A Glider Pilot Bold.. f ttom % fRfltng liBttattg of A Glider Pilot Bold... Wally Kahn A Glider Pilot Bold... Wally Kahn First edition published by Jardine Publishers 1998 Second edition published by Airplan Flight Equipment Ltd Copyright ©2008 Third edition published by Walter Kahn 2011 Copyright ©WALTER KAHN (1998 & 2008) and Airplan Flight Equipment (2008) WALTER KAHN 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a newspaper, magazine, or radio or television broadcast. Every effort has been made by the author and the publishers to trace owners of copyright material. The events described have been cross-checked wherever possible and the author apologises for any errors or omissions which may have arisen. Cover photograph courtesy Neil Lawson. White Planes Co A Glider Pilot Bold... 1st Edition original cover Contents Another bite of the cherry .................................................................................9 Chapter 1 The early days and Oerlinghausen ..........................................15 Chapter 2 More Oerlinghausen.................................................................19 Chapter 3 Mindeheide and Scharfholdendorf ...........................................29 Chapter 4 Dunstable and Redhill ..............................................................33 Chapter 5 The Mynd and The Cambridge Club.. ............... .......................41 Chapter 6 Comps and All ..........................................................................53 Chapter 7 Denmark...................................................................................59 Chapters The BGABall............................................................................63 Chapter 9 More of them and us ................................................................67 Chapter 10 The Lasham Airfield history. .................................................. ...77 Chapter 11 Robert Kronfeld ........................................................................83 Chapter 12 Lasham. .............................. ......................................................87 Chapter 13 Derek Piggott-Our hero! ........................................................93 Chapter 14 Retrieves and other stories ......................................................99 Chapter 15 Pont and Angers.....................................................................105 Chapter 16 The battle for Lasham ............................................................109 Chapter 17 Fund raising and downbeat. ................................................. ..119 Chapter 18 Wills, the World Champs and the Irish.................................. .123 Chapter 19 We have 'em even if they are not all there ............................129 Chapter 20 More Hero's. ...................................................................... .....135 Chapter 21 And finally. ....................................................... .......................141 Appendix 1 Wings for Prudence. .......................................................... .....145 Appendix 2 Fred Slingsby .........................................................................151 John Stanley Sproule...................................... ................ .......152 HCN Nick Goodhart............................ .................................... 156 Alan (Derek) Piggott.................... .................................. .........159 Humphrey Dimock..................................................................168 Naomi Heron-Maxwell................. .................................... .......169 Keeping up with the Jones'sss........... .................................... 172 Major General A J Deane-Drummond.. ........................... .......173 Appendix 3 Wally Kahn's Gliding CV ........................................................175 Appendix 4 Aselection of gliding songs..... .............................................. .179 Bibliography ..................................................................................................193 Index .............................................................................................................195 For Margaret the best crew chief and co-pilot ever Another bite at the Cherry adly in 1996 my wife died and to fill the lonely hours I sat down and wrote this book. Just after it was published two further momentous events occurred in my S life. First and most rewarding was the successful culmination of my nearly fifty years relentless plotting, persuading, scheming, cajoling and fund raising which resulted in Her Majesty's Government at last agreeing to sell us the freehold of Lasham Airfield, all 504 acres at a very favourable price. One of my very favourite films is John Huston's "The Treasure of Sierra Madre". In one scene with Humphrey Bogart, old man Waiter Huston performs a wonderful dance of joy. I had promised myself that on the day the freehold was ours, I would go to the runway intersection of the Lasham -1 had first walked there in 1944 while serving in the Royal Air Force - and copy that great dance of joy. However, the second event spoilt my fun for on that very day, the Ides of March 1999 I was being cut open in hospital so that a large nasty thingy could be cut out and removed from my inside. So I resolved that on the tenth anniversary I would carry out the dance but someone up there or down below had other ideas and lo and behold, I was back in doc being mucked about with yet again. Sadly now being far too decrepit I'll never be able to fulfil my promise. Now to the present. AFE of Manchester, the parent company of RD Aviation to whom all glider pilots have willingly donated large sums in exchange for sundry items of equipment, sought my permission to republish my book but asked for a few more stories to be added. The phenomenal success of our British Glider Pilots, both male and female in World and European Gliding Championships, in the period from 1999 to 2007 really should be recorded here and was the obvious choice. They have won no less than 12 Gold, 12 Silver and 6 Bronze World medals and 4 Gold, 4 Silver and 3 Bronze European medals. However, the tally is surely ongoing so I will leave it to others to sing their praises at some future date. Some of my foreign gliding friends often ask me how and why we achieve this success. My answer is simple - happily we live on a small island where the weather is very changeable and so we have to fight the elements harder and be even more dedicated to our sport. Therefore, instead, in the hope of stimulating young pilots to aim for the stars, I have penned a few vignettes describing just some of my heroes. They actually deserve better, but at least I have tried! Luckily I have been able to take back my publishing rights and instead of producing yet another enlarged edition and then trying to sell copies to the world and his wife, I much prefer to make my book freely available for all to read. Some of the contents such as Derek Piggott's fantastic gliding C.V., the story of the Battle for and of Lasham and the brief outline biographies of some of the GREATS in gliding surely deserve the widest readership. Not only is 'A Glider Pilot bold' now in the 'public domain' but I have also made arrangements that my gliding library of more than 125 titles, full sets of all our gliding magazines and lastly all the gliding ephemera printed material I have collected over the many years will be housed in the BGA offices so that anyone will have access to them. My proud boast is that at the time of writing (2011) I have been hyper active both as a pilot and administrator in our Gliding Movement longer than anyone in our history. From 1945 without a break, only two non gliding holidays in all that time, I have enjoyed every second and wish all others the same joy and satisfaction when they indulge in our wonderful sport. January 2011 12 A Glider Pilot Bold... In the spring of 1894, Albert LJwental, who worked in Dartmouth, became airborne on the slopes above the River Dart in a machine he designed and built himself. This little known achievement some years before the \\right brothers flew, makes him one of the earliest pioneers of heavier than air flying machines Preface liding is the best sport in the world! Whenever and wherever soaring pilots meet, their talk of thermal up-currents and cross-country flights Gcomes thick and fast. Every pilot must tell his own flying stories as not only do they enrich our enjoyment of our sport but also they are a vital teaching aid for the younger, less experienced pilots. Since 1920, when the sport literally 'took off', there have been three quite distinct phases of development. The pre-war era of trial and error, frustration and very hard physical effort was followed by the post-war expansion and the rapid increase in competitions, cross country flying and the growth of privately owned gliders coupled with the firm re-establishment of gliding clubs. The third phase was the introduction of closed circuit racing in very high performance machines made not of wood, but first of glass fibre and then the even stronger carbon fibre which has totally transformed the sport. The beginner, however, still has to hone his skills on less