[Bill Cummings]

Good morning Howie,
I'm off to the bunny hill this morning and should be back on line later in the day.
I also have 900 flights with trikes which was an easy transition from naked HG.
Laters!

[reluctantsparrow]

Hello Hawks,
just introducing myself and learning my way around this awesome forum.
Began hang gliding at 13 years of age in 1973 in the Seattle area with no instruction. I crashed a lot.
took me one year to figure out I was supposed to take off into the wind and four years to learn I was supposed to land into the wind so when I say I crashed a lot. I mean a whole lot.
Met Kamron Blevins when I was fifteen and he was 13 or 14 in Omak, Wa and we built a bamboo batso together and a 16 foot Flexi-Flier.
I still had not learned i was supposed to land into the wind so those wings did not last too long.
Kamron opened the first Northwing with myself as his informal business partner and that was lot of fun but that business failed for several reasons.
Kamron just put a pic of him and I flying the bamboo Batso in 1976 on his facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/north.wing.inc/ (scroll down)
Only thing i can lay claim to is this Hang glider Catapult I built to promote autonomy in the paraplegic hang gliding community. There really wasnt a market for it but hey.....the idea comes and you build it anyway.....
http://www.cmsstudios.com/fly2k/01flights/fhgc.htm
That thing worked pretty darn slick. it would get me to airspeed without having to really hang on tight in about 1.5 seconds, no head bobbing, that thing was amazingly smooth.
I could take off from nearly flat ground with a 5mph headwind and fly about fifty or sixty feet to a stand up landing.
Kenny Brown considered using a version based on my proof of concept for speed Gliding events but nothing came of that So i dismantled the catapult and moved on.
My real name is Jim Fenison. Locals call me Sunny Jim. Ive been called worse but please, please, please dont call me Sunny jim anymore. Its way too much to live up to.....Rainy james would be more appropriate, Or RS for reluctant sparrow, which defines my mind more accurately.

I am delighted to find this forum. i am thrilled to find a place ideas can be freely shared and considered, like joe Faust did with Low and Slow
thank you BobK for putting this thing together. I Sooooooo needed a place like this. Thank you.

So that it.....along with a big thank you to Joe Faust who put out the rag which I read like the holy bible as a 13 year old Kid up in Seattle with no mentors trying to teach myself how to fly. I lived and breathed the paper that Rag was printed on.
thank you Joe.....you made THE difference..(even though I obviously never read the article about landing into the wind)........RS

[wingspan33]

Hello Jim!

I feel like I know you already. Wait! I do! You responded in a thread I recently started.

BTW - I've never met someone who started flying hang gliders earlier and at a younger age than I. I started in 1975 at age 19. You have me beat!

But then, I was lucky enough to start off with an early hang gliding school with instructors and all that good stuff. Basic concepts like taking off and landing into the wind now seem like innate concepts. I wonder if I could say the same if I tried to teach myself way back then?

Gad to have you on board the US Hawks!

Take note that Joe Faust is here as well.

[Bob Kuczewski]

Welcome to the US Hawks Jim!!


 




 

 


The story of how you learned is a treasure. Thanks for sharing it with us.

As you probably know, Joe Faust was one of our founding members over 5 years ago, and he was on our first Advisory Board of Directors. Joe is also responsible for helping us craft our mission statement that's now part of our logo. Thanks Joe!!

Thanks, Jim, for sharing links to the Northwing pages. I found some nice pictures of my friend Mike Giles that I'll be posting in his memorial page if no one minds me copying them. Mike was a super guy, and we miss him every month at our Torrey Hawks Second Sundays (which was today, by the way).

The US Hawks is basically an attempt to start over again in the sport of hang gliding and to keep our focus on what matters ... the people who love flying hang gliders as much as we do. It sounds like you fit right in with that philosophy, and it really is our honor to have you joining us. We have an active historical section, and it would be great to see more of your older pictures there.

Thanks again for joining us, and please contact me any time. We're all in this together, and we've got a great group of people making this happen.

[Rick Masters]

Hi Jim. That thing is really cool. It could also be used to open up some shallow or unforgiving launches that are difficult to get airborne from by running.
First time I've seen one. Similar in concept to the original dual bungie early sailplane launch technique used by the Germans at Wasserkuppe and Hawley Bowlus over here. Both techniques avoid the lock-out problem in different ways. Good to have you on board.

[SamKellner]

Welcome RS

[reluctantsparrow]

woke up realizing i found the US Hawks by doing a patent search for prior art. (standard practice when going through the patenting process).
I had been using the google.com/patent search engine and a few of Joe Fausts historical posts came up from this website, US Hawks.
Why do I mention this? I have been flying in the pacific Northwest with a fairly high pilot population and I had never once heard of the USHawks......not once.
I had been dreaming of just such an organization but had no idea such an organization already existed until i did a patent search for prior art.
So what i am saying is....Maybe there are a LOT of pilots out there who dont know we exist and would like to know.
I would have come on board years ago if I knew.
Perhaps a mass emailing to pilots in the USA just to just say hi and let them know what is happening here?
I am sure any pilot living near sites like Torrey Pines know but may assume, since ALL the san Diego pilots Know there is a US HAWKS trying to bring back the freedom factor to our sport that ALL pilots in the country know.
In my case that would constitute a false assumption, I do not spend a lot of time online surfing the OZ report or any other club newsletters so I had no idea the US hawks existed.
i Bet there are a lot of pilots and potential new US HaWKS supporters out there like me tucked away in smaller population pockets.

[SamKellner]

Yeah Jim

[Bob Kuczewski]

Hi Jim,

The reason for our relative obscurity may be more intentional (and sinister) than you realize. In the spring of 2010, I tried to start a new hang gliding association by posting the idea on hanggliding.org. The person who runs that site uses the name "sg", but his real name is Jack Axaopoulos. It's a long story, but he ended up hijacking our first effort in the spring of 2010 and killed it. He then banned a bunch of us from his forum and put software in place that will immediately rewrite any link to ushawks.org. The last time, anyone checked, if you try to enter "ushawks.org" as a link, his software will automatically rewrite your link to be something like "loserville.org". Just for fun, try registering an account there and post a link like this:

Hi Everyone,

There's a bunch of pilots trying to create an alternative national association just for hang gliding. Go to http://ushawks.org and check it out.

By the time you submit that post and then go to read it, you'll see that it's been changed.   

You might also find yourself banned if you just try to mention the U.S. Hawks.   

A number of the people here on the US Hawks (and on our Board) were part of that spring 2010 effort, and we've been working away on it ever since. We would surely welcome any effort you can make on other forums or other clubs to spread a positive word about the US Hawks. We would like more clubs to join as Chapters as well. Maybe you could start a Chapter of your own?

Anyway, thanks for posting.  

[Rick Masters]

Along those same lines, I have been kicked off ParaglidingForum.com and OzReport.com for questioning the high death and accident rates from paragliding and the supposed benefit to hang glider pilots of combining parachutal soaring with our sport. It was a terrible shock to me, after an absence of 20 years, to re-examine hang gliding to find it had been taken over by dangerous entrepreneurs and crazy people with the maturity level of pre-adolescents, hell-bent on destroying all the work the USHGA had done over decades to make hang gliding a respectable sport. That was back in 2011 when the global paragliding fatality numbers were little over half what they are today.

See https://web.archive.org/web/20111126151836/http://cometclones.com/ for perspective.

Because of that terrible toll, the USHPA has become utterly defensive, lashing out at any criticism and choosing character assassination over real discussion. It has also lost its focus on hang gliding safety. This is reflected in today's hang gliding fatality numbers. It is what one would expect from an association dominated by paragliding and joyriding. The only solution I see is to separate hang gliding from paragliding. Because of the complete and utter intransigence of the USHPA, this can only be done by forming an alternative national hang gliding association.

I thank BobK for taking the first steps toward making that happen. Now it is up to the fence-sitters.

- Stop bickering with USHPA. Replace it. -