In message ,
writes
On 23 Aug 2004 06:36:44 -0700, (Todd Smith) wrote:


1) good one-design competition ?
NO, it's too damn slow ! and ugly !

Totally ignoring that it is flying ONLY against others of the same
type. It's no uglier than any other plastic ship. They all suck.

Most of us can't afford two reasonable performance modern sailplanes.
So, if you have a PW-5 you will not only be flying it in world class
comps you will be using it for normal club flying. If, when I bought a
glider, I was faced with the choice of something that would get me round
most of the local club comps and cross countries or a glider that
wouldn't but would be ideal for world class comps then I'm afraid the
"get me round most" wins.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a full advocate of the idea of a world single
class but it should be competitive with other sailplanes as most pilots
will be doing that sort of flying.

My question to the PW-5 supporters.

Would YOU buy one ? As the glider YOU flew every good soaring day ?
If you want the class to grow, sell whatever you have and buy a PW-5.

If you can give any rational reason that you want them to disappear,
and the class to die, other than "it's not your thing", it might shed
a little light on the subject. From the many, many threads that have
blasted anything less than 40:1, it's quite obvious why it's not being
a success. In other words, if you're not interested, you are only
joining the small number of high volume bigmouths that wish only to
impress their "standards" on others and have pretty much killed the
class in the process.

I think the real problem is that the current idea behind the world class
is that it is too many things to too many people. The proponents of it
should decide whether they want a machine that can be used for comps or
whether they want a machine for early solos and so on. There is nothing
that says a reasonable performance machine has to be very expensive but
unfortunately it has to compete with the second hand machines that exist
and so if a large number of them are required then this is a barrier to
entry that has to be over come.

My first glider was, and still is come to that, an Astir 77. Not
sparkling performance and it climbs like a lump of concrete compared to,
say, a DG300, however it was cheap, probably cost me 8k ukp when I
bought it. Is a very nice glider to fly and is quite capable (shame I'm
not :-)) of doing a 300k task in UK conditions. This is what any glider
that is being introduced as a cheap, early solo, machine has to compete
with. If I am going to spend, say, 30k ukp I will buy myself something
with a lot of performance as when I can say that I have reached the
limits of my Astir then I can easily use the performance of a DG, Discus
or so on, and second hand high performance ships can be bought for this
sort of money.

Given this I am never going to be in the market for a new glider, unless
I win the lottery, as I am never going to be capable of reaching the
limits of something like a good LS4/6 or a discus 2. So I am always
likely to be in the second hand market and I would venture that this is
true of an awful lot of people.

So, either decide that you want a competition glider - performance and
the like, or a cheap early solo machine and don't mix the two up.

Flame pants on

Robin
--
Robin Birch