Hang Gliding and Paragliding Volume 44 / Issue 3: March 2014 | Page 19

stabilized the victim and helped coordinate emergency medical support, while
providing significant emotional comfort
to the victim, whose injuries were sufficiently extensive to require air evacuation to a level 1 trauma center. Judy
remained many hours at the hospital to
serve as advocate for the patient while
other support was being located. One
nominator says, “It is not the medical
skill and level-headedness that I would
like USHPA to formally commend as
much as Judy’s immediate, sustained and
selfless impulse to do whatever she could
to mitigate the suffering of the victim.
Judy was an element of practical positive
energy during an entirely awful event.”
Tony Lang has for several years
spearheaded the fundraising efforts to
garner the cash needed to send the US
paragliding teams to the world championships and to the X-Alps. Anyone
who’s ever taken on responsibility for
raising money for any cause knows what
a challenge it is to reach a financial goal;
Tony’s fundraising drives have successfully financed the US paragliding
teams’ competition expenses for the past
several world meets.
Todd Weigand persevered through
many years of negotiations with the US
Forest Service to improve the somewhat
sketchy launch at Mt. Howard, near
Joseph, Oregon. Accessed by the Mt.
Howard tram, this 8200’msl launch was
originally rough, rocky, constrained by
trees, and considered suitable only for
the most skilled pilots. Todd obtained
permission and organized the efforts to
make the launch more user-friendly by
removing rocks and trees and spreading truckloads of topsoil. A fly-in last
October to celebrate the newly improved
launch was compromised by an early
snowstorm, but Todd assures us that,
once the snow melts out in the spring,
Mt. Howard’s launch will be open and
available for safe launching by a wider
population of pilots.

Recognition for Special Contribution
Ginger Zee, a meteorologist who ap-

pears daily on ABC’s Good Morning
America, has brought 21st-century hang
gliding and paragliding to a national
television audience through her on-thescene filming of her free-flight adventures. She’s taken tandem paragliding
flights in Valle de Bravo (Mexico) and in
Colombia, been parahawking in Nepal,
and flown tandem on a hang glider at
Lookout Mountain (Georgia). Her
bubbly personality, and her presentation
of free flight as a bit edgy and intimidating but so totally worth doing, has seriously damaged the long-standing (but
no longer deserved) reputation of hang
glider and paraglider pilots as adrenaline
junkies with a death wish. USHPA is
extremely grateful to Ginger Zee for
providing her audience an opportunity
to experience the fun, the excitement,
the magic that free flight offers those
who choose to step off into the air,
and is pleased to award her the 2013
Recognition for Special Contribution.

PRESIDENTIAL CITATION
USHPA’s most prestigious award is the
Presidential Citation, and its recipient
is determined not by nominations or
committee consensus but (as the name
implies) by the president of our association. Rich Hass selected Dick Heckman
as the 2013 recipient of this award, and
everyone who has known and worked
with Dick over the past several decades
enthusiastically endorsed Rich’s choice.
Dick’s many contributions—chairing
BOD committees, serving as USHPA
president and as our delegate to the FAI,
and working tirelessly on a huge variety
of projects and committees—deserve
more than a paragraph or two in this
article. If you don’t already know this
active and energetic octogenarian hang
glider pilot, you’ll be introduced to him
in a future issue of this magazine.

ABOVE

Meteorologist Ginger Zee.

C

hances are, as you were reading
through the accomplishments and
contributions of these awardwinning pilots, you realized that
someone in your flying family has done
something equally worthy of recognition. The Awards committee is accepting nominations for the 2014 awards
right now, and it’s easy and straightforward to complete a nomination online.
Go to http://ushpa.aero/award_info.
asp for a full description of each of the
awards, to http://ushpa.aero/emailaward.asp to submit your candidate’s
name and contributions, and to http://
ushpa.aero/award_recipients.pdf t