The Dawn of Hang Gliding on the OBX

By Steve Hanf | Photo Courtesy of Kitty Hawk Kites

Fifty years later, in the age of instant information and glitzy videos in the palms of our hands, it’s unimaginable. Unthinkable to the point of laughable. Yet the fact remains – that one grainy black-and-white photograph in the middle of the Winston-Salem Journal newspaper changed the course of history.

Before we knew what rabbit holes were, John Harris headed down one. He needed to know more about that image of the hang glider he saw in the paper. The local library was no help. The phone company said the guy in the photo from Kaysville, Utah, whose name was Dick Cheney – no, NOT the former VP – could be reached at this number.

Harris called him. Found out Cheney was making sails and gliders for people. Paid him $800 to make him one and ship it to North Carolina.

The box included a silent Super 8 film of somebody launching and landing a hang glider, Harris recalls, so he at least had some basic understanding of what he was doing. Then it was time to get his buddies out to Jockey’s Ridge to try it out.

The rest, of course, is history. From those humble beginnings, a retail empire and unquenchable thirst for adventure took flight.

In 1974 Kitty Hawk Kites’ co-founder John Harris became the first person to hang glide from the 1,600-foot-high rock pinnacle of Grandfather Mountain in the western part of North Carolina.

“When I saw that picture, everything crystallized. I thought, ‘Oh my God, a cheap way to fly,’ and I couldn’t think about anything else,” Harris says. “We ran up and down the dunes till we figured out how to fly it. The experience on the dunes was so good, better than I imagined it would be, and I knew that other people would enjoy it. That’s when I started thinking, ‘How can we share this?’”

One of those friends at the initial flight was Ralph Buxton, who would end up joining Harris as the co-founder of Kitty Hawk Kites. Those early years proved challenging. The Outer Banks of the mid 1970s wasn’t the tourist spot it is today. After being laughed out of a few buildings, they landed in a garage next to the old casino across from Jockey’s Ridge – a structure so rickety that sand would blow in through the walls and break their answering machine.

Still, the former co-workers in engineering jobs at Lockheed in California loved the active, outdoor lifestyle with their other 20-something friends and couldn’t get enough of their new pastime.

“You’re running and once that glider lifts you and you’re off the ground it was like holy mackerel – you were like a kid on a Ferris wheel for the first time!” Buxton recalls. “We were smitten. We were really lucky on a number of scores. First of all, we got in on a sport that was just starting to ramp up on the East Coast. And being near Kitty Hawk, the birthplace of flight, marketing it was going to be great. So, we were at the right place at the right time.”
Along the way, they attracted countless disciples of the sport, most of them surfers in search of one more type of adrenaline rush. Remarkably, many of them remain in the area today and enjoy gathering and reminiscing about the good old days.

People like Tom Haddon, a Kitty Hawk staffer in the 1970s who would become a national hang gliding champion. And Billy Vaughn, a hang gliding pilot since 1984, the current Kitty Hawk Flight School Co-Manager, and the person tasked with writing the history of Francis Rogallo, whose flexible wing design revolutionized hang gliding, kite flying and a host of other pursuits.

And people like Jonny Thompson, who also got his start in the 1970s and is still flying today at the age of 73, most often as the tow pilot for Kitty Hawk’s hang gliders you see soaring above the Cotton Gin/Wright Farm property in Jarvisburg.

Facing page (back row, left-to-right): Kitty Hawk Kites’ co-founders Ralph Buxton and John Harris with instructors Tom Haddon, Ed Green and Glen Hocket. Front row: Mark Armstrong and Tom Glasgow with son. Photo by Judy Glasgow.

“I was a surfer, and I was actually living in a cottage court on the beach road with a bunch of other surfers,” Thompson recalls with a laugh. “This strange guy moved into the complex in front of us and told everybody he was opening a hang gliding business and none of us knew what that was. One day we were running back from a surf trip in Rodanthe, and we stopped and watched him teach on the hill and I came back a few days later, tried it and fell in love.”

That “strange guy” was Harris.

Haddon, meanwhile, made his first flight one week after his best friend, Glenn Hockett, took a lesson with Harris. Haddon and Hockett were short on cash, so Hockett just shared what he had learned with his friend. One week later, the Richmond duo headed not to the modest training ground of the dunes, but to the mountains.

“Everything was, ‘We need more altitude!’” Haddon remembers. “We didn’t know any better. I don’t know how we survived – I really don’t.”

Soon, they too were working at Kitty Hawk Kites and teaching others how to fly. Buxton cherishes another old photograph – this one in color – that features he and Harris along with Haddon, Hockett and three other instructors in front of Kitty Hawk Kites’ vintage yellow Suburban that hauled gear and people up and down the beach for a decade.

One of the first Hang Gliding Spectaculars from the mid-70s, at Jockey’s Ridge.

“I feel totally blessed that I discovered hang gliding when I did because it was in its infancy,” Haddon says. “So, all of us were pioneers just by virtue of being there when the sport began. It was a huge adventure, just a fabulous experience.”

For anyone who’s done it, the draw is clear.

“The flyingest flying,” as Vaughn describes it, mentioning that articles, books and films about hang gliding have all shared that title.

“There’s nothing to beat the thrill of it, the experience of it,” Buxton adds. “It’s amazing being up there like a bird, totally free, open. All you hear is the wind rushing. You’ve broken the bonds of earth. You’re surfing the sky.”

Or, as Thompson puts it: “I’ve flown a lot of marvelous machines. I really have. Hang gliders are ME flying. And that’s all the difference in the world to me. All you have to fly with are the sensations.”

6th Annual Hang Gliding Spectacular, at Jockey’s Ridge in 1990. Photo by Drew Wilson, courtesy of Outer Banks History Center.

As thrilling and energizing as those early years were, they also came with dangers. As Haddon explains, Orville and Wilbur didn’t have a pilot’s license back in 1903 – because there was no such thing.

“It was the same thing with hang gliding,” Haddon says. “People were teaching themselves how to fly or in John’s case, he had just opened the school and was teaching the very first people on the East Coast to fly. So, we were all learning together, discovering together, and the evolution of the glider designs back then was so rapid.”

Early glider designs struggled with stability in high winds, and even on calmer days, bumps and bruises and broken wrists could happen at any moment: “We provided a lot of business to the local medical clinic here,” Buxton says.

Sadly, fatalities also were another part of the early days of hang gliding. While Buxton could recall just one on the dune – an instructor who crashed after going up in windy conditions – Haddon mentioned that anybody in the sport in those days lost a friend, or multiple friends.

“It took a few years before the gliders rapidly became safer, but during that time period, there were some accidents and people lost their lives,” Haddon recalls. “People would say, ‘Why do you do that? It’s so dangerous.’ People that were doing it were not drawn to it because of the danger. The danger just kind of came with the territory. They had just fallen in love with flying.”

Tom Haddon, 1980 National Flexwing Hang Gliding Champion is shown here flying high above Jockey’s Ridge in the late ’70s. These days, Tom owns Haddon Homes, Inc., well known in the area for building custom homes to “green” certification (see business profile on pg. 31). Photo by Bud Ramey.

That’s how Haddon went from new convert to national champion in all of six years – he simply loved the sport and couldn’t get enough of it. He started working for Harris during summers off from college in 1974-75 and ended up winning the championship in 1980.

“I was competing at a high level for the last maybe three years that I was flying,” he says. “But when I won that championship, that was fine. That was it. I’ve done this. Also, I knew I needed to earn a living by that point in time – hang gliding didn’t pay!”

Haddon bounced around with a few flying-related jobs and then got into custom home building, which he still does today. It’s been about 10 years since he’s been up in a hang glider.

Buxton hung up the hang glider around 1990, when he and Harris split off Kitty Hawk Kites and Buxton ended up leading Kitty Hawk Sports and focusing on the watersports part of the business. He sold that part of the business back to Harris in 2010.

Thompson, meanwhile, celebrated his 73rd birthday in December and still thrills at taking flight. He started at Kitty Hawk Kites while majoring in education during his college years, and while he never did get that degree, he’s still teaching nearly 50 years later.

“I love the flying, and teaching almost as much as I do the flying,” Thompson says of his days in the tug planes that can take visitors as high as 2,000 feet. “We didn’t know squat back then, but today is so amazing. The equipment is so much better, there’s fewer sites but they’re easier to find. I don’t think about the old days all that much. Or so I tell everybody!”

When they all get together, though, the stories about the old days come rapid fire, from all of them and other long-time instructor friends like Lawrence Battaile and Greg Ball – about meeting future wives on the dunes or in the store. Or marveling at one new glider after another that came along and wondering if THIS one would be the breakthrough innovation. Or teaching people from all walks of life, from airline pilots to the commander of the USS Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier … to the lady who they had trouble getting into the harness just so, who informed them AFTER her flight that she was seven months pregnant and thank you very much for the experience! Or the endless shenanigans amongst all the friends.

“It was a beautiful thing for me,” Battaile says. “I just felt like I landed in heaven – hang gliding on the sand dunes, tons of people just wanting to check it out.”

They joke that all their stories involve arms outstretched as they demonstrate one flying maneuver after another. Or as Haddon says his wife puts it when the latest tall tale begins, “‘There I was at 10,000 feet…’”

Celebrating 50 years in business, Kitty Hawk Kites has been “Teaching the World to Fly” since 1974. Pictured: Hang Gliding instructor Andy Thompson, being high fived by fellow instructors Charlie Trossbach and Emma Comer during the 51st Annual Hang Gliding Spectacular, back in May of 2023. Photo by Hannah Comer of Kitty Hawk Kites.

With Kitty Hawk Kites responsible for teaching so many people how to fly and creating so many hang gliding instructors, ties to the original group on the Outer Banks can be found all over the country, and many of them continue soaring today with their own flight school operations.

The ultimate class reunion takes place at Jockey’s Ridge every year with the Hang Gliding Spectacular, the longest-running hang gliding competition in the world. Visitors fly in from all over the world and hundreds of flyers take to the skies. This May will mark the 52nd anniversary of the event, and a very special 50th anniversary celebration for Harris and Kitty Hawk Kites.

“It’s just a big party, basically,” Vaughn says. “It’s a weeklong big warm hug. This is the epicenter. The faces change, but the people are the same.”

Author: CoastalLife