Free Flying on The South Downs
Ian Grayland writes about the Early Days of the SHGC
The Idea
Back in the early 70's I saw a short news item on TV showing a bunch of guys flying some very basic hang gliders off a hill in California. They seemed to be having a great time, but were arriving at the bottom very shortly after take-off, so for my purposes at the time, there seemed little point to the activity and I very soon forgot all about hang gliders. I had been for some time working on a jump-start gyroplane design, having realised that the only way I could afford to fly would be to build my own aircraft. Design work was progressing nicely, when I came across a photo of a primitive hang glider in a newspaper. Again, I thought little more about it until later that evening when I suddenly realised that if you flew the thing off a steep enough hill in a wind of 20 mph or so, you would actually be able to stay up! What's more, I already had all the equipment and machinery required for the job; a hacksaw, a pistol drill with a couple of drill bits, a small Victorian sewing machine, a pencil and a slide rule. I immediately set about designing and building a hang glider. What could possibly go wrong?
Aeronautical Engineering
Unfortunately I had failed to keep the photo, so I had very little to go on, thus my first attempt was a glider with 21ft leading edge tubes and 18ft keel. The nose angle was around 105 degrees and the resulting wing area about 340 sq ft - pretty big, but I had only reckoned to get a maximum lift coefficient of about one. After a lot of phone calls and driving around to get materials ("You're going to built a what??! - You must be crazy!"), I was finally ready to start construction. I made the sail first, laying it out roughly on the lawn and sewing it on the kitchen table. I drilled the main spars in my back yard with a pistol drill, marking around the circumference with bits of paper for the pilot holes, then using masonry bits for the through holes (to save blunting the drills on the concrete). Reinforcing inserts had to be 'machined' down with a file to fit inside the 16 gauge tubes. For the A-frame tubes I soaped the ends and heat-treated them on the gas cooker before shrinking inserts into place in the kitchen sink. Probably the hardest bit was drilling the Woolworth's hardware dept bolts to take key-rings to secure the wing nuts. After load testing the frame by balancing one end of the cross tube on the garden fence and the other on the shed roof, then jumping up and down in the A-frame, I was ready to go flying.
Flight Testing
The maximum lift coefficient turned out to be rather better than I had estimated - no question of needing to run for a landing; a lazy walking pace was plenty - the wing was way too big. This was not the only problem either, as I found out on my first flight. I had located the hang point by assigning a first guesstimate and then accurately calculating the difference to where it should be. Five inches. I carefully built the wing with the hang point five inches further aft. Disaster! It should have been five inches further forward! This made my first flight a little tricky with the hang point some ten inches too far aft - bear in mind, I had to teach myself how to fly at the same time as figuring out the shortcomings of my design. Even so, I did manage to top land on that first flight at Anchor Valley in a stiff Westerly breeze - by virtue of being unable to get to the bottom! I rounded the flight off in style with my first ground-loop. Thus ended many years of confidence in my own mental arithmetic and began the first of many years of flight-testing, bending, bodging and re-testing countless experimental aircraft. Some might call this a career. It certainly involved a lot of careering around the sky!
Flying, Flying, Flying
Following the first few flights, I re-designed the wing, mostly with a hacksaw. I cut the leading edges down to the same length as the keel. That way it folded neater. I reduced the nose angle to around 90 degrees, which cut the wing area to about 220 sq ft and went off to learn how to fly it. Things were much better now. Although the glide angle wasn't so good, I could take off and land reliably and, better yet, I could actually steer the thing in flight! Then in the Spring of 1974 a new development emerged. Other people! There were other people out there on the South Downs attempting to commit aviation just like me!
Apart from the obvious social benefits, flying with a group like this produced a real boost in my learning speed, since I could learn from the mistakes of others as well as my own. I soon discovered that I could get higher and stay up longer than most by virtue of my superior sink rate. Conversely, my glide angle was so bad that often I couldn't make it over the fence into the landing field with everybody else. Eyeballing my fellow aviator's mostly cobbled-up, home-made or kit-built machines revealed that the ones that glided best had, amongst numerous other differences, one key element; non-porous sails. By now thoroughly hooked on flying, as opposed to sewing, I rushed out and purchased a ready made rip-stop nylon sail and after ten minutes with the trusty hacksaw fitted it to my airframe. Success! It flew a treat! I had an even better sink rate and could now actually out-glide most of the others as well. The glider looked a real beauty too in its two-tone blue. A man could be proud of a machine like that. Well, until he realised that he could make a much better one...
Competition Success
It was on this same glider that I entered the first British Championships held at Steyning Bowl that Summer (1974). There was no entry fee and, better yet, when you signed-in as a competitor they gave you six bottles of Stella lager, so it was well worth entering. Unfortunately the wind was a brisk SW and, even after a couple of breakfast beers, the idea of flying through appalling turbulence to the bottom of the bowl for a pointless spot-landing task didn't appeal. I went to the sponsor's tent, cadged another six bottles of beer and went off to Mill Hill to go flying.
This turned out a brilliant day for me. I got in several hours of soaring, my bottles of beer jammed inside my denim jacket. I opened them in flight on the A-frame corner brackets and came in for a succession of top-landings to dispose of the empties. Best of all, I finally worked out how to top-land (this was quite a new thing at the time). On my first attempt I got it all wrong and knocked one of the spectators out of his wheel-chair. Luckily I was undamaged and he apologised profusely for getting in the way! Anyway, I got more free beer and more flying that day than anyone else entered in the competition, so I reckon I won.
Theory Into Practice
I had written an article for the national association magazine on the theoretical possibilities of gaining extra height in ridge-lift using thermals. The first time this happened in reality was such a surprise to my fellow fliers that they stopped flying and abandoned their gliders at Anchor Valley, having seen me flying from there at Mill Hill. The whole bunch piled into their cars and rushed down the road to Mill Hill to regail me with questions to which I had very few answers. I wasn't sure at the time if it had been thermal or wave. These days of course any one of us would immediately recognise thermal lift and the onset of sea-breeze convergence.
On another afternoon we were soaring at Mill Hill when the sea breeze became a true Southerly. The turbulence was fairly severe and the only real lift was way out over the bushes at the North end. So someone said "How about Newhaven? That faces South..." A bunch of us jumped in a couple of cars taking my glider and a Hiway Standard with us and shot off to the cliffs. Now at this time we knew it was theoretically possible to fly a cliff and had read of some guys in California flying a coastal cliff by launching from a big hill behind it and landing on the beach. But actually launching from a cliff?? After walking back and forth along the top of Newhaven cliffs for half an hour or so scoping out the severe rotor (it was blowing over 25mph), I chose a rounded bit of cliff edge with clean airflow and enough space for someone on the nose wires and off I went. After a short flight in smooth, strong lift I made an easy top landing in a rotor free zone and had a second flight, quickly followed by Martin Farnham, the component maker at Brighton HG manufacturer Hiway - now 'fully recovered' from 'the towing incident', who flew my wing rather than go and fetch the other one.
Southern Hang Gliding Club
One of the keenest local fliers, graphic designer Mark Woodhams, approached me one afternoon at Mill Hill with John Malin, the Steyning Bowl HG school proprietor, in tow. "We're thinking of forming a club to protect our flying sites and generally look after local fliers interests. It'll cost money. We reckon twenty five quid each will do to get things started. Some of the others have already agreed, can we count you in?" "OK. As long as he doesn't get to handle any of the money..." The SHGC was founded later that Summer, the result mostly of Mark's hard work and the boundless enthusiasm of guys like Johnny Carr, who was the first to actually hand over a cheque. Everyone joined - I mean everyone. Incidentally, twenty five pounds back then was a lot of cash, like maybe 200 or more now. National Hang Gliding Association annual membership including third party insurance and the Illustrated Monthly Fly Paper was only three quid. I can still remember reading the first Exchange and Mart ads for the NHGA and being reluctant to join thinking it looked a bit of a con...
British Hang Gliding Association
Turned out it wasn't actually a con at all, though there was a bit of deception involved. The NHGA was run by enthusiastic flier John James. It was expanding fast and had organised appropriate publicity and suitable third party insurance for flying members on a shoestring. In fact all was running quite well, despite the best intentions of rival organisation, the British Kite Soaring Association. Unfortunately, it then came out that 'John James' was acually Peter Haynes, the oldest of the Haynes brothers, the younger two of whom ran local HG manufacturer Wasp! Oops! After a lot of name calling and a hell of a political bun fight the BKSA and NHGA were merged to form the BHGA. Apart from the increased number of members and an improved magazine, 'Wings', all this argy bargy had lead to a properly constituted National Association, providing a sound legal basis for the foundation of 'Member Clubs' like SHGC.
My First Flying Trip Abroad
I used to go to the Isle of Man for the Manx GP in early September most years with a group of friends. We'd take our bikes (typically not UK street legal) up to Liverpool in a van, then ditch the van in Liverpool and get on the ferry with our bikes. This year was different; I took my glider on the roof of my TR4a. There was a Hang Gliding Club on the island (with three members and one, currently broken, glider). Though very friendly, they didn't seem to know very much about the Met or the best local flying sites and were obviously in the very early stages of learning. However, there appeared to be no potential problem with flying more or less anywhere on the island. Despite this being a bit of an alien concept after the attitude in Sussex, I set out with my OS map to try a few sites. Anyway, I had a couple of flights, but the best was from Snaefell, the biggest peak on the island.
I took off from a shoulder of the mountain alongside the road in a stiffish SW wind. Up I went. And back a bit. And up some more. As I passed the mountain railway on the way up the driver stopped the train and he and all the passengers got out to watch! They were waving and photographing like mad. I wrapped one arm hard round the control bar to keep penetrating while I waved back. After a short, but enjoyable flight in ever increasing wind, I landed on the top of Snaefell. Early the next morning I was rather ominously awakened by a phone call at my B&B. Expecting it to be the plod, or some irate land owner, I battled my way to the phone very carefully past the biggest Manx cat you've ever seen ("Well, that's sort of 'his' room. He's absolutely fine as long as he likes you..."). It was Manx Radio wanting to know where and when I'd be flying today so they could tell people where to go and watch! Oh, and could they be of any help with weather forecasts or anything like that? A stark contrast with the attitude to fliers still prevalent in Sussex today.
Building A Better Glider
My airframe still had the original un-anodised extruded alloy tubes, much bent, re-straightened and cut about by now, together with rusty Woolworth's bolts and bare galvanised steel rigging wires clamped with those horrid little U-bolt cable clamps. I had done a fair amount of development work and added some extras. I had one of the first king-posts, though mine was only fifteen inches tall and had just a single fore and aft cable to hold the reflex in the keel. The tendency of the cross tube to get bent when parked nose down in a wind, requiring it to be constantly un-bolted and inverted (no kidding, this was common practice!), had been more or less eliminated by the addition of a shackle on the nose wires to allow the wing to park flat on the ground. The control bar had always had a 'belly-bulge' in it ('speed bar' it's called these days) and was removable using wing nuts and safety rings, though I rarely bothered to fold the A-frame, preferring to keep it rigged as I had no bag to keep the glider in anyway and it kept the wires from flapping about while the glider was stored on the roof of my car. My variable geometry crosstube ends had also been very useful for fine tuning the billow and I had now reached the practical limit of performance from the rip-stop nylon sail.
Realising that there was a big boost in performance to be had, I was mad keen to get a new sail made in some decent heavier polyester sailcloth and, at the same time, tidy the rest up a bit. After ordering the new sail for me, the guys at Hiway let me build the fiddly bits of my new frame in their factory in Bernard Road, Brighton. This time I used anodised tubes all round - no more black marks on the sail and black hands after flying - and, after tweaking and tuning the wing, I added a complete new set of properly swaged plastic coated rigging. The finished glider looked superb with its pristine all white sail. It flew really well too, fully justifying my extra expense and effort. Glide and especially penetration performance were much enhanced. A man could be proud of a machine like that. Well, until he realised that he could make a much better one...