[Frank Colver]

Yes. I've had old timers say that my glider looked like all of those in the air now (plan-form wise, modern HG's are much cleaner aerodynamically). It had a very good glide. It took me a lot of tries to learn to fly using that glider, because performance was so high. It would be like learning to drive using a hot Italian road race car.

I remember other HG pilots saying that because my glider weighed 75 lbs it would never catch on, because nobody would want to fly a HG that heavy. Ha! Even I retired it and donated it to the museum because I wanted something lighter and more convenient to transport and set up. That's when I bought the Eipper and then a secession of better gliders after that ending with Bob Will's personal prototype SST. The other reason I retired the Skysail was because by the time I learned to fly, it was getting pretty beat up from hard landings and transportation. My son Matt got more flights in it because he was already flying Rogollos from mountain sites.

Photo of Matt flying at the 3rd Montgomery meet in Pio Pica Park near San Diego. It still had a triangle bar then, I hadn't converted to the parallel bars yet.

It was destroyed in the San Diego Aerospace Museum fire. They had it hanging above the Write Flyer replica.

Frank