On Monday, June 19, 2017 at 12:20:20 PM UTC-4, Steve Leonard wrote:
The soaring community lost a colorful character on June 3, 2017, when Bill Seed passed away at his beloved Sunflower Aerodrome and Gliderport near Hutchinson, Kansas. He was 73 years old.


Steve, "colorful" is the adjective I most closely associate with Bill. I only met him once but Charlie Spratt had a number of very funny (and perhaps true) stories about Bill. My own Bill Seed story goes back to 1981 when we all showed up for the 15M Nationals at Minden, NV. Bill was flying an Open Class ASW 17 with short tips. The glider seemed to match his personality: larger than life and sort of "in your face" compared with the rest of the skeek, more conventional 15M ships.

To cooperate with the power traffic there, we had to stage on an intersecting taxiway and then wheel each of us onto the runway just before launch. Bill was in the cockpit in position to take off when word came to get him off the runway to allow power traffic to land...immediately!

One of the line crew hopped up on the nose of the glider so two others could pivot the glider and get it off the runway. The '17 was no lightweight. Neither was Bill. And neither was the crewperson perched on the nose staring right at him.

This was in the days before we weighed gliders so the max gross for most pilots was determined by whatever we could get into the aftermarket oversized wing ballast tanks. Bill's glider needed a lot of water ballast owing to its high wing area. And this was a particularly strong weather contest (IIRC, we flew a 455 mile thermal task, the longest in the world at that point, with time to spare). The '17 was a stout airplane so I probably just imagined the mainwheel and gear groaning when they were forced to bear the added load of the substantial crewperson on the nose.

I thought Bill was going to explode! He turned red and started yelling and sputtering, with no effect. The ground crew hustled him off the runway and let the power plane land, then got him back out there again without the gear collapsing. We were too polite to laugh...until after he launched.

RIP.

Chip Bearden
"JB"