Sailplane & Gliding 1966 - Lakes Gliding Club

El Mirage and landed it safely-it had
tail units of sorts. I gathered that the
ship was designed for re-entry experiments
for astronauts.
Reading through Gus Briegleb's visitors'
book, I saw many names of people
from England. Talking to one of the
BriegJebs' boys, I learnt that Brian Masters,
who, up to a few years ago, was a
professional instructor at Lasham and
then took a similar job at El Mirage, is
now General Manager of "Aero Jets", a
branch of "Flying Tigers~ near Santa
Monica, and is doing well.
Our next call was at Pear Blossom to
see Irv. Prue and his wife Ruth. who
had joined our party a few weeks earlier
at Tarzana for oUr get-together.
Irv. Prue has designed many successful
ships. He is now working on an advanced
sailplane which I am sure will
be way ahead on most now in use. His
workmanship is superb. I look forward
to having news of the test flights of his
latest effort-a beautiful all-metal ship
with a high aspect ratio wing and ...
lots of special features which I am not
prepared to disclose in this narrative.
I was impressed by the many hours of
work these enthusiastic Californians put
into their creations. Many have highly
placed and responsible jobs in the leading
aircraft firms: jobs which must demand
maximum concentration of effort
for research work. Yet they use their
spare hours designing and actually building
their own sailplanes.
One afternoon we called to see Stan
Hall, another expert designer and certainly
in the category outlined above; he
is the designer of the successful Cherolcee
sailplanes, many of which have been
built by amateurs. He took a few hours
off from his work to show us his latest
designs which he was building in his
garage at home. When I asked him why
he had used a special method of wingroot
fairing, he said: "I guess I just like
it that way." He was indeed very happy
in his work.
Later in the week, after lunching with
Richard Miller (editor of Soaring) and
George Uveges (who takes most of the
photographs for the magazine), we paid
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INSTRUMENT
344
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