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The Rest of the Story

by Paul Clark

(Lost in the pages of the last edition of the NSP bible of R/C Soaring, The Catalog, is Sky Pilot's article, "Joe the Champ." Joe, being a little adverse to this hero stuff, after a pre-read, suggested I get another opinion. Well, here is what the Old Buzzard had to say about it, "Paul....This is great! Readers will LOVE it. Hero building is an important part of the sport." Guess he won't mind this piece.)

The story goes something like this, "In the beginning there was this buzzard and . . ." Sleuthing the history of RCHLG has been one fascinating effort started another time ago in my life. It came about after succumbing to an obsession with RCHLG rooted in a lifetime enchantment with wings, feathers and flight. The fascination has been enhanced by the opportunity, especially for an ole'theology-philosophy major like Sky Pilot, to trace a history of something through its originating principals; living! primary source material!! That has meant getting it straight from the horse's mouth; the characters (few ordinary glider guider persons) themselves, telephone calls, e-mail, letters and actually making friends and flying with them; flying with your heroes; and this is about one of them. AHhh! Yes!! THE horse, I mean, of course, the "wonderful" Old Buzzard, Dave Thornburg, RCHLG's "godfather" himself!--and this is the rest of the story!

The eventual telling of the whole tale will be called "A 'Light' History of RCHLG." It should have been finished long ago, but even deadlines have not helped fill in the blanks of this yet short-lived art form of flinging-wings-into-the-sky-under-electronic-control history any faster! Well! There IS work! And some characters are just hard to pin down, some hard to find. While the twenty-year history of RCHLG does have many principals and a lot of characters, including some birds other than the Sunbird, the inciting factors behind what has become a worldwide phenomenon are not hard to identify. There is no doubting that Bill Northrop's magazine Model Builder provided the support and venue that midwifed RCHLG; and that MB's soaring columnist Bill Forrey's coverage of the Annual Inland Soaring Society RCHLG contest was responsible for fanning the spark into a flame.

Nevertheless, as the saying goes, if there hadn't been Dave Thornburg there would had to have been someone just like him for the hitchhiking Old Buzzard to manipulate. This makes "Old Buzzard" Thornburg the instigator of this obsessive form of glider mania and you can see the culprit just sitting there smiling and nodding! Guilty as charged!! He, who by his own definition, is a "Lifer". "One, for whom the building and flying of miniature aircraft is a passion, an obsession, a source of energy and enthusiasm virtually inseparable from their life force. People who are hooked by this unique hobby/sport not for a year or a decade, but forever." His many articles of humor-filled erudition over the years have enthused a whole hobby, and his two books are classics no matter that they are not bestsellers. "Do You Speak Model Airplane?" should be on the shelf of every library across the USA under Americana. It's a classic chapter out of American history that only a "lifer" could, let alone would, take the pains to write. (I gave a Christmas copy to my major professor.) "The Old Buzzard's Soaring Book" is an R/C soaring world classic. Joe, the world champion, doesn't make up stuff; he just quotes Thornburg on "the river of air" to explain himself.

The March 1979 issue of Model Builder then came as a paradigmatic bombshell dropped on the R/C Soaring world! Dave had been a regular with Model Builder as a contributing editor, but MB's Volume 9, Number 86, page 26 article "Handlaunch R/C" by Thornburg launched the RCHLG phenomena! RCHLG has not only continued to evolve, riding the crest of the latest science and newest technology in design, materials and equipment, but it has also been a push-pull dynamic within the whole R/C soaring community, bringing the best out of all kinds of aeronautical engineers and commoners; the experts and the wouldbies!? It has been of significant influence in setting careers, the making of world champions and, "Yes!" even a Ph.D. in Low Speed Airfoils; feature that!? Thornburg, reporting on the "first" RCHLG contest in the September '79 issue, predicted it would become an AMA class in five years! Well, at least this would prove he isn't a prophet; it took six. Close isn't good enough for prophet qualification! Yet his prediction would be exceeded as RCHLG was declared a World Class, F3K, in 1999, fixing the wing span finally at 1500 mm (59 1/2"), adding a nose radius requirement of 5mm and a (meaningless) weight limit of 600 grams. In real life the average weight of competition class models has fallen from 15-13 ounces down to 11-8 ounces and now even to 6 oz. (the original Sunbird was 11.5 oz....the Flinger 13 oz). Designs have long ceased to be simply poly rudder-elevator editions, now including full-house ships and some, to the eye, ill-logic designs. 

The subtitle on the March article read, "Dave takes a break from his series on sailplane design and instead proposes a new type of R/C sailplane event, designed to separate the real pilots from the "experts." What followed was the gospel of Hand Launch according to the Old Buzzard. He wrote:

Way back in the romantic past....about 1973, I think....I witnessed something down in Phoenix, Arizona, that shook my World View to its roots [the ever philosophical if not theological, Old Buzzard!]. I saw a fellow modeler toss a Graupner "Cirrus" into a long test glide, and then, instead of keeping the wings level for the landing, the fool pulled it up into a shallow bank … at less than six feet of altitude! I held my breath, waiting for the crash. It never came. Instead, the Cirrus held its bank angle through a wide, smooth circle, upwind, crosswind, downwind, and suddenly it was coming back, right at us! While I ducked, my fellow modeler stood his ground and caught that four-pound beast by the nose! What an idiot! "You do that on purpose?" I asked, crawling out from under the car. "Yup," he said, and did it again. I thought about this for a minute. I lived in Albuquerque at the time, and I was supposed to be the local Glider Guru. And I had told everybody there that you couldn't DO a 360 degree turn from a hand launch. I went back to Albuquerque and called the faithful together. "God has given unto me a revelation," I told them. Thereafter, we all tossed our planes and caught them, and the planes stayed new a lot longer, because the state of New Mexico is made out of the same stuff they make garnet paper from, only on a much larger scale.

Not being a prophet, how could Dave have imagined the way RCHLG would captivate the whole world of R/C soaring the way it has!? However he gave it the evangelist's effort, taking the Sunbird with him to the 1979 FAI Worlds in Belgium with every intention of expounding and converting the world with the Thornburg gospel of R/C Hand Launch. As it would turn out, he was eminently successful! One, Guy Revel, now a world-traveling, international writer on the R/C world, would request permission to publish an article about it in the French magazine Radiomodelisme, granted and done. Still another participant at the Worlds, today's Mr. R/C Soaring of Japan, Sanwa's Hasegawa, would bring the idea back to his home country and has been preaching RCHLG every since. He would hold the first RCHLG contest in Japan in 1980. He doesn't know anything about a Sunbird one-design contest. The Sunbird would then appear in the English magazine Radio Modeler and later Sean Walbank's White Sheett; giving credit to Dave and the SFVSF for his introduction to RCHLG. Wow! One bird, the SUNBIRD, to the Worlds and now a world of RCHLG!

Now! Listen to the rest of the story, "In the beginning there was this buzzard . . ." AHhh!! Let Dave tell it in his own words for the first time in print:

Can only think of one other tale incidental to early HL, and that's how it came about. I was living in the sticks near the town of Sebastopol, about 50 miles N of the Golden Gate Bridge, last house on a dirt road that dead-ended in a bird refuge. I was down on modeling, spending time writing a novel. (Lousy novel, incidentally.) Stepped out of the house one AM about tennish, just as a buzzard zipped over low, around 30 feet. In the field directly in front of the house he got bumped....I could see his right wing go up clearly. He turned left, came around and got bumped again. Then promptly turned the wrong way a second time! By now I'm shouting instructions to him, which he's ignoring. Third circle (down below the phone lines, now) the idiot finally turns INTO the lift, and slowly climbs out. I say to myself, heck, I know more than that turkey about soaring, maybe I should build something I could toss up there into that kind of air. The something was a crude all-sheet-balsa device that later evolved into the Sunbird.

Hand launch R/C has opened up a whole new world to me, a world of micro-micro-meteorology that takes place in the invisible air around us every minute . . . a world of miniature highs and lows, cold fronts and warm, that sweep and dance across flying fields no larger than a baseball diamond. If the romance of this kind of flying appeals to you, I hope you'll try a Sunbird.

What I think I never mentioned in the mag stuff was OHLG's effect on my lumbar region: not good. I 'bout crippled myself during a ten-mile practice run for the '79 team thing: lower back went out, had to be hauled home, took six weeks and some chiropractic to walk again without severe sciatic pain. Gotta believe it was at least partly from too much toss-toss-toss: I'd go out in the morning with two Sunbirds and run down both 225 ma packs before quitting. If I were ambidextrous it would be different, but hours of uninterrupted tossing, all on one side, is probably pretty unbalancing. Now (age 52: wiser....Sep'94) I work out at spa 3x a week, and the tossing I do (mostly FF HLG, rarely more than an hour straight) has no bad effects.

Oh!! About that "first" contest. Well, it wasn't. Turns out those Madison,  Wisconsin MARCS, rascals of the National Sailplane Symposium fame had already held three; the first in August 1978. Dave said, "Now I know how Columbus felt when they broke the news to him about Leif Ericson." in his Model Builder October 1980 "R/CHLG UPDATE." Reflecting later Dave wrote, "After doing 'speak,' I've grown wary of 'very firsts.' You can almost never pin such things down with any degree of certainty . . . [but] someone always gets the credit."

Well!! No lack of certainty here. No question about whom to blame, I mean, give the credit. Dave Albert Thornburg, alias "Old Buzzard"; the Sunbird Classic, your day in the sun, finds you guilty as charged and duly sentences you to endure the delight of knowing how much FUN you have brought around the world to so many. 

--Sky Pilot, RCHLG Aficionado

Last Updated 02/26/00
By Mark Miller on a Macintosh G3
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