Hummingbird Haven

One June afternoon in 1962 my father took me to watch the gliders at Hummingbird Haven. It was an airstrip for glider craft just East of Livermore, California, where we lived. The valley rolls toward grassy hills just before Altamont Pass, and the airfield lay in a perfect flat acreage.  As we found a place to park, where we could sit on the hood of the car and watch the flights, Dad told me a little bit about the history of this place.

As he spoke, I discovered that my father came out here often, and knew some of the pilots. Although he'd never been up in a glider he knew quite a lot about them. He said the Northern California Soaring Association had been at this site since the mid-50s and was founded by two men who designed glider aircraft. That's one right there, he told me. It's called a Nelson Hummingbird. It's actually got a small engine that assists it into flight and back to the ground. He'd seen it take off and land on another day, it amazed him that after gaining loft the engine and propeller would retract into the fuselage, optimating the lift to drag ratio.

Nelson Hummingbird developed around 1959

This picture shows the engine out of the fuselage for landing assistance

The thrill, of course, is to fly without an engine. The pilot soars along currents of air, seeking "thermals," or hot currents of air, that naturally rise and take the aircraft up with them. Dad told me about how a thermal is like a column, it kinda rises from the ground to the clouds in the shape of an invisible mushroom. The airship enters the column and glides around and around, up and up. As he reaches the top of the thermal-mushroom, the air begins to cool quickly and grow turbulent. That's his signal to shoot out of the thermal and soundlessly glide as far as the loft will take him. The loft can reach 20,000 feet and last for hundreds of miles, although this is unusual. A glider can travel from thermal lift to thermal lift and stay up quite a long time.

This day, Dad and I watched an auto tow. It may have been a soaring lesson or just some guys goofing around. We saw a kid, no more than twelve years old I'd guess, open the driver's side of a 1948 2-door Ford convertible and climb over some cushions (so he could see over the dashboard). He expertly started it up and drove it about 1000' feet from a TG-3 Redwing glider, pointing the back end toward the airship. He located a cable on the ground leading from the TG-3 and attached it to the car's hitch. He ran back to the car, over the cushions again, and looked toward the glider with excited anticipation. We could see some motioning from inside the glass cockpit and the kid eased the car forward to tighten the slack cable, watching over his shoulder for the wag of the rudder, and then he nailed the accelerator! Blast off!

"That's a Cadillac engine. Hopped up," said Dad, "I've heard about this."

The glider climbed fast, at about a 45 degree angle. It got to a little over 600 feet, maybe, then jerked a bit as it released the cable. Not real high, but enough to get into a pattern that made a big circle and approach to land back where it started. That kid stayed on the gas and made a big fishtail at the end of the runway, his plaid shirt flapping in the wind in synch with the windsocks along the runway, blowing his hair all around his head. From my seat I could feel the absolute joy of it.

Auto tow just before release. You can barely see the cable.

He slowed down to travel the runway back to the starting point, and waited for the glider to return, standing on the cushions and stretching as high as he could toward the blue skies. His right hand shaded his eyes, and when he saw the glider approach the runway and pass overhead with a "swoosh" sound, he raised both arms in the air, waving and whooping.

After landing, the boy towed the Redwing back to the launch point and reattached the cable.

My dad and I watched three of these flights before it was time to go home. He said to me as we buckled up, "That boy really loves the aircraft. I wonder how many times he tows before he gets to go up himself?"

As we left the airfield, I saw the boy at the pop machine, wiping his hands on his pants before he shoved the bottle top into the opener.

"It would be fun to see the boy fly his first solo, when that day comes. And I'm sure it will."