Aeronautics: Soaring in the Blue Ridge

There were only four days in the 14-day meet of the Soaring Society of America at Elmira, N. Y. last July when there was wind enough for soaring. The meet was rated a success because it marked the establishment of a permanent meteorologi-cal station at Elmira and because a large number of novices earned primary soaring certificates. But the tedious days of inactivity, punctuated by windy speech-making on the part of local boosters, made crack glider pilots wonder why Elmira should be the only soaring site in the East. One who wondered was Richard Chichester du Pont. Last week he did something about it. Richard du Pont, 24, blond and clean-cut, is the younger son of Vice President Alexis Felix du Pont of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. Like his brother Felix Jr. he is an able airplane pilot, has logged some 1,000 hr. at the stick. He started gliding in 1929. At the July meet he persuaded his father to go up with him for a sail in his Dragonfly, a handsome two-place job built by famed Gliderman Hawley Bowlus. A sudden shift of wind at the moment of launching spilled the Dragonfly into a clump of bushes, a wreck. Rescuers heard Father du Pont ask calmly: “How do you get out of this violin case?” Neither was hurt. Few days later Pilot du Pont soared a new sailplane to 4,334 ft.—the meet altitude record, only 456 ft. short of Jack O’Meara’s U. S. record. At the end of the Elmira meet Dick du Pont called a group of crack pilots together. He had been studying maps and he was certain the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia offered an ideal soaring site. The Blue Ridge Mountains, a great wall from Pennsylvania to Georgia, was sure to catch the prevailing winds and turn them upward into precisely the sort of currents that keep sailplanes aloft for hours. To test his theory Dick du Pont invited the pilots, as his guests, to an informal meet centering at the Swannanoa Country Club near Waynesboro, atop the Blue Ridge in western Virginia. Last week this meet got under way. Besides Pilot du Pont in his new Bowlus sailplane Albatross there were August C. (“Gus”) Haller of Pittsburgh, builder of Hatter-Hawks; Haller’s pupil, Emerson Mehlhose of Wyandotte, Mich., Warren Eaton, Norwich, N. Y. After feeling their way up & down the Ridge for a couple of days, the pilots went out for records. Mehlhose, in a Hawk, took off from Rockfish Gap in a wind that nearly tore his wings off, soared up the Shenandoah Valley 71 mi. for a new U. S. distance record. (Old record: 66.7 mi., Martin Schempp, from Elmira.) Dick du Pont set out next day to go Mehlhose one better. Also starting from Rockfish Gap, he passed Mehlhose’s landing place, kept on soaring, crossed the Maryland line, started to head into Pennsylvania when rain & fog forced him back to Frederick, Md. Distance: 122^ mi.—14 mi. short of the world record . . . from Rockfish Gap to the Pennsylvania line. made from Wasserkuppe by Germany’s late Guenther Groenhoff. Elated over the possibility that “Amer-ica’s Wasserkuppe” had been discovered in the Blue Ridge, Jack O’Meara last week planned a 500-mi. sailplane flight from near Frederick, Md. to a point south of Nashville, Tenn.