It is with a heavy heart that I let you all know that our friend and fellow club member Bob Hatschek passed away Saturday, October 13 th, at the Franklin Hospital hospice. Dave Acton and myself visited Bob last weekend. He was frail and had trouble breathing and talking but he was happy to see us and talk about Free Flight for one last time.

As per a discussion I had with Lucy last week, Bob will be cremated and a memorial gathering will take place at the Hatschek home on a date to be announced in the future.

Condolences can be sent to:
Lucy Hatschek
316 Grosvenor St.
Douglaston, NY 11363

I sure Bob would take great joy in knowing that all of you have read his ode to Free Flight below:

Free Flight by Bob Hatschek

What’s Free Flight? A thrill, a challenge, a puzzle. It’s other guys like you, the world around, striving for the same graceful beauty of flight. It’s comradeship across all human barriers. It’s bull sessions through the wee hours. It’s fierce competition with the highest of sportsmanship. It’s a battle against nature … her perversity … her law of gravity. “Free as a bird,” describes God’s most unchained creation. Man’s is a model airplane soaring birdlike in a thermal. You created it. Vicariously you soar with it with its freedom. Free Flight is the mist of the dawning’s calm as you test. It’s the noonday sun as your model thrusts for the heavens. It’s the cool drink after a dusty chase. It’s the piercing scream of a peaking engine the silence of the glide. It’s sunburn and poison ivy and weariness to the marrow … made worthwhile. It’s skill in your fingers. It’s knowledge learned for the knowledge alone. It’s perfection sought … never attainable. A goal everlasting. Free Flight is all of these, yet much more! I tell you this, and you may believe. But, you cannot know unless you know.

and Bob Hatschek knew it……

Rest in Peace Bob and thermals always….
Alan Abriss