wrote in message ...
Heh, I hope Schweizer makes better helicopters than they did gliders.

There was a time when Schweizer made some of the best gliders that money
could buy, but they went on to bigger and better things. Since Paul's death, I
have been thinking about Schweizer a lot. Over the years, there have been many
derogatory things said about the 2-33 here, some of them by me. I did not much
enjoy my days instructing in the 2-33. But the fact is that you have to go back
to 1978 to find a fatal accident in one. They are here for us to malign
precisely because the Schweizers built them right. Any one that you see has
likely survived decades of terrible student landings, some of them with me at
the controls.

There is one day that I will always remember like it was yesterday...the
day my 14 year-old daughter soloed, nestled inside the swaybacked structure of a
long-suffering 2-33. (And I will always remember her instructor, Mary Gafney,
wincing at that first terrible landing) There are better flying gliders, but I
can't think of any other flying machine I would rather have trusted my
first-born to.

Here in my study there is one picture of one glider hanging on the wall, it
is the 2-33 I soloed in, some ten years after my daughter did it. I will truly
miss Schweizer aircraft.

Vaughn