The Wills Wing Story

Written for Cross Country (XC) Magazine by Michael W. Meier

On February 7th, 2010, Wills Wing commenced its 38th year of making hang gliders. Since 1973, we’ve manufactured more than twenty-three thousand gliders and we’ve had the opportunity to make friends and customers all over the world. Not many people in hang gliding today were there in the early 1970’s when the sport experienced its initial explosion in growth and the first manufacturing companies were formed. This is the story of one of those companies — where we came from, what we’re doing today, and where we’re headed in the future.

The Founding

The story of Wills Wing starts with Chris Wills, who, early in 1972, came across some photos in National Geographic Magazine of the 1971 Otto Lilienthal hang gliding meet. Chris had always wanted to fly, but as a young man with limited economic resources had not yet figured out how to realize his dream. The photos showed people flying bamboo and plastic Rogallo type hang gliders, and suddenly Chris knew that this was how he would fly. Within three days, working from the pictures, he and his friend Chris Price had designed, built, and were flying their first “Bamboo Bomber.”

It wasn’t long before Chris’ brother Bob got involved, and soon they had two gliders, and before long were making flights “higher than they wanted to fall.” By that summer they had seen a picture in Soaring Magazine of a much more sophisticated Rogallo type hang glider, made from aluminum tubing, steel cables and Dacron sail cloth, and based on the John Dickenson design that would become the template for the first generation of commercially manufactured flexible wing hang gliders. For the first time the three realized that the state of the art elsewhere had advanced well beyond bamboo and plastic. They immediately set out to design and build their first aluminum and Dacron glider. The hang point was miss-located by several inches, the nicopress sleeves had been secured by pounding them with a hammer, and on July 4th, 1972, first Bob Wills and then Chris Wills each flew the glider from 1500-meter Saddleback Peak.

Sport Kites to Wills Wing

In May of 1972, the newly formed Southern California Hang Gliding Association had published the first issue of their Ground Skimmer newsletter, listing the names of their first 100 members. By November of 1972, membership in the SCHGA had grown to more than 700, and by the following issue four manufacturers were advertising factory built hang gliders including Bill Bennett, Eipper-Formance, Velderrain and Co., and Sport Kites, Inc — the original name of Wills Wing — incorporated by the Wills family on February 7th, 1973. That year saw continued explosive growth in the sport and industry of hang gliding, and it was during 1973 that the Southern California Hang Gliding Association formally recognized its national scope, and became the United States Hang Gliding Association. By 1974, USHGA membership had grown to more than 10,000, and by December of 1975, the hang glider directory published in Ground Skimmer Magazine listed a total of fifty different manufacturers advertising to the U.S. market.

The First U.S. Nationals — 1973

In October of 1973, the first U.S. National Hang Gliding Championships were held at Sylmar, California. The event was sponsored by the Annie Green Springs wine company and covered by Sports Illustrated magazine. Hang gliding had gotten both the attention and the respect of the mainstream media, and its treatment in the media at this time was both widespread and very positive. Chris Wills won the meet, and his brother Bob took second place. Over the following 36 years, Wills Wing pilots would win 25 out of 69 US National Championship titles awarded.

A New Generation of Leadership

The direct involvement of the Wills family in the company that they had started largely came to an end over the two and a half year period between June of 1976 and the end of 1978. In 1976, Chris Wills, whose lifelong career ambition had been to become an orthopaedic surgeon, was accepted to medical school. On June 24, 1977 Bob Wills was killed while flying for a Jeep commercial at Escape Country, blown into the ground by the rotor downwash of the filming helicopter. Over the following 18 months, the management of the company was gradually assumed by the four partners who would go on to build Wills Wing into the largest manufacturer in the world — Rob Kells, Steve Pearson, myself, and my wife Linda.

Design Innovation — The Pearson Era

Steve assumed the position of the company’s designer, and over the next few years, would design a series of gliders that gradually built Wills Wing’s market share, and solidified its place as a leader in the US market. These included the Raven in 1979, the Harrier in 1980 and the Duck in 1981 — Wills Wing’s first enclosed crossbar, double surface glider, which Rich Pfeiffer flew to second place in the 1981 FAI World Championships in Japan.

Safety and Industry Leadership

In 1980 I was elected to the board of directors of the Hang Glider Manufacturers Association and I have served as a board member and officer ever since, helping over the years to update and administer the HGMA airworthiness standards program. During its formative years, Wills Wing also directly supported the HGMA program by observing a strict, self imposed policy of obtaining official HGMA certification for each new Wills Wing model prior to the shipment of the first customer glider. Since 1979 we have always owned our own certification test vehicle, and our testing experience in HGMA certifying 102 different glider models and vehicle testing dozens of additional prototypes has given us a wealth of information and a broad understanding of the issues that bear on stability and structural strength in hang gliders.

Building the Sport

Rob would come to focus on sales and dealer relations, and established and fought for many policies at Wills Wing that actively supported the dealers and instructors, who in turn were supporting hang gliding by supplying the sport with new pilots. It was often costly in the short term to hold to policies such as requiring dealers to be instructors, and not selling gliders retail direct, because we were competing in an open market where those policies were not the norm. In the long run, as Rob foresaw, those policies helped insure the survival and growth of the sport.

Linda took on the job of interfacing directly with the dealers and customers on a day-to-day basis. Rob, Steve and I handled the majority of the test flying for the company, and flew in competition for most of the decade of the 1980’s. During this period of time Rob and I also participated as advisory directors in the United States Hang Gliding Association, helping to develop the pilot proficiency and instructor certification programs. Wills Wing sponsored a traveling instructor certification program to help increase the number of trained and qualified instructors, and make it easier for instructors to obtain or renew their certification.

Survival and Growth

The explosion of interest in powered ultralights, which evolved out of hang gliders in the mid 1980’s, led to a significant downturn and a major shake out in the hang gliding industry. Wills Wing managed to survive, and went on to have some of its most successful years in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, greatly expanding its presence in the European market and establishing a clear lead in the US market.

Technical Milestones

In 1984, Steve developed a new glider configuration in which the keel was enclosed within the double surface and sewn tightly to the upper surface with a small keel pocket. Designated as the “HP,” for High Performance, the new configuration demonstrated a clear advantage in L/D over existing designs of the day. Steve’s follow on high performance intermediate glider — the Sport — in 1986 marked the first use of 7075 aluminum in a flex wing in large scale production, and was the first HGMA certified glider to feature a kingpost or elevated hang system. With the HP AT in 1989, Steve introduced the stepped leading edge configuration, using a stiff, 60mm front leading edge stepping down via a crescent reducer to a more flexible 50mm rear leading edge. All of these innovations are now in common use on high performance flex-wings.

On July 3rd, 1990, Larry Tudor, on an HP AT, made the first in history 300 mile cross country flight in a hang glider, a feat not matched by any other pilot for more than ten years. Larry, in the meantime, on June 30th, 1994, would go 308 miles on a Wills Wing Ram Air, another of Steve’s designs that featured innovations such as internal shear ribs to control the shape of the bottom surface.

The Falcon — Saving the Sport

In the early 1990’s, paragliding was growing rapidly in the US, while hang gliding was stagnant to declining. One of the problems was that the evolution and development of glider design had largely left the new student and entry-level pilot behind. In 1994, Steve decided that in order to survive, hang gliding needed a properly designed training and first purchase glider, and in the spring of that year we released the Falcon 195. Nobody had asked us for such a glider, and some of our most successful dealers didn’t see any need or any purpose for it. But before long it had become one of our best sellers, and today, still in production in four sizes and in its third generation of development, the Falcon line has outsold every other model line we’ve ever produced.

Going Topless — The Fusion

The mid to late 1990’s saw the first appearance of “topless” flex wing hang gliders — first as tentative prototypes, and eventually as well developed competition class gliders with a significant advance in performance. Late in 1996, Steve began development of the Fusion — Wills Wing’s first topless design. At the time, the topless gliders were just starting to show a measurable performance advantage. One of the challenges of the topless configuration was how to achieve the required stability without a kingpost from which to hang reflex support bridles.

When we began the Fusion development, the most commonly used topless glider stability system consisted of an internal floating washout tube supporting the tip and a larger tube hinged on the front leading edge forward of the crossbar junction, bearing on the top of the crossbar and supporting mid-span twist. Pitch test results of a Fusion prototype with this type of system showed a bare minimum compliance with HGMA certification pitching moment standards, but not the margin of compliance we wanted or were accustomed to with our other high performance gliders.

In experimenting with different stability system configurations, we found that eliminating the inboard, “over the crossbar” washout tube and replacing it with cable supported “sprogs” located well outboard of the crossbar provided much better stability. With refinements of that system, we were able to achieve vehicle test pitch stability results that were well above the HGMA minimums, and much more in line with the margins of compliance we were accustomed to.

The Condor and Scooter Towing

In 2000, inspired by a request from one of our local dealers and instructors, Rob McKenzie, Steve designed the Condor 330, a specialty glider designed for low speed, low altitude initial training flights. The idea behind the Condor was to lower the difficulty level and the anxiety level during the initial training experience by slowing everything down. Running headlong down a hill, carrying a glider on your shoulders that you hope might lift you into the air, can be an intimidating experience. A nice wind in your face can make it less so, because you don’t have to run as fast, but wind seldom comes without some variation in its strength and direction, which in turn can make controlling the glider much harder for the student. The Condor, with a nearly 12 meter span and over 30 square meters of area but weighing only 24 kg, allowed for low ground speed launches on the training hill in little or no wind.

As often happens in hang gliding, a synergistic development by US instructor Steve Wendt greatly expanded the Condor’s potential for supporting new student instruction. Steve developed and perfected a highly refined form of towing — the Blue Sky Scooter Towing method — using a low power scooter as a tow winch, and using the Condor 330 as the glider. When I first heard about the idea of towing the Condor, I nearly had a heart attack. To keep the weight at 24 kg for a 30 square meter wing, the entire airframe was built with small diameter, lightweight 7075 tubing. We had tested the glider on our test vehicle and knew that it was only good for an ultimate load of about three G’s. This was by no stretch of the imagination a “utility class” hang glider — it could only be used safely under very restrictive conditions.

But Steve was, in fact, using the glider safely — he was using very low line tensions, and keeping the glider at very low altitudes, just “trolling” his students, as he put it, a few feet off the ground, at very low speeds, for flights lasting hundreds of feet. Once we had had a chance to observe his methods, we became complete converts to their value, and went on to help sponsor and promote a number of clinics in which Steve could teach his methods to other instructors.

The FAA Challenge

Starting in 2002, a new challenge arose for the future of hang gliding in the US, as the Federal Aviation Administration released a notice of proposed rule making that would affect both powered ultralights and hang gliding tandem and aero tow operations. Over the next few years, Wills Wing devoted significant resources to attending meetings and participating in the development of consensus standards that would govern the new Light Sport Aircraft and Sport Pilot operations covered by the new rules. In the end, hang gliding’s tandem and aero tow operational privileges, both crucial to the preservation and growth of the sport in the US, were preserved.

The Next Generation

The remainder of this decade has seen significant additional advances in hang glider technology at Wills Wing with the development of the U2, the Sport 2 and the T2 and T2C lines. There is always a tension here between allocating resources to the development and promotion of the entry level of the sport, versus spending those resources on the development of new leading edge technologies. Without instructors and new pilots, the sport would cease to exist. At the same time, without the development of competition class gliders like the Fusion, the Talon and the T2, the current generation of highly refined recreational gliders like the U2 and Sport 2 wouldn’t exist, as those gliders depend on the trickle down of technology from the gliders at the forefront of technical development. The one historical constant in the hang gliding business here at Wills Wing has been the significant limitation on the total amount of personnel and capital resources that we have at our disposal. In one sense, the management of the company can be distilled down to the challenge of making the right decisions about how and where to allocate those resources.

Remembering Rob

In November of 2006, our friend and partner of 30 years, Rob Kells, was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Based on the diagnostic tests done at that time, his prognosis was very poor. Characteristic of Rob’s unfailing optimism, he vowed to fight the disease and promised that he would beat it. In the end, however, despite a courageous and determined fight, he was unable to win this last battle, and he passed away in August of 2008.

As the head of sales at Wills Wing, Rob had been the most visible symbol of the company to most of our customers. His positive attitude and his natural inclination to treat each pilot as a friend were major factors in how pilots viewed the company as a whole. In this sense, he reminded me very much of Bob Wills. Bob took as much joy, if not more, from watching other pilots have good flights on his gliders as he did from his own flying, and despite the fact that he was a legend in the sport, he never treated anyone as anything other than a friend. That attitude and approach became an integral part of the company, and Rob did as much as anyone to maintain and reinforce that characteristic of Wills Wing during the 30 years that he was a part of the company.

Looking Ahead

Looking ahead, there is much to anticipate. I don’t believe that anyone at Wills Wing thinks that hang gliding has yet reached its full potential, either in the development of better ways to introduce the sport to new pilots, or in the refinement of the most advanced technology for experienced pilots. Steve is continually at work on refining the T2 and T2C models, and on applying the lessons learned to the U2 and Sport 2. This past year, all five members of the US Team at the FAI world championships were flying Wills Wing T2C’s, and this is a young team with a lot of room for improvement and growth. Steve is also working with WW competition pilot Jeff Shapiro on the development of a new competition style harness, and the first prototypes show great promise.

Going forward, beyond just an emphasis on technology and product development, we expect to remain equally inspired by our continuing focus on customer service and support. Our management team has been in place for more than 30 years, our authorized factory test pilots average more than 30 years of hang gliding experience and our production employees have been with the company for an average of fifteen years. Whether your Wills Wing glider was made last year or twenty years ago, you can call us on the phone and talk to the person who designed it, or the pilot who did the factory test flight on it, or to someone else with the experience and expertise to make sure that you have your questions answered and your service needs taken care of. We’re proud of that long-term continuity and we look forward to continuing to provide that kind of customer focused support in the future.

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