to truly call myself a pilot. After going the rounds of the various training hills, I graduated to higher and higher launches, culminating in the four-thousand-foot Sandia Crest, which I started flying in the spring of 1979. I knew the road up the mountain quite well, having been a driver for the other experienced pilots in the area. In return for not flying that day, I got a chance to study some of the area's most skilled pilots as they observed weather conditions and pointed out the likely sources of lift, sink, and turbulence for given sets of wind speed and direction. And I got to watch their take-offs and flying form – not a bad education for a novice pilot!

When I was finally allowed to fly Sandia Crest, the glider I was flying was a Cirrus 5B, the first glider I had ever owned. I had ordered it in the first couple of months I was working at Electra Flyer. It was common practice at the time for hang glider manufacturers to offer their employees a discount on gliders and equipment. But Larry Newman, who owned Electra Flyer, went farther; an employee could finance his purchase, at zero interest, paying a little of his salary at a time over the space of a year. I think there was a limit on the number of gliders an employee could purchase, as was true of most of the other manufacturers, who didn't want their employees to undercut their dealers. My housemate at the time was Dennis Wood, Electra Flyer's sail loft foreman and my boss, who owned an Olympus. Our second-floor apartment near the shop had no outdoor storage facilities for the wings, so we had to dismantle a kitchen window to pass the gliders into or out of the apartment, and reassemble it afterwards. That Cirrus 5 was the first glider I ever ridge soared, and the first one I thermalled. Of all the gliders I've owned, that was the only one I've kept.

At the time, Electra Flyer billed itself as the world's largest hang glider manufacturer, and they may well have been right. They sold well over a thousand gliders a year. At its spring and summer peak, our sail loft produced more than forty sails a week. Even during the winter, with a stripped-down staff, we'd be making around five to ten gliders a week.

Electra Flyer may have been the largest manufacturer in the US, but it wasn't the center of the industry. That was several hundred miles away, in southern California. I was personally acquainted with some of the other manufacturers there, having visited the area in the summer of 1980. After dropping a friend of mine off in Los Angeles, I proceeded down the coast to meet Barbara Graham in San Diego. Barbara was hang glider pilot I'd met while at Econ-o-Flight; she owned one of the infamous Chandelle "Competition" gliders, and I had modified it to eliminate some of its structural deficiencies.  She ended up replacing it with an Electra Flyer Cirrus 3, which I test-flew for her at the Spring Hill training site. I hooked up with Barbara in San Diego, where she was now flying an Eipper Antares, and we caravanned together to some of the flying sites and hang glider factories that Southern California was peppered with at the time.

It was then that I became acquainted with a peculiar subculture that had sprung up in the factories there. At Electra Flyer, only a small minority of the workers were pilots. The rest treated their relationship with the company strictly as a job, and drove home each night to a life entirely divorced from flying. But in many of California’s hang glider factories, the majority of workers were also pilots, who worked at the factory to obtain the latest gliders at a discount. This tended to raise hob with factory production and delivery schedules, as most of the crew might disappear when the nearby flying site became soarable. The only similar phenomenon I have ever seen, before or since, was the “hacker” culture that sprang up in the seventies and eighties, a lifestyle that encompassed work and entertainment, where people spent more of their off-hours in the computer lab than they did at home, and where working magic with computers was all they cared about. And it was largely for the same reason: they were creating an industry that had never existed before, and knew that the infancy of that industry was giving them an opportunity that might never come again. Why be a salesman or an accountant when you can see people take flight in a way that never happened before? What if you could help them by building wings that had flown better than any wings had flown before? Advances in design were taking place almost monthly, and the only way to keep up with that breakneck progress was to keep riding the crest of the wave. If that meant forsaking the usual trappings of success for a year or two, so be it.

The hang glider businesses of the time had other traits in common with the nascent computer start-ups. There was usually no strict demarcation between the management and the workers. The people you worked with were usually the people you socialized with. Electra Flyer was the exception to that practice; the owner and office staff generally had their own social life. But in every California hang glider factory or school, there would always be some sort of company-sponsored party at some time or another -- dinners, barbecues, flying trips, skiing trips in winter, bashes at the shop. (The Halloween parties at Stratus, up near San Francisco, were legendary.)

And there was a sense of sharing information among companies that had almost no counterpart in other industries. When somebody found a way to make a glider easier to set up or safer to fly, it wouldn’t be long before those features found their way to every glider on the market. One reason for this was that none of the companies were making enough money to warrant taking them to court for infringement of intellectual properties. But there was also the feeling among many of the designers that such inventions should be shared, because they improved the sport as a whole, and made hang gliding more accessible to greater numbers of people. It was also a way to change the public perception of hang gliding as a high-risk sport practiced by death-defying adventurers who should maybe be prevented from hurting themselves by legislation, the force of public opinion, or both.

More often than not, the typical worker-cum-pilot had long hair, an affinity for pot, and a casual attitude toward clothes, but it would have been a mistake to label “hippies” in the popular sense of the term. They all had jobs, and were good at them. They generally had little use for psychedelic drugs, love beads, or property held in common. Their evangelism was reserved for hang gliding, and their goal was to fly higher, longer and farther in a literal sense, not a metaphorical one. Their jobs were a means to that goal, to allow them to buy newer and better equipment. Hard drugs got in the way of that goal, because they siphoned money and time from the true purpose of life, which was to fly.

A lot of these workers shared apartments or houses, dividing up the rent and, sometimes, other living expenses such as food or utilities. Some of them were “parking lot people” and every hang glider factory seemed to have a few of them. These were workers who lived in their vans at the shop as I had done in Maryland, and who no longer even had regular homes. They lived to work and to fly, and had little in the way of a social life. Electra Flyer had a prohibition on using their parking lot that way, for the very reason that other factories allowed it; the management wanted to distance itself from that culture. But California was another story.

During that trip, I visited the Eipper factory and the Seagull factory, as well as a number of shops and flying sites. It was my good fortune to meet with many of the people I'd only read about in industry literature, and to fly some of the sites they used. So it was with some reluctance that I returned to Albuquerque, which now seemed to me to be a backwater of the glider industry. By that time, I guess that word of my competence started getting around, because I was receiving calls from manufacturers to work for them. (Every couple of months, the phone would ring and it would be Bill Bennett on the line, saying, "So when are you gonna come work for me, mate?" By the way, I was one of the very few people in the glider-making industry who had never worked for either Bill Bennett or Wills Wing.)

 I had also managed to get on the wrong side of Larry, which wasn't hard to do, as anyone who worked with him or for him could verify. The trouble came later that summer, when I bought a second glider, a Spirit this time. I paid cash for this one rather than finance it. I made the sail myself and delivered it to the shop downstairs, telling the foreman, "This is the sail for my glider. Be good to it!"

Well, somehow, the foreman took that to mean that he was to give it priority in the building process. That meant not only scooting it to the head of the production line, but scavenging scarce parts from other gliders to finish it. Two days later, the glider was assembled, and the next day, my friend J. C. Brown, a regular test pilot for the company, test-flew it.

And the day after that, Larry called me into his office. Ruben Baca was there, as was Irv Alward, Larry's right-hand man. Larry was absolutely furious with me. He flat-out accused me of pulling rank, sabotaging production, and stealing company resources. He calmed down a bit when I gave him my side of the story, and called in the shop foreman to back me up. I also pointed out that J. C. had not flown the glider on company time but on his own time, as a personal favor to me. Ruben and Irv said not one word in my defense; their job was purely to add weight to Larry's accusations by their presence, comments, and frowns. In the end, Larry dismissed me from the royal presence without an apology, telling me merely to get back to work.

I survived that incident, but it left a bad taste in my mouth, and I resolved to find other employment. In particular, I was looking for a place that could offer its staff full-time employment throughout the year, which was not a common practice in the industry at that time. The practice at Electra Flyer was to build up a sail loft staff of thirty people in the spring and lay off all but five of them in the fall. I managed to survive those purges, but when I became foreman of the sail loft after Dennis Wood left, it was part of my new duties to do the firing, and I hated to do that. Apart from the hardship it put on the employees, it was also not cost-efficient, because those employees would find other jobs during the winter, and each spring we'd have to start with a new untrained crew. For the first month or so of training, our productivity would drop drastically as the experienced workers were slowly training others to do their jobs instead of doing those jobs themselves. So I put out some feelers for employment at some of the factories in California where the management made more of an effort to keep their staff over the winter.

 A response came to me from a man named Marty Alameda, a former bull-rider who had wisely retired from the rodeo circuit at an early age. (His remarkable ability to stay on a bucking bull earned him the nickname “Flea.”) Marty had fallen in love with hang gliders while on a skiing trip and, after working with Seagull Aircraft in southern California, he started a hang glider factory in his home town of Salinas, a farming community near Monterey Bay. His sail-loft foreman and chief designer, a New Zealander named Graeme Bird, was going home to resume his own manufacturing business. Marty’s dealer representative, an energetic French engineering graduate named Jean-Michel Bernasconi, was eager to take over the design reins but had no interest or expertise in running a sail loft. Marty offered me the job of foreman in the fall of 1980.  I sounded out Marty on his views about the value of keeping employees through the slump season and found out that he agreed with my philosophy. He'd never laid anybody off, he told me, and he hoped to hell he never would, and he certainly wouldn't plan his production around it. But would Marty keep his word on that?  I'd asked around about Marty's reputation in the industry. I remember somebody, possibly Jeff Mott, telling me, "Marty Alameda is every bit as sharp a business man as Larry, and ten times better as a human being." Others told me that Marty was a man of the highest integrity; if he said something, he meant it. That was all I needed to hear.

When I gave Larry my notice, he said dismissively, "I'll bet you're going to work for Bill Bennett or the Wills people." No, I replied, I was going to work for Marty Alameda. Larry regarded me for a moment, nodded, and said, "Good choice."

I stayed with Flight Designs for a year and a half, bringing their production up and helping with their research and development. I replaced my Spirit with a Flight Designs Javelin, a single-surface glider designed by Jean-Michel. Based on a design he'd been working on before he came to the United States, the Javelin was was the first design of his produced in the US, and was positioned to compete with the Atlas. While it effectively replaced Graeme Bird's Super Lancer in the product line, Flight Designs continued to keep the Lancer, in its catalog. That was in contrast to a common practice at the time of manufacturers dropping a model in favor of a newer design, leaving dealers with unsalable gliders on their racks.  "We will never discontinue the  Lancer," he said in a production meeting I attended after the Javelin was released. "If anybody wants to order a Lancer, then we'll make him a Lancer." He counted on the dealers, who appreciated that he understood their needs, to order the Javelin once their stocks of the Lancer were depleted. I think we made a few more Lancers after the Javelin came out, mostly the big 220s that were popular with heavier pilots and tandem training.

     I also set up a second sail loft to make sails for Flight Designs's version of the Hiway Demon, although I didn't make one of those gliders for myself, since they were very heavy and I wasn't sure that I would be able to launch one in still air with my weak legs. My main flying site was Marina Beach, on Monterey Bay, but I took time to visit other sites, mainly Ed Levin Park near San Jose, Dunlop and Lake McClure in the Sierra, and Pacific Valley and Fort Funston on the Coast. I kept that Javelin for a long time, even after I had replaced it with another glider. It was usually on loan to some aspiring pilot, since it was easy for novices to fly.

Marty was indeed a fine human being, and a good businessman. He had an unfailing ability to get people on his side of things. There was many a dealer who came down to Salinas with blood in his eye, complaining about how some invoice or another had gotten screwed up or how some glider had arrived with a defect. After an hour with Marty, the two of them would be walking out arm in arm, swearing undying friendship to each other. No employees ever feared his wrath; they only feared that they might disappoint him somehow. He was as generous with praise as Larry had been frugal with it.

In the spring of 1982, Marty died while test flying a prototype of an ultralight aircraft he and his brother were developing. He had sold his business to the Pioneer Parachute Company in Connecticut the previous winter; Pioneer was doing nicely with government contracts (most notably the parachutes used by returning spacecraft in the space program, as well as military parachutes) and with sport parachutes like the Parasail, but was looking to expand into other areas of sport aviation, particularly ultralights. It was even opening a new factory for ultralights back in Connecticut, and transferring some of my staff to run it.

Marty’s death didn’t stop those plans, but his freewheeling, hands-on management style was gone and the Salinas factory was no longer a pleasant place to work for. Jean-Michel, who had been hired as a dealer representative and was now Flight Designs’s head designer, was appointed interim manager in Marty’s place but was never given free rein to direct the company the way it had been run before. He now had to answer to executives in three-piece custom suits who had no sport flying experience whatsoever and refused to be taught the idiocyncrasies of that particular market. The only real benefit I could see for continuing to work there was the health insurance that Pioneer offered all its employees.

When it became clear to him that he would never be able to run the company the way he liked, he left to start his own company, called Pacific Windcraft. I was his first employee, hired to staff, train, and run the sail loft. His second employee was a fellow named Calvin Cox who had run the assembly floor where the “Jet Wing” powered hang gliders were being made; Calvin was to handle the manufacture of all the frame components and the final assembly of the gliders. Jean-Michel had been in the country since 1978, working as a dealer representative for Bill Bennett Delta Wing Kites and Gliders and then Marty Alameda’s Flight Designs. There was hardly a single important hang glider dealer in North America that he hadn’t met, and he used that list of personal contacts to enormous advantage in setting up the new company. Not only that, but Jean-Michel had designed a higher-performance glider that would be so easy to fly that even a novice could handle it. He would name it the Vision.

The Vision was a versatile glider for two reasons. First, it was easy to adjust the crossbar and leading edge tensions to give it a looser sail with more forgiving handling characteristics or a tighter sail for better performance. As the developing pilots became more familiar with the glider, they could increase the tension to complement their skills. Second, it employed two types of sailcloth: a stiffer cloth for the main body, and a softer cloth for the double surface. This allowed the lower surface to become more concave at higher angles of attack, effectively increasing the camber of the airfoil for more docile slow-speed flying, while flattening out at higher speeds. (That second feature was my own major contribution to the design.) But Flight Designs didn’t want to build the Vision, as they already had a novice glider in production as well as a higher-performance one, and felt that profits could be maximized by selling those instead. They couldn’t see the potential of the new design, but we could.

I left Flight Designs with mixed feelings. On the one hand, these were my friends, business associates, and flying buddies. And my experience with Bob Martin’s company had made me wary of start-ups and the daunting challenges they faced; I would again be gambling on whether another person’s dream would really pan out, and asking myself if I wanted to ride that roller coaster again. On the other hand, Flight Designs just wasn’t the same without Marty. Patty Butler would be my successor as sail loft manager; she was a quick learner, and I had no doubt that she would be able to take over all my duties.  On the one side lay security; on the other side, promise. Pacific Windcraft seemed to be our best chance to keep alive the spirit of Marty’s company. And Jean-Michel and his wife Natalie were determined to make it a good place to work, offering health insurance to its employees ... the second hang glider manufacturer in the United States to do so (after Flight Designs), as far as I know. As Jean-Michel later recalled, "While it was my idea originally, Natalie put in a lot of work in the research, negotiations, [and] selection of a health plan, and made it all happen (I remember how reluctant the insurance companies were to consider the ideas because they thought all our employees were paid to go fly hang gliders and 'they had no plans covering that activity!')"

I worked for Pacific Windcraft for four years. During that time, I'd built a Vision and a higher-performance Esprit for myself, but it was common for the Marina Beach regulars to trade gliders with each other, so I got to fly most of the other designs on the market. In time, Pacific Windcraft would also produce the Vision Eclipse, designed by Jean-Michel and Bob England. Like the Electra Flyer Olympus, it left something to be desired in speed range compared to other gliders of its time. And, like the "Oly,"  it had very light handling for its time. (I remember Jim Johns doing tight soaring turns at Marina Beach one-handed. When he landed, he said, "You're not supposed to be able to do that on a hang glider.") But unlike the Oly, it had amazingly docile stall characteristics. One could be flying it at the most ragged edges of minimum sink and still turn it with ease; while other gliders would suddenly stall a tip or become skittish in their handling in similar circumstances, the Eclipse might give a little shudder to indicate it wasn't happy, but it would complete the turn with its customary light bar pressure. It is still the best "scratching" glider I've ever flown, and that includes the La Mouette Atlas, which Jean-Michel was marketing in the US through a company called Sky Lines, a joint venture with La Mouette. La Mouette was also supplying us with a higher-performance called the Profil and a trike that was developed as a tow-launch platform.

In 1986, I thought it was time for me to start out on my own. I established a company called Dragonwing with the purpose of making prototype sails and doing sail repairs for the aviation industry. (It also made replicas of medieval tents, which was a sideline at first but would become the business's primary product. But that's another story). The company was first based in Rohnert Park, near Santa Rosa, California. This is because I was sharing manufacturing facilities with another start-up company called American Windwrights, which was making a high-performance double-surface glider of its own design. I made the patterns and prototype sails for the company, and the intention was that I would eventually hire and train sail loft personnel for them. The company's owners were a fellow called "Bones" Strickland (I've forgotten his formal name), and his wife Sharol, who had sold their hang gliding shop and school to finance the new company. They seemed very enthusiastic at first, and I thought their business had every chance of success.

It didn't turn out that way. For one thing, Bones assumed that the needs of his business took precedence over the needs of mine. The crisis came when he told me that he needed three sails within a week's time. I explained that while I could give him one sail, I had other customers to whom I'd given delivery dates, and that I had to honor those commitments. He responded with a speech saying in effect that if I wasn't with him, I was against him. Then he told me to clear my stuff out of there. Sharol was able to talk him out of that demand, so I was safe for a while, but the bond of trust I had with him was broken. I started to look for other places to establish my new business.

As it turned out, it was Jean-Michel who solved the problem for me. He'd sold Pacific Windcraft to Airwave Gliders, an English company who was at that time making a big dent in the industry with a high-performance glider called the Magic. He would own some stock in the new company, now named Pacific Airwave, and continue to run it; the company would produce the Magic in the United States, as well as future gliders designed by Airwave. He would also handle certifying those gliders with the Hang Glider Manufacturers Association, making them easier to sell in the US. The new company would also make Vision sails for their market in Europe, where the glider would be called the Calypso.

This Vision was not the Vision Eclipse, but a successor in the line. It shared the planform of the Eclipse, but little else. Called the Vision Mark IV, it had a different airframe, sail camber, airfoil, and hardware. It was designed by Jean-Michel and Bob Schutte, who had also designed a high-performance glider called the Kea. It was Airwaves's acquisition of Pacific Windcraft that caused Bob to look elsewhere for employment; he had hoped that Pacific Windcraft would manufacture the Kea, but the Brits had no interest in it, being committed instead to manufacturing the Magic. So Bob quit Pacific Airwave, and Jean-Michel suddenly needed another sail loft manager.

When I visited the new company in the summer of 1987, Pacific Airwave was in the process of moving to a larger factory just across the street from its old location. The new factory had six thousand square feet of floor space, to which another fifteen hundred square feet of sail loft would soon be added. So Jean-Michel made me an offer I couldn't refuse: come back to work for him, train another sail loft foreman, make all his prototype sails and patterns, and continue to run Dragonwing out of my own niche in the new sail loft, using my own machines and staff, and paying him a percentage of what Dragonwing earned.

I guess the truth can be told now about another reason Jean-Michel had for luring me back. At the time, most of the major sailcloth makers were very skittish about selling their product to hang glider manufacturers. This was due to the legal climate of the time, where if a person was injured on a hang glider, that person's lawyers could sue not only the manufacturer of the glider, who had practically nothing of value to collect, but also the companies who supplied that manufacturer, whose "deep pockets" made them particularly tempting targets for lawsuits. It was true that the plaintiff's lawyer had to convince a jury that the supplier's product was somehow to blame, but juries couldn't be counted on to make that distinction. And in view of the possible legal costs, the sailcloth industry decided that the patronage of the hang gliding manufacturers, who provided only a small part of their profits, simply wasn't worth the trouble to retain.

But there was another sport using sailcloth that was growing fast, and that was sailboarding. And Dragonwing was making, among other things, prototypes for sailboard sails. It had also made prototype sails for a water-ballast sailboat that Jean-Michel had designed. So I was routinely ordering and paying for thousands of yards of sailcloth, which I would turn around and sell to Pacific Airwave. Since Dragonwing never appeared on the lists of hang glider manufacturers, the sailcloth suppliers could say in their defense that they had no idea that their product would end up being used in aviation sails, and that they couldn't be held liable. I think they probably knew, anyway, but they were off the hook.

At any rate, I was back in Salinas that fall, working once again as sail loft foreman for Jean-Michel's new company. While training a new crew and foreman for the sail loft, I made the patterns for the Magic and re-designed the sail for easier manufacture without compromising the glider's performance. Later, I did the same thing for the Magic Kiss and the other K series gliders. I also made the prototypes and patterns for the Formula, an intermediate glider that shared the same planform as the Kiss but was easier to fly; the Double Vision, a large single-surface glider designed specifically for tandem flight;  and the Vision Pulse line of gliders that replaced the Mark IV.

There a few changes in the coming years. In the beginning of 1991, Jean-Michel left the company after becoming convinced (as he told me) that the company was being stripped bit by bit by Airwave U.K., and heading straight into a wall commercially. He continued to work with Pacifica Airwave as a consultant, certifying the Vision Pulse and the Double Vision.

After Jeff Williamson and Sue Gale took over the day-to-day management of the sail loft 1n 1992, Natalie Bernasconi retired from the company and I took over her duties as purchasing agent.  Shortly afterwards, when Briggs Christie left, I also assumed the duties of production manager. That was my last job with the company. I had fallen in love with a woman who lived in Sacramento, and it seemed apparent that were were meant to be together. (Twenty years later, we still are.) She was a programmer for the state of California, which meant that she had to live in Sacramento. I, on the other hand, could move my business without ill effect. So I quit Pacific Airwave and moved Dragonwing to Sacramento, where I operated it until my own retirement in 2012. As it turned out, Pacific Airwave itself went out of business about a year after I left it; the British owners decided to close it down and move whatever was of value to their original factory on the Isle of Wight.

You may have noticed a pattern here. A year or so after I left Electra Flyer, it had ceased making hang gliders and, as American Aerolights, was making only the Eagle and another ultralight called the Falcon. It went under shortly after that. A year after I left Flight Designs, it too went under; Pioneer decided to leave the hang gliding business and, after shipping most of the remaining stock to its ultralight factory in Connecticut, it sold the remaining assets (including the name) to a fellow in Oklahoma. A year after I left Pacific Windcraft, it had been sold to British owners and renamed. A year after I left Pacific Airwave, it went under. It may be that I had done enough damage to these companies that they failed a short time after my departure. It may also be that I was so invaluable to them that my services made the difference between success or failure. Or it may simply be that I had the talent of a rat in vacating sinking ships (although I didn't know they were sinking at the time). Take your pick.

But my career in the hang gliding industry was almost never dull, and I wouldn't have missed it for the world. I cannot claim to have been one of the great pioneers or designers or business leaders of the sport, but my career "in the ranks" is probably fairly typical. And I had a chance to participate as an instructor, salesman, repairman, sailmaker, plant foreman, and pilot, affording me a better look at the sport's development than most people. For that, I'm grateful.