Skyline opens 2004 with Kolie Lombard’s account of a demanding first landout, Greg Ellis’s climb to 14,000 feet near Signal Knob, and a spirited tale of four club members driving through a snowstorm to inspect the LS-4 Juliet Sierra. The issue also previews the annual meeting, debates proposed changes to club governance, considers the Schweizer 1-26 as an affordable cross-country trainer, reviews recent glider accidents, and remembers longtime aviator Chuck Beatley.
Skyline reports rising membership, improving finances, new board members Chris Williams and Frank Banas, construction of additional hangar space, and the addition of the Sprite to the club fleet. Members revisit proposed governance reforms ahead of the annual safety meeting, complete Bill Vickland’s case for the Schweizer 1-26, introduce a former Air Force Academy 1-26E to Virginia’s Civil Air Patrol program, examine three glider accidents, and recount efforts to fly an authentic Wright Flyer reproduction.
The 2004 flying season opens with a bang as the Skyline Soaring Club moves to purchase the Schweitzer 1-36 Sprite from members Piet Barber and Joe Rees for $12,000 on a three-year interest-free plan, giving the club a dedicated single-seat glider for cross-country training and badge work. President George Hazelrigg reports early-season flights to 12,300 feet and a smoking ridge on February 22, while the Board sets a membership target of 80 and expands its cadre of CFI-Gs to make 2004 a strong training year. Carlos Roberts files a vivid report from the SSA Convention, covering the new Diana 2 sailplane, Klaus Ohlman's world-record talks, Juan Mandelbaum's Mifflin Regional video, a tour of the Lockheed F/A-22 assembly line, and Steve Wallace's encore presentation on the Columbia accident. The issue also carries a sobering NTSB summary of a fatal Standard Cirrus collision with a transmission guy wire near Lone Pine, California; minutes from the January 24 Annual Meeting, where members voted on by-law changes and elected new directors; a Service Award to founding member Shane Neitzey; new discounted soaring titles in the club bookshop; and the addition of Dr. Jack Glendening's daily BLIPSPOT forecasts for Front Royal. The season, the club declares, is officially under way.
The April 2004 issue marks a turning point for Skyline Soaring Club as the BIG (Build Instructors from within the Group) program, proposed by Piet Barber and taught by Spencer Annear, finally bears fruit: Geoff Hazelrigg, Piet Barber, and Fred Mueller earn their commercial ratings, President George Hazelrigg completes his CFI-G, and Fred LaSor and Brian Collins join the instructor ranks, restoring the club to a full cadre after a two-year period with only four active instructors. The issue also carries Frank Banas's vivid account of a two-day pilgrimage through the five hangars at Wright-Patterson AFB's National Museum of the U.S. Air Force (including a B-2 repaired in a record two months and the Presidential 707), Dick Otis's hard-won lessons on towing and landing in 30-knot crosswinds out of Front Royal, and Dave Weaver's delight at an unannounced winch-launch ride in a DG-505 along the cliff face near Portmoak Airfield in Scotland. Rounding out the issue are Bill Vickland's 1973 wind-shear landing-out in a 1-26, Bob Collier's Massanutten ridge run, the Board's unanimous approval to purchase the club's SGS-136 Sprite for $12,000, a review of the 'Redline Sky' gliding DVD, and the news that NASA's X-43A became the first air-breathing scramjet aircraft to fly freely at Mach 7.
This issue of Skylines opens with a sobering and deeply personal account from Paul Adriance, the surviving pilot of a fatal glider-glider mid-air collision in the Seattle area, who details the split-second assumptions that led to the crash and urges fellow pilots to abandon the dangerous habit of 'assumptive flying.' Jim Kellett amplifies the warning with statistics showing a troubling rise in glider-glider mid-air collisions, while Bill Vickland contributes a hard-hitting series on the terrain and power-line hazards that have claimed pilots in the Shenandoah Valley. On a lighter note, President George Hazelrigg recounts a harrowing double land-out of the club's Grob and LS-1, complete with a torn calf muscle, a confused retrieval crew, and a cracked canopy discovered back at the hangar. Fred Winter and Fred Mueller share vivid dispatches from the Region 5 North Contest in Perry, South Carolina, where 67 gliders launched in under an hour and a 61-year-old acro pilot stunned the crowd with a six-turn inverted flat spin. The issue also carries the thrilling news that hundreds of wreckage fragments on the Mediterranean seabed have been positively identified as Antoine de Saint-Exupery's missing P-38 Lightning from 1944, a discovery that has electrified aviation historians. Rounding out the newsletter: a raffle for a rare 1949 1-23 sailplane, a farewell to retiring members Tim and Lisa Neitzey, the wedding of Geoffrey and Melanie on the soaring ridge near Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and a reminder to catch the History Channel's 'Silent Wings' documentary on the evolution of gliding.
The June 2004 issue of Skylines opens with a somber tribute to Peter Carl Masak (1957–2004), the Canadian-born engineer whose winglet designs and the celebrated ASW20C wing cross-section reshaped competition soaring for decades. Masak, a national champion and international competitor, was killed on May 22 while flying cross-country in Pennsylvania, and the club community rallied to honor a man who, as one member recalled,
This July 2004 issue is dominated by two stories that pull in opposite directions. President George Hazelrigg delivers a frank, sometimes exasperated account of the Skyline Soaring Club's ongoing standoff with the Warren County Airport Commission over its future at Front Royal (KFRR), including a contentious WCAC meeting where a $52 monthly Based-Aircraft Fee was voted in, a heated exchange with the so-called
President George Hazelrigg reports the resolution of months of uncertainty as Skyline Soaring Club finalizes a one-year lease with the Warren County Airport Commission, keeping the club at Front Royal Airport while absorbing a new $52 monthly Based-Aircraft Fee and the loss of Hangar 5. The issue also carries two hair-raising near-midair accounts: tow pilot Dick Otis describes a head-on encounter with a Sprite during a hazy release, and an airline pilot reports spotting a glider just 300 feet below on final approach to Dulles, prompting discussion of transponder use and Potomac TRACON coordination. Beyond the safety stories, the newsletter features Fred LaSor's vivid dispatch from the CAP National Glider Camp in Matoon, Illinois, where SSC member A.J. Dunn earned his first solo; Frauke Elber's history of the Women Soaring Pilots Association and its scholarship programs; Wolf Elber's proposal for a region-wide Superior Gliding Certificate aimed at reducing insurance costs; and a profile of Slovenian photographer Matevz Lenarcic's solo round-the-world attempt in a Pipistrel Sinus motorglider. Rounding out the issue are technical articles on steep-turn aerodynamics and tow-pilot control-failure procedures, a partnership wanted ad for a VRollanden-Schneider LS-6a, and an invitation to the First Annual Hobbs Fly-In on August 21–22.
The September 2004 issue of Skyline Soaring Club's newsletter carries the somber news that Paul Schweizer, the 91-year-old founder of Schweizer Aircraft and a driving force behind the 1-26 Association and one-design soaring competition, passed away on August 18. The obituary, penned by 1-26 Association President Bill Vickland, recalls Schweizer's authorship of *Sailplanes by Schweizer* and *Soaring with Eagles*, his Tuesday-and-Thursday devotion to the Schweizer Gallery at the National Soaring Museum, and his warm, garden-tending personality. Compounding the loss, the issue reports that Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. has agreed to acquire Schweizer Aircraft—the oldest privately owned aircraft manufacturer in the United States, producer of 2,160 sailplanes and 900-plus helicopters—deal expected to close by year's end. President George Hazelrigg delivers a stirring call to arms, warning that soaring faces a
This issue is anchored by Dave Weaver's vivid, day-by-day account of the 2004 18M National Soaring Championship at Uvalde, Texas, where a six-pilot Mid-Atlantic team (including Fred Mueller and Weaver himself) logged 38 hours of contest flying, five gold-distance flights, and four five-hour sorties against the nation's top glider pilots, including world champion Doug Jacobs. Weaver's narrative captures the full texture of a national contest: a rain-soaked practice-day landout at an exotic game ranch, a 265-mile assigned task shadowed by Jacobs, a three-turn task along the Rio Grande, and the ritual of loading 350 pounds of water ballast before a 10 a.m. grid. Back home, the club weathered a full-fledged tornado that tore through the OKV field at Winchester on September 17, ripping hangar panels and uprooting trees while the gliders inside survived intact. President George Hazelrigg reports Jim Kellett's election to the SSA Board of Directors as Region 4 Director, a clean safety audit by Burt Compton of the Soaring Safety Foundation, and a wave of young pilots—Matt Brewer, Danny Noonan, Loring Ross, and new student Joe Clark—approaching their first solos. A tribute to founding members Leo and Linda Meacher, a WWII Navy carrier pilot who helped move the club to 8W2, closes with Phil Jordan's 1979 first-ride memory. Rounding out the issue: Geoff Hazelrigg's Silver Badge flight and its bureaucratic twist, Piet Barber's Silver, a Curmudgeon's Corner grammar lesson, and a Baltimore County Waterfront Airfest announcement.
This November 2004 issue captures the Skyline Soaring Club at a moment of youthful renewal, with record membership, four high-school-age students working toward ratings, and two of them already soloed. The standout story is 14-year-old Daniel Noonan, who joined the club in May with his father and has already claimed first prize in the Soaring Society of America's CADET Scholarship, his essay weaving soaring, freedom, and a dream of the U.S. Air Force Academy into a moving coming-of-age narrative. The issue also announces Piet Barber's appointment as Chief Flight Instructor, succeeding Jim Kellett, who is set to become SSA Region IV Director; a tongue-in-cheek 'glider battle' challenge pitting Bill Vickland's LS-8/18 against Fred Mueller's 1-26 to be settled by OLC points over the 2005 season, with a $250 charity donation riding on the result; the club's December 11 holiday party at the Canary Cottage in Clifton, Virginia; and the first Region IV Soaring Safety Foundation Flight Instructors' Revalidation Clinic, to be taught by Bob Wander at Dulles in January 2005.
Skyline Soaring Club wraps up 2004 with a bumper crop of club news: Joe Clark nails a picture-perfect solo in the Grob, Steve Wegner earns his PPL-G, and the Board scrambles to fill four open director seats ahead of the January 15 annual meeting. The issue's centerpiece is George Hazelrigg's vividly told account of a ridge day at Massanutten that goes sideways when a K lands in a second cow pasture, a protective cow and calf stage a Mexican standoff at the gate, and a shiny new Yukon gets stuck axle-deep in what the author insists is only half mud. The retrieve crew spends two hours wrestling a two-place glider onto a trailer in undulating, mine-dotted grass before the left fender falls off on the drive home. Also in this issue: details on an affordable independent ground school, a winter wave-soaring window at Petersburg, West Virginia, the SSA's hard-won TSA exemption keeping gliders out of new security rules, a University of Florida team of 25,000 rat neurons learning to fly a simulated F-22, and the club's holiday party at the Canary Cottage in Clifton, Virginia.
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| 2004-01 Newsletter (January 2004) | 0 |
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| 2004-02 Newsletter (February 2004) | 0 |
(5 days, 16 hours ago) |
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