I bought a new hang glider today! It's used actually, but in
really great shape. This is the first glider I've bought since 1993,
but I've worked for the manufacturer (Wills Wing) since 1995 making
parts, building gliders, running their website, and test flying
production gliders (and the occasional prototype). I've flown over
1500 brand new gliders of various types and sizes, so I haven't been
deprived, exactly. Most of those flights were a half hour or less on
days where four or five of us go up to launch, set up and inspect
wings, make sure they fly right, pack 'em up in the LZ, and then go
up the hill again, anywhere from 3 to 7 times in a day. Quite different
from flights on my own where I stay up for an hour or two or more, on
my own schedule. When I worked at the factory (I just run the website
and test fly now) I brought home a glider or two most weekends to test
fly, so I generally had longer flights, but still, each wing was going
to be somebody's new baby so I didn't push the envelope with them,
usually.
I bought a single-surface wing when I learned to fly in 1985, a used
Lite Dream 185. In 1990 I finally moved up to a used Moyes GTR 175, a
double-surface hottie - 'GTR' was for 'Glass Tip Racer', because the
wingtips were flexible fiberglass tubes. I wore the GTR out and bought
a barely used Wills Wing HP AT 158 (the numbers are square feet of
wing; notice the wings get smaller as performance increases?) in 1993,
a glider that had been flown by a factory sponsored pilot in a couple
of competitions. When I started working for Wills Wing, there was no
real need for me to buy a glider, and I still had the Dream and the GTR
to fly in a pinch. My first Falcon 225 was a used 'demo' glider that
Wills Wing generously gave me after I set up their initial website in
1996 (I had to sell them on this new 'World Wide Web' thing first) and
that I chose specifically to take people for tandem flights with. My
second Falcon 225 was the only brand-spanking-new glider I've ever
owned, and they gave me that in trade for my low-airtime 225 when a
very busy tandem pilot wrecked HIS 225 in the week before Labor Day
weekend (lots of tandems scheduled) and they had no 225s in stock that
he could buy. He came from Nevada and got my glider and they built me a
new one a few weeks later.
So I've been flying my Falcon 225 (single-surface, low performance,
easy) for most of my fun flying for the past year, and while it's so
light and easy that it's very relaxing to fly, there are days when I'd
like to have more performance so I could venture farther up or down the
ridges or zoom around a little more. Cash flow hasn't been such that I
can really justify dropping thousands of dollars on another wing when
I've got a perfectly fine wing already (that I couldn't get much for on
the resale market). There have been a couple of gliders for sale in the
area in the last few months that tempted me, vaguely, but the prices
were kind of high and I knew they'd seen a lot of airtime, which equals
UV exposure, which is what limits wing life - the fabric of the sail
starts to break down after 400-600 hours of UV. Getting a new sail for
an out-of-production glider is not an option because things change too much,
too quickly. Then a confluence of events occurred, and I carpe'd the diem.
I also run the website for our hang gliding club, which includes a
mountain-top weather station I started back in 2000, when I lived up
there, and the station's been down for the last 3.5 months due to storm
damage. SoCal pilots can get a very clear idea of
conditions before making the drive out to fly, and most of the pilots
live more than 30 miles away. I'd worked on it a few times when the
weather wasn't nasty, but was getting nowhere. Going up the mountain to
work on it wears on me more than physically, but that's another story. The folks whose home it's at now are
quite nice and accomodating. I thought there were bad connections in
the cables because I'd temporarily slapped in an old anemometer and
it still hadn't worked. Turns out a brand new anemometer did the trick
(two anemometers on the scrap heap). I installed that Monday and it
went like clockwork. I felt a great weight lifted off my shoulders - I
hadn't realized how deeply not having it working had been affecting me.
We had a test fly day on Tuesday, and good thing, because it kept me
from checking the weather graph all day, just because I could again. It
was a good day of test flying and I flew some racing wings.
In the morning on Tuesday I'd emailed a fellow pilot requesting
payment for some website work I'd done for him over a month ago. When I
got home that night I saw that he'd renewed his ad on the club website
offering his lightly used UltraSport 166 (double-surface, mid to high
performance, my size) for sale, which I'd forgotten about (originally
posted last February). He'd lowered the price, and after about five
minutes thought I called him up and offered him several hundred dollars
plus the cost of the work I'd done and he said "Heck yeah!"
That guy also has a Falcon 225, which he started flying with, and he
bought this one used, thinking he wanted higher performance. He found
he really prefers the Falcon, as he's mostly a casual pilot. I applaud such a sensible outlook. I know the
guy who had the UltraSport before him - he flew it regularly but bought a newer
model a few years ago. The original owner was totally gung ho and
this was his second glider; he flew it for a few months (banging it up
slightly) before 'moving up' to a high performance blade wing. He
doesn't fly anymore, which is the norm in that scenario. The coolest
thing, which I had forgotten until I got it home and set it up for a
good inspection, was that I did the original test flight of this wing,
October 9, 2002! My initials are still scratched into the placard.
That's an additional comfort because I know that the keel, a major
piece of frame tubing to which the placard is affixed, hasn't been
replaced. Keels don't often need replacing, but when they do the glider
has usually taken a severe impact with something. My flight log shows
that the glider flew well and needed no adjustments. It's even possible
I built the thing, I'll have to check the shop's records.
UltraSports were my favorite glider to test fly when they were in
production, especially the 166 (the largest) since I'm a big guy and
they let me float when the lift is light but tighten up and go fast
when there's a need to get from A to B quickly and efficiently. I actually was the one who suggested the
name 'UltraSport' when we were flying the protos, in late 1996. It was
the successor to the SuperSport, which had come after the Sport, both
very popular 'intermediate' gliders. I thought the name would clearly
establish where the model fit in the company's model line and that they could
put a big "US" on the bottom surface, since the high performance wing
we were making at the time had an 'XC' on the bottom, for 'Cross
Country'. We could possibly get a little patriotic
sales boost; the chief competitors were an Australian company and, at
the time, much smaller Italian and French manufacturers (both now basically
kaput). A lesson learned from the naming, by the way, was that many
pilots assumed it was just an update of the Sport, when in fact it was
a very different airfoil with very different cabling and hardware. The
UltraSport was targeted at the same market segment as the Sport and SuperSport, but
the glider's qualities were quite different. It took a while to get that
through to the pilots.
This particular glider, in fact, is red and blue with a white 'US'
logo; my Falcon is mostly white with red and blue leading edge panels.
So I've inadvertantly got a theme going. It felt great to set it up in
the backyard today, and everything checked out. It has an estimated 100 hours of airtime on it and has been kept
very clean and well cared for. Some nicks in the
fabric, a grass stain or two, but it's a creampuff. I gave it some TLC and got reacquainted with the
hardware and cabling details. I made a lot of cable assemblies and
other parts for UltraSports, and built a fair number from parts into
finished gliders, so it's very nostalgic for me. There were a couple of
small parts that were tweaked (corrected, no big deal) and I got the minor bend out
of the basetube (which you steer with while flying) pretty easily. I
let it sun for an hour to dry after rinsing some areas, then packed it
up and put it in the bag. All the while I felt this contentment mixed
with anticipation and even a little pride - those kinds of feelings are
not the status quo for this generally alienated underachiever.
Then it was time to modify my in-garage glider storage to handle two
gliders, but if I start describing the pulleys and ropes and padded
two-by-fours this will go on even longer, so suffice it to say I had a
satisfying few hours in the garage on this post-heat-wave cool spring day as well.
Maybe this is just my micro-budget version of working out a midlife crisis, but right
now I'm looking forward to my next flying day the way I've heard
people look forward to 'hot dates'. I now realize that for the
last few years flying has been as much about the escape to the cooling
solitude where the white noise of wind rush masks the inner chatter
and the outer silence, where the required concentration keeps the mind
out of well-worn ruts, at least for a while, as it has been about the
joy of flight, the challenge of working the invisible
currents, and yes, the camaraderie on the ground, before and after
flying. This positive development is because of something I fixed,
something else I worked on, and something I decided because it felt right as the idea arose, without worrying about justification. I hope this is the start of a trend.