Instructors soon discovered how useful the park was for introducing new pilots gradually to advanced skills. Santa Clara County soon bought the ranchlands above Ed Levin and paved the way for renewed hang gliding activity. There was even enough space for Wings of Rogallo club meetings. So Super Fly became Mission Soaring LLC in 1978, when it opened in new expanded quarters in Fremont's Mission district. Pat decided it was time to move from Los Gatos closer to a flying site, but which one: Marina, or the East Bay? Fremont was a gamble, but reopening Mission or Ed Levin looked promising. Flying sites were opened and shut down almost monthly, it seemed. They began flying from the "Rondorosa" property above Milpitas, CA, into a little park called Ed Levin. Meanwhile, a club formed by Dave Kilbourne, Jim Diffenderfer, and other water-ski low kite enthusiasts was evolving into the Wings of Rogallo as they moved their flying from the delta to Coyote Hills near Newark. Super Fly became a retailer, and hired experienced instructors. He couldn't keep up with the likes of the Wills boys and, besides, his gliders only cost him about $100 more than he sold them for. Pat realized his first love was training, not manufacturing. Late in the seventies, hang gliding was evolving at warp speed, and Super Fly was no exception. Soon Super Fly was heading to Marina Beach regularly and a formal teaching program was born. What a place! Training dunes and miles of coast to soar along.
He was cruising down the coast on a trip to LA when he found a road leading to the dunes at Fort Ord.
Pat was most interested in places where he could help people learn to fly. Everyone was busy searching for new flying sites. Super Fly began taking friends down to Sunset Beach to show them the ropes for fun. Instruction was still haphazard, the nearsighted leading the blind. So Pat was now a manufacturer, with a new name to match: Super Fly Sky Sails. Many pilots wanted help building their glider kits and most wanted help flying them. But plastic had a way of stretching in the heat and cracking in the cold. Dacron sails were available by that time, but the quality varied and the result often wasn't as smooth as plastic. For another $12.50 NCHGS supplied a 20' square of plastic sheeting and a roll of deluxe duct tape. Requests for other parts soon led to the $150 complete airframe kit. So in March 1973, Pat opened the garage doors of Northern California Hang Glider Supply, purveyors of aluminum.
It also left him with a LOT of extra tubing. That was a little steep for one more glider. Pat did some searching until he located wholesale tubing for $.30 a foot, $1000.00 minimum order. Time to build more gliders! But the retail price of tubing was an "outrageous" price of $1.65 a foot. One glider just wasn't enough to go around, and crashes were eating their tubing supply in a hurry. Pat and five friends salvaged what they could, built one glider, and it flew! One piece he purchased had the flexibility of overcooked spaghetti, useless for a hang glider. No one knew much about alloys or temper back then. And Washington Supply sold Pat the last useable lengths of tubing. The Fly-in didn't happen, but there was plenty of action to check out at an ocean front dune called Dockweiller Beach, in El Segundo, CA. Armed with plans from Michael Markowskis' "The Hang Gliding Bible", he headed to Los Angeles, CA, for the 1972 Turkey Day Fly-in, with the ulterior motive of a stop at Washington Supply Hardware, a Mecca of aerospace surplus including aluminum tubing. But an article in Joe Foust's " Low and Slow" newsletter convinced him that aluminum was the way to go. Unlike the rest of us, he decided to actually build one. Pat Denevan, owner and founder of MSC, had read about a bamboo and plastic do-it-yourself glider in Popular Mechanics like the rest of us. Mission Soaring Center - 40 Years of Hang Glidingįorty years! That covers the lion's share of the history of Hang gliding.
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