Written by TH (10/2005); Edited by JS (03/2005), Reformatted by JS (03/2010, 07/2012)
Talbot G. Hinze wrote the following autobiography in October of 2005.
A Brief History of the Involvement of Talbot G. Hinze in Model Aviation
I was born on December 27, 1926 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I had a fairly normal childhood, other than being raised by my Grandmother, but that came to an abrupt end on the morning of August 8, 1937. It was my great misfortune to be sitting in the back seat of a 1931 Chevrolet sedan that a Frisco Railroad passenger train broadsided going 55 miles per hour. I was about 10 years old and spent many following months flat on my back in a body cast from armpits to ankles. In 1937, there were very few options for occupying the restless mind and hands of a young boy anchored to a bed in a single room in a single house, constrained to see only the ceiling and out one window to the side of the neighbor’s house. I tried it all; knitting, crochet, stringing beads, coloring books and reading. In the daytime, I was constrained to listen to the “soap operas” with my Grandmother, but in the afternoon, there was excitement in the radio adventures of Hop Harrigan, Captain Midnight, and others. That got me to thinking about airplanes. One evening, my Dad brought home a ten-cent solid model balsa kit that we put together. Soon, he brought me another one and a genuine KA-BAR pocketknife for whittling. I still have it. The living room fireplace (radiant gas insert) had glass door cabinets on either side. I kept whittling out solid models until the shelves were crowded and my Dad could not find any kits I did not have already. They were crude and unpainted, but my Grandmother treasured them. Most of them deteriorated or I disassembled over the years, but a few remained when she passed and I have them still.
When I could finally sit up with a lap table, I started building the ten-cent balsa flying models. I think they were mostly sheet balsa. With my brother’s help, we flew them in the living room from my hospital bed. In 1939, I was able to restart school and went to live with my dad and stepmother on the far eastern edge of Tulsa. It was about a two-mile walk to and from Woodrow Wilson Jr. High School. I could ride the city bus, but preferred to meet up and walk with schoolmates.
Our path took us down a residential street and in the afternoon. We saw really large and beautiful gas models in the driveway of one home. That was where Mr. Lulow lived and ran the complete model supply shop for Tulsa. His day job was manual arts instructor at Tulsa Central High School. He dedicated his garage to model airplanes. He even bought balsa logs, sawing and sanding the wood himself. On Saturdays, models and modelers were all over his yard. That really got my best friend, Lowell Palmer, and me fired-up. We started on rubber models. My first “big” model was a Dick Korda Quaker Flash. We did not know how to do anything, and were proud to ask, so we just ploughed ahead.
We finally became usably proficient in carving props, making them free wheel or fold, and had a good time of it. Our house near Third and Yale streets had a two-car garage. The rear half of one side was the laundry room and the front half became my shop and the local modelers’ hangout. I nailed the bottom of the garage door in place and left the top half hinged to open, with screening to keep the bugs out. One of our favorite flying sessions was sleeping out in the yard, getting up early well before sunrise and walking the three blocks out to where, on a clear day, I think you could see over the sea of prairie grass to St. Louis. Using freewheeling props, we would launch our rubber models and listen to when the motor ran down, then try, in the dark, to follow the sound of the props click-click-click…until it made a swooshing sound as it landed in the tall grass. Then we fanned out to look for it. In those days of clear air, you could see the stars and the Milky Way while waiting for the motor to wind down. I only wish my kids and grandkids could experience that, with or without the models.
Our little modeling group finally moved on to gas models. There was Lowell Palmer, Howard “Elmo” Putnam, Don Burns, Bob Earle and the “Watchers,” Russ Wylie, Charlie Walker, Jack Frese and L. Wayne Ghent. None of us had any money (it was still the Depression), but there was opportunity. The power lawn mower had yet to be invented for the masses and the Oklahoma summer sun was punishing, so to raise money we would take a family lawnmower or two and start door-to-door soliciting. A good size lawn, ready for cutting, trimming and raking, was good for three to five dollars. Two of those split three ways wasn’t too bad for balsa, dope, batteries, and gas.
My first engine was an Ohlsson 23 and I ended up with Ohlsson 19s and 60, Hornet Red Head, Delong 29 (?), and a few others I do not recall. My first gas model was in 1941, a Peerless Pippin. When finished, I had trouble with the engine, so I walked it over to Lowell Palmer’s house and we worked on the engine. When it was time to go home, he gave me a ride on his bicycle. A stiff, unbending left knee was a permanent result of the train/car accident and I could not ride a bicycle myself. I think there was a stiff wind blowing, too, because partway through the trip the wing folded up, and in the ensuing confusion, we both fell over with the bike. The Pippin was a total loss. It was followed by a Scientific Ensign that I flew for a long time. Not a great performer, but I enjoyed its ruggedness, as I cannot remember ever having to repair it. However, the deep prairie grass was forgiving of crashes.
During this time, there were two other fellows in the neighborhood, Harold and Robert Fields. These modelers helped deepen our knowledge and understanding of why and how our models flew. Their father was an aeronautical engineer with the Spartan Aircraft Company at Tulsa. Spartan manufactured the Spartan Executive, an all-metal, single-engine plane that was a precursor to the Corporate Jet. He formally was with Ryan and allegedly designed the Ryan ST. Anyway, with help of their father, Harold and Bob built a homemade wind tunnel that occupied a room in their house. It had a throat section of about 200 square inches complete with flow straighteners and calibrated balance beams to measure lift and drag forces. They spent a lot of time on airfoils, streamlining and testing a control system theory (which may have been their father’s theory).
They only built one model that I recall, and that was to test the control. It was a large (at the time) cabin model, with about a six-foot wingspan and powered by either a big Brown or a Forester 99 engine. The unique feature was a flat wing (zero dihedral.) Instead of dihedral, below each wingtip was a fin, mounted such that it hinged parallel to cord and could swing freely in the slipstream. The fins were connected to ailerons with linkage so that in-flight any side slip or yaw motion would deflect the fins from normal vertical down position, and through the linkage move, the ailerons restored to level flight. I saw it actually fly a couple of times and it worked in principle but grossly over-, or under-, controlled depending on the model speed, attitude and whatever. I think Lowell and I learned more from it than they did. They later moved to Denver and did not follow careers in aviation.
During the war years, we did the best we could, as balsa was almost unobtainable. We flew our planes carefully, and now looking back, I am amazed that we did not use dethermalizers. I only lost one model of my own design, a Class A with an Ohlsson 19 that is still probably turning to dust on Turkey Mountain South of the Arkansas River near Tulsa. The contests were held at 41st and Sheridan Road on the southeast side towards Broken Arrow. Before I graduated from high school, my two favorite models were Carl Goldberg’s Zipper and Sailplane with Ohlsson 23 and 60 engines. The regional contest was always on or near May 31, and the state championship later in the year was at an airfield near Oklahoma City. At the Tulsa regional, I placed first in Junior Class C and was ecstatic. My sailplane hovered and circled over the site before gently drifting up, up and away toward the city. Elmo Putnam had his dad’s Oldsmobile and we chased it for twelve miles before it made a beautiful landing in the parking lot of the Will Rogers Theater along Highway 66 on the east side of Tulsa. Coincidentally, I worked nights as a parking lot attendant, general handyman and gofer at that theater.
My prize for winning at Tulsa was a gift certificate to a record shop. I did not have a record player so I gave it away. Elmo and I made it to the state competition at Oklahoma City and I was full of hope and expectation. All that was dashed when the engine just wouldn’t run right. I thought it was floating points, but had no parts. It later proved to be only a bad condenser. The last model I built before starting college at the University of Tulsa was a Playboy Senior kit. It was a late WWII kit with no balsa, and as I recall, the sticks were spruce and the sheet was some substitute, maybe impregnated cardboard. It included a bag of casein furniture glue in powder form that you mixed with water and had to let set a day or so to cure. I finished it and it flew, but it weighed a ton and flew like it, too. A picture of it was the only one surviving of my models in those years and it would have been included in this biography, but is missing. I entered the University of Tulsa in the fall of 1945 and that ended my modeling activities. With some setbacks due to health issues, I finally received my bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering in January of 1951 at Oklahoma State University at Stillwater (then Oklahoma A&M). I immediately went to work in the engineering department of the Nordberg Manufacturing Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. That company, now gone, built huge industrial power generating engines and marine diesel engines, rock crushers, mine hoists, railway maintenance equipment, and custom machinery such as submarine components and process equipment. The pressure of training, work, and travel precluded any attempt at model building other than some time-killing solid models on lonely motel nights.
That changed in 1959, about a year after I married Elaine Ring (on May 10, 1958, in Milwaukee.) My wife was busy with a newborn son, so my spare time again was available for modeling. Two fellow workers, one of them Louis Hunt, took up hand launch gliders because they were quick to build and took up little space in our small apartment. Those were kinder, gentler days. A farmer just south of Milwaukee gave us full access to his large pasture for flying. Starting with hand and catapult launch, we moved onto towline models and got fairly proficient at it. The kits available were not very rewarding so we went to scratch building and designing our own. The most popular was a Czechoslovakian design with Jadelski-type sheet wood wing that, if built light and carefully, was a real performer. We eventually moved onto Free Flight gas, but I was limited to a ½A by my limited building space.
One day, a fellow turned up with a Cox helicopter that consisted mainly of a Cox engine mounted on the helicopter rotor. The reaction of the crankcase torque would turn the rotor. It went straight up, the motor stopped and the helicopter tumbled straight down. Junk, junk, junk. I decided to build my own autogiro, which looks like a helicopter but has an un-powered rotor. It was a trial and error project that took most of my spare time in 1960. I went through sizing rotors, fuselages, tail moments, and empennages ad infinitum until I finally got it right. It would right turn spiral climb on a minute or so of gas, then auto rotate down at about a 30-degree left turn. I still have it.
In 1961, I had a new house built for us in Greendale, Wisconsin, and between that project and increasing work travel, my modeling just fell completely dormant. In 1966, I changed jobs and [moved into] a new house near Racine, Wisconsin, with still no time for models. In 1968, we moved to Seattle, Washington for a job with work and responsibilities that required about 50 hours per week at the office/shop and another 20 hours at home. I was the Chief Engineer, Purchasing Agent, Service Manager, Shop Superintendent, and occasional inside salesman for Hough Marine and Machine of Seattle. I was in charge of the design and application of and about everything else pertaining to hydraulic steering systems for boats and ships. After 23 years of intensely hard but interesting work, I retired on January 1, 1992.
I had plans to begin right away building the large (about 3-meter) Hobby Lobby Telemaster Radio Control model, powered by an OS 120 four-cycle engine. However, I had no Radio Control experience or knowledge whatsoever so I spent some time at the local public access flying field, 60 Acres South, near Redmond, Washington. It so happens that this was a glidersonly field; no gas models. There was a fellow there, Pete Peterson, flying some small acrobatic electric models. He was also the proprietor of the Model Electronics Company of Seattle and distributor of his custom-made WEP and Turbo 10 motors and gearboxes, and at that time, a series of acrobatic electric model kits. Electrics were the “untouchables” at that time. Pete was relegated to a far corner of the field, out of the way of the “real” model fliers. That was where I parked to observe from afar, so it was my good fortune to connect with him first. He convinced me that learning to fly on the Telemaster was a bad choice and recommended that I start out on an electric glider where I could concentrate on flying at the 60 Acres field. A gas engine would force me over to Marymoor Park Gas Field where on a good day you wait two hours to fly 15 minutes.
My first Radio Control model then was the Graduate kit from Hobby Lobby. The kit came with a motor, gearbox, folding propeller, speed control, and NiCad batteries from Peterson. I ordered an ACE Micro Pro 8000 radio (made in the USA!) with servo kits from Ace in Higginsville, Missouri. Before I could finish and fly, Pete and his little screaming buzz bombs were forced off the field to elsewhere and I had no mentor. I built the Graduate in the aileron version (mistake) and made many crack-of-dawn attempts to fly it when no one would be there to see. I was not getting anywhere but beating up the model, banging it into some tall grass one morning when another guy showed up early with electric gliders. He was Don Kummins, an immigrant from some Balkan country, and came out early some days to avoid the hassle from the “real” fliers. He told me to park the Graduate, go get a Goldberg Electra kit, and give him a call when ready. That chance meeting with Don probably kept me from switching from models to collecting matchbook covers or worse. With his help, I mastered the Electra, then the Graduate, and many more. I made a two-meter Spirit and a three-meter Paragon for hi-start/winch-launch to improve my standing with the “in” crowd, but I still preferred electric launch gliders. As for the Telemaster, well, I finally decided I did not need all that noise, mess on me and pollution, so it is long gone and forgotten.
In 1992, I joined the Seattle Area Soaring Society (SASS, AMA #2927) and have been active in it every year since then. At that time, there were only three of us that regularly flew electric gliders at the field, which is the ONLY field in the greater Puget Sound region that is open to the public to fly non-gas models and launch model rockets. It is King County Parks land. Their only requisite is to have liability insurance when you fly, and inasmuch as homeowners insurance is not acceptable, AMA membership is virtually mandatory.
John Oberto, Don Krummins, and I persisted, and very slowly electric gliders became acceptable though not plentiful. The electric breakthrough was perhaps 1998 or so when someone brought out cheap, modeled foam, twin motor models (Tri-Star?), and the race was on. Now everyone has electrics in some form or another.
In 1994, the World Soaring Jamboree was held in the Tri-cities area and along the Columbia River. Various clubs volunteered to conduct the different events. SASS ran the Slope Pylon Racing event at Eagle Butte (one of the GREAT slope sites in the West.) Steve Cameron, U.S. hand launch champion, was in charge of the effort and I was on his team. We had flyers from all over the United States, Australia, and Europe. We had two sites about twelve miles apart and the whole race setup had to be ready to move in an instant to suit changing wind conditions. It was a great success and experience.
In 1996, SASS elected to participate in the large hobby exposition held the first weekend in February at the Washington State Fair Grounds in Puyallup, Washington. I volunteered to organize and preside over our effort. First, I designed a framework assembly that we could collapse for transport, reassemble, hoist up, and attach to the roof trusses of the display hall. It was adjustable so we could display a considerable number of gliders overhead for easy viewing, but also just beyond reach of spectators. That first year, we displayed 15 gliders, intending to demonstrate the great diversity in glider modeling. They included a five-meter (ASH 25) scale, three-meter stick-and-skin scale, polyhedral, aileron, flying wing, hand-launch, electric-launch, and more. We offered a raffle for a kit model, built and tested with a four-channel radio, and continuous video of every type of glider activity. It was a great success. I have continued to manage the SASS display for the ensuing ten years.
When I was elected vice president of SASS in November of 1997, the infrastructure at our field consisted of two very beat up, dilapidated frequency boards (north and south sides) and one picnic table. While on the SASS Board as vice president through 1999, and Field Marshal through 2004, I personally either acquired or produced all of the infrastructure and facility changes at the field, including frequency boards, wind streamers, picnic tables, an access bridge, traffic signs, gravel fields, chemical toilet access with concrete foundations, a storage container, and signage for control of flight and vehicle parking. SASS is not a group noted for volunteerism, mostly because it is not designated for our exclusive use and there is not a feeling of caring for our own facility.
By 1997, the club acquired a mass of equipment, but it was spread out over three counties in basements, garages, and attics. We needed a central storage space. Most pressing was a small trailer with one of our four winch/retriever sets that was held in a garage twelve miles from the field. The keeper needed to have his garage back. I and another member, Bob Brewer, began a search for storage near the field. We looked into renting space, building a shed, a truck, a truck body, and a shipping container. At year’s end, there was no consensus on this issue, but Mr. Brewer and I were elected president and vice president. Therefore, in 1998, volunteerism became our responsibility.
Between us, we decided that in addition to existing equipment, we needed expansion room and that would be met best with a used shipping container. We had the best quote from a supplier far south of Seattle and I spent a lot of time looking over candidates as they became available. When a container is no longer suitable for its intended service, then it is not of much use for anything else, either. We finally found and bought one after the supplier demonstrated for me that the ceiling cracks were welded closed and the door latches could function by my effort alone. I bought four rail ties and cut them in half for supporting the corners off the ground. After delivery, I borrowed an acetylene torch and tank, cut holes in the corners and top for air access screens, and roof for wind-driven ventilators. It was a lot of work but a good investment. Now it has two trailers and so much ancillary stuff that it is full.
Also in 1998, some members commented that they could not bring their families along to contests or fun fly events because of the lack of suitable sanitary facilities. It is park property but remains undeveloped. There is a toilet facility about a half-mile away for trail use, but most will not go near it because of its remote, hidden location. (What is behind the closed door?) I asked the Parks department to add chemical toilets to the north and south ends of our field. That effort took months and I had to finally appeal directly to the head of the park, who was not aware that the park existed. I finally got the “okay” that they would supply the toilets, but the club had to make the foundations on reinforced concrete to their specifications and provide a mat of 20 cubic yards of gravel at each toilet. That was a real lesson in dealing with the bureaucracy.
In winter rains, the field becomes too soft for vehicular traffic and it is closed and locked from about November until May. During that time, we parked across the road at a soccer venue and had to carry airplanes and gear over the road and across a 2-foot by 10-foot plank over a drainage ditch for access to that field. This looked dangerous to me as the plank was wet and slippery with moss and there was no handhold. If nothing more than for my own safety, I set out and built a bridge two-foot wide with floor drainage and a handrail. The bridge was mated with a set of stairs I previously built to ease the awkward climb up the loose gravel road embankment from the plank.
In 1997 and 1998, our two frequency control boards were in a state of disrepair. There were few volunteers to make repairs, but it only needed superficial nailing of a loose joint and propping back up straight. Then, the north board simply disappeared one weekend. It was replaced with a post, which was consequently broken off. Then it was replaced with a section of telephone pole with plastic soil pipe slipped down over that. Well, the vandals made short work of the pipe and pulled the post nearly over. The leaning post stayed with some paper clips for frequency cards. I volunteered to make new boards estimated at about $500. I spent the spring of 1998 making them and planned to install them around mid-June, after high school graduation. At each act of vandalism, there were signs that a bunch of young people had a beer bust on the field and were just mindlessly blowing off steam. I hoped that the guilty ones were graduating and moving on. I invested a couple of months and about $300 in more power tools to build the two boards. Each consisted of three 16 square foot panels supported at eye level by four treated four-by-fours, inline and braced. The top is about 18 feet long by two feet wide, with a gable top covered with three-tab shingles and fitted with a gutter system to prevent puddles. The center panel has fitted doors (added later) and provides for display of current AMA cards for 72 and 27 MHz channels, and two Ham band channels. One end-panel displays AMA, county, and club flying and ground rules, and the other end-panel is a bulletin board with boxes for club literature and AMA application forms. The final bill to the club was about $1500. In 2005, road revisions on the north end caused temporary removal of the north board. I have it at home and it is completely refinished, but I cannot reinstall it until August of 2006.
Until 1998, at each frequency board there was a pole about eight feet high that carried a pingpong ball suspended on a string, near a board with some graduated reference numbers on it to indicate relative wind speed. The whole thing was supposed to pivot to show wind direction, but it did not. The wind is not steady and the pole and board created eddies such that the ping-pong ball flailed wildly around.
I volunteered to put up a pole about 15-plus feet high and placed a streamer on it. The streamer came from a kite shop, was expensive, tended to wrap the pole, and did not last very long. I tried a windsock from the same source and it just was not sensitive enough to light wind currents. I tried strips of many types of materials before hitting on a certain type of rip-stop nylon from a local supplier of sails. I started with a 9-foot by 5-foot sheet (bright yellow) and reduced that down to 12 nine-foot tubes about two-inches wide, closed at one end and turned inside out so the stitches are inside and protected from sun and abrasion. The open ends attach with hardware and adhesive to a “hanger,” which also includes a ball bearing swivel and a snap connector from fishing tackle. I made a triangular frame from a brass-welding rod that had three radial arms about five inches long and equally spaced at 120 degrees. The hanger had a triangular shape and a ball bearing swivel at its apex. Each of the three arms had positions at end and center to which the individual streamers attached. Thus, the streamer was a cluster of six, all equally spaced, both sensitive to gentle winds and easily visible from 1000 feet across the field. The post top is a four-foot piece of pipe with a “T” in the middle, which carries a one-foot pipe at a right angle. The short pipe is lubricated and set over the post top to allow the assembly to rotate horizontally. One end has a loop to which the streamer attaches and on the other is a stack of washers that counterbalances the weight of the streamers. The object of this is to keep the streamers far enough away from the pole that they do not tend to hit and wrap around it when the wind is variable or gusty. The pole is pivoted near the base and can be laid over to service the streamers. There are three streamer poles at the field, which is a great help in determining location of thermals. I have been the sole provider and servicer of these streamers, which last from 18 to 24 months.
With Washington being a mountainous state, it would seem that slope soaring sites would abound. Actually, they do, but very few offer landing sites that are not covered or blocked by trees or rough exposed rocky terrain, or over forests that preclude finding downed models. SASS club members preferred three sites north on Whidbey Island, but they are on state park land and were closed to us from November through April, the period of best sloping winds. In the fall of 1997, I started inquiries as to why our benign activity was so restricted. The effort ballooned into letters, e-mails, calls, contacts, and meetings with park personnel on many levels and many members of the state legislature. The main hurdle was that flying models in state parks was not an accepted form of recreation. By the fall of 1999, the state parks drafted a new policy of accepting Radio Control models as a valid form of recreation, and now the slope sites are open year-round. The parks on Whidbey Island had me design their posted signs and draft the language for rules of flight.
From 1997 through 2004, I designed and procured all the trophies for the 10 to 12 thermal duration winch-launch and electric-launch contests. I pursue this hobby purely for the fun of it. Contests are stressful and I wanted to put stress behind when I retired. Early on, I participated in contests as a rite of membership. I have some trophies in winch launch and electric thermal duration from 1995, 1997, and 1998. Since then, I have chosen not to enter contests but I always attend to help man the retrievers and maintain the winches and lines. However, in 1998, my electric scale Curtis Robin won a static display award at the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field, and in 2002, my Autogyro (built in 1960) was given a Free Flight Aircraft award at the model exposition in Puyallup, Washington.
From 1997 through to the present, SASS has fought an almost continuous battle with elements of the King County government to prevent our field (a.k.a. “60 Acres South”) from being converted into another multiple soccer venue. By one count, there are over 400 soccer pitches in King County alone, while our field is the only public access field for flying winched and electric gliders and rockets. In that effort, I have been active by attending county council meetings as well as those of the city of Redmond, Washington. I have written countless letters to all levels of city and county government and even on November 11, 1998 to the AMA and Joe Beshar, Flying Site Coordinator in Oradell, New Jersey. I feel King County parks is no longer dedicated to providing clean, safe, well-managed parks for the pleasure and recreation of the tax supporting public, but rather to be revenue sufficient at whatever the cost in loss of access, convenience, accommodation, or pleasure to the public. In short, whoever puts up the most money can gain exclusive use of a park. Our struggle to defeat that philosophy is again at full force at this writing. If SASS loses the fight, then flying Radio Control thermal gliders from two meters to five meters will go extinct in Puget Sound except for a few very expensive private fields north, in Snohomish County.
I joined SASS in 1992, and one of the benefits of membership we had was the club newsletter, SASS Updraft, published four to six times per year by Waid Reynolds. He did the publishing and I handled the printing and mailing until he stopped in January 2000. Others carried on until August 2001, when the last issue was distributed. It always contained the usual reports on contests: who won, coming activities, and the like. Waid always pleaded for members to write articles, but few did. He spent a lot of time on the Internet and much of his material was gleaned from there. I finally started writing when he was desperate. One article was how to make your own simple battery eliminator circuit (BEC) circuit for electronic speed controls (ESC) that did not provide it.
After the Puyallup show, there was always a review written. In a few editions, I had up to three articles. Those that seemed to generate the most interest and later comment from members were those that used modeling as an excuse to talk about something else. For instance, on a trip to Alaska and the Yukon, I would email that I flew my Spectra somewhere, then wander off on a theme that had nothing to do with the model. Another article, titled “Stupid is As Stupid Does,” started with my model going down in an adjacent area, then became a survival story. The troops seemed to enjoy those articles more than just dry statistics on airfoils, contests, and such. I think it just gave the newsletter more variety and flavor.
In 2001, I joined the BEAMS (Boeing Employees Aerodynamic Modeling Society), AMA club #3808. We fly many indoor rubber-powered models with up to a 25-inch wingspan. The club is most active during the cold, rainy winter season and slack during the summer when Radio Control models take preference. We have two meetings and Saturday flying sessions each month in the large Boeing Activity Centers.
That just about says it all for me. I am 79 years old, and while I still am as active as I can be, the rigors of age, diabetes, and badly-worn joints will keep slowing me down at an increasingly faster rate. I still find time on nice days to fly my electric two-meter Spectra, three-meter Minimax 1000E, Bird of Time, Sagita 900, Paragon, or two-meter Spirit, but not all on the same day.
It has all been fun and I have no complaints.
Over and out…T.G. “Pete” Hinze Bridge over drainage ditch, built by Hinze for his club. It was used for crossing 116th street from the soccer fields to “60 Acres South” field in the winter.
1999: Assembling the North frequency board c. 1997/1998: Hinze with a fold-up trainer and Honda Spree scooter
1999: South end frequency board with streamer pole behind it. Doors over the central panel were added later.
Hinze talking with visitors to the Seattle Area Soaring Society (SASS) booth at the Puyallup Model Expo
Hinze with Bird of Time model
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