Stan Hall passed away this morning - SSA Hall of Fame member

Some very sad news – Stan Hall passed away this morning at his home.
I’ve included some information about Stan here. Please keep his wife
Doris and their daughter Denise and family in your thoughts. I’ll
know more about the service later.



I was honored to, in 1997, compile “The Collected Works of Stan Hall”,
published by the SHA, and as such, came to know Stan even better.
We have lost a legend today. May he rest in peace.



Janice Armstrong
DAN Crew



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From “The Collected Works of Stan Hall”, with some modifications



Inside Stan Hall’s DNA chain is a gene called aviation. ; Inside that
gene is a sub-gene called soaring. Together, they’ve been
blueprinting a life dedicated to machines that fly – and that life
began at age 4, when, sitting in his mother’s lap, he went aloft in a
Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny”. 77 years later he still recalled the name of
that pilot. It was Seely Blythe.



But pilot Blythe’s influence was overshadowed by one Charles A.
Lindbergh, the patron saint of all aviation. Stan was 12 that night
in 1927 when Lindbergh hit the runway at Le Bourget. The following
day Stan started putting together what he called a glider. Well, it
wasn’t really a glider so much as a contraption – which, thanks to
alert parents, never got finished. Getting a real glider completed
and into the air had to wait until 1931.



The ensuing four years saw three more gliders and it was crash and
build, crash and build. A defining moment came in 1936 when it
became apparent to Stan he needed more smarts if he was to get out of
this discouraging cycle. That was the year fate intervened to prevent
his attending college. That fate was the year Hitler set the world
on fire.



In Los Angeles, North American Aviation was busily building up its
engineering staff. Stan landed a job as an engineering draftsman.
He had no engineering training. What got him the job was his
experience as an “aircraft builder” (read “gliders”) and the fact that
he got top grades in high school drafting. From then on, the on-the-
job engineering training came fast and furious. In the five years he
worked at North American, he became involved in the design of the
company’s AT-6 trainer, the B-25 bomber and the P-51 Mustang fighter.
Under the pressure of wartime, and working under some brilliant if
harried engineers, Stan soaked up technical know-how like a sponge.
He picked their brains without letup.



Then the military gliders came, gliders capable of carrying up to 15
soldiers. Douglas Aircraft hired Stan away from North American to
help design the XCG-8 and XCG-15 cargo gliders conceived by the great
Hawley Bowlus.



Near completion of the glider program at Douglas, Stan left the
company to join a new civilian contract flying school in Wickenburg,
Arizona. He wanted to FLY for a change. Here, he taught young staff
sergeants to fly training gliders preparatory to flying the huge cargo
gliders Douglas and others were building. Later, as Flight Commander,
he taught aviation cadets to fly the Stearman PT-17 airplane. It was
here that he and his new bride, Doris, set up housekeeping, and it was
here their son, Rogers was born. Eight years later, in Los Angeles,
daughter Denise was to be born.



The war had to end sometime, and it did. The Hall family moved back
to Los Angeles, where Stan took a position with Northrop as an
engineering designer. With his flight experience he also served as
an on-call, corporate pilot, flying a military twin-engine UC-78
bailed to company and a company owned-Bellanca Skyrocket.



His engineering training was now going full throttle as he joined the
legendary John K. Northrop in the design of the Northrop B-35 and the
YB-49 Flying Wings. In those days, designers received special
training by experts in stress analysis and other engineering
disciplines. The order of the day was, then, that designers do their
own first-order analysis, followed as necessary by more detailed
analyses by the stress engineering group. Stan found this experience
to be priceless, an experience he had been capitalizing on and adding
to ever since.



He spent five years at Northrop, the last one as Manager of
Experimental Design at the company’s Snark missile installation at
Cape Canaveral, Florida. A few months after returning to home base in
Hawthorne, California, Stan left to join the Lockheed Missiles and
Space Division in Van Nuys, California. In 1957 the company moved to
Sunnyvale, and Stan moved with them. He spent 20 years with Lockheed,
managing technical programs. It was here he supervised the design of
the biologically-oriented payload on Discoverer 13, the first payload
ever recovered from space. And it was here that Stan later conceived
and had patented the Lockheed/Army YO-3A Quiet Reconnaissance airplane
which saw outstanding service in Vietnam. Stan was Manager of
Airframe Design on the YO-3A program and later, Manager of Engineering
Flight Test.



In all, Stan served as an engineer for four major aircraft
manufacturers over a period of 37 years. After retiring from Lockheed
he was called back as a freelance engineering consultant. It was in
this service that he did the conceptual design and stress analyses for
the sailplane-like Solar Happ, an unmanned, solar powered, long
endurance, high altitude reconnaissance aircraft. Working on his own
drafting board at home, he also did conceptual designs and engineering
analyses of remotely piloted aircraft for Lockheed’s facility in
Austin, Texas.



Since 1931, and during Stan’s long tenure as a professional engineer,
he found time to engage in more personal pursuits such as design and
construction of ten gliders (including the famous Cherokee II), direct
the 1958 National Soaring Contest at Bishop, California, win an
appointment to the prestigious SSA Hall of Fame, deliver the 1994
Ralph Stanton Barnaby Lecture, write “Homebuilders’ Hall”, a column
devoted to gliding homebuilding which was voted by SSA’s membership as
the most popular column in SOARING magazine during the years it
appeared, receive an Outstanding Achievement award from the
Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA), earn a Commercial Pilot’s
certificate with single and multiengine, instrument and glider
ratings, and fly some 5000 hours as Pilot in Command. He also found
time to act as a major influence in the formation of the Sailplane
Homebuilders Association (now Experimental Soaring Association), of
which he is an Honorary Life Member.