Golden/Slay Airplane

Chester Slay was probably my best friend in the elementary school period, although I ran with a pretty large crowd.

Somehow Chester and I got fixated on building an airplane - well, a glider. We must have been about 9 or 10. We did this at his house.

We started with a lightweight crate used to deliver produce to grocery stores. We tacked a couple of boards onto the sides of the crate to serve as wings and hung a rudimentary tail structure onto the arbitrarily chosen back end.

We built a ramp our of a couple of 2 X 4s that ran down from the picnic table, reached almost to the ground where it was balanced on a stump, made a 90 degree turn upward and ran over a saw horse. The idea was that the pilot would sit in the ‘airplane’ and the mechanic would push the assembly off the picnic table onto the ramp where the contraption would pick up speed on the downslope, magically turn the 90 degree corner and launch into the air. With no flight controls we decided that the pilot would use weight shift to direct the flight path. Good enough for the Wrights, good enough for us.