wrote:

As soon as they learn how to recycle epoxy and fiberglass the PWs will
go too.

You must be one'a them trolls, Doodle.

What I hate is those ugly Discii-clones. They're all the same boring color and you can't
tell where the hell you're going to land when you look out the front window, because the
glide angle is so damn flat. It beats me how anybody can learn anything in one of those.

When I'm in the pattern in a good old 2-33 I just look down at a point about half way to
the horizon and I know I can hit it every time. And I never have to worry about finding
a thermal to get back home again because the breeze here in IL always keeps me real
close to the airport.

Now, next week I'm going to try Fred's PW5 and I expect to get a little farther out,
because I hear they are real easy to take apart and put together again, if I should
happen to have to walk it out to the road a piece at a time. Since those PW5 wings are
so short, I can get my wife to pick-up tow me back into the air as many times as it
takes to get back home -- as long as the Sheriff's boys don't catch us doing it in the
road. Just try that with one of those Discii! You'll bust them long wings right off on a
county road sign or a fence post before you get half way airborne.

When they do figure out how to recycle that epoxy & fiberglass stuff, we can make a
whole bunch of little PW5s out of a few of those big Kraut ships, and that will be good
for the sport as it will help keep prices down. They better hurry too, 'cause I hear the
sun light and those Ultraviolet-type death rays are eating up all that pretty smooth
glass just like mice in the grain.

We got a 1-26 out in the shed that's been in the family for more than thirty years now,
but Uncle Jim says they are too easy to fly and they'll spoil a pilot for anything else.
I figure I'm going to wait until I get real old & feeble before I take it up, so by then
it should suit me pretty well. Another thirty years should do it.

I read the other day where Paul Schweizer, a guy who did more for soaring in the US than
just about anybody, died recently. He and his brothers sold their first glider a few
years before Pearl Harbor, and most people in this country who have flown gliders at all
have probably flown in a Schweizer, especially when they were just starting out. That
means plenty of our soaring champions as well as guys like me have spent some time in
those American metal beauties before they got their heads turned by the Loreleis from
the Fatherland. In fact there's still some records set in 1-26s that have yet to be
broken by them slippery white ships, like Paul Bikle's altitude gain back in '61 of
42,305 ft out in the California desert in an E-model just like ours. I read it in one of
them SSA magazines we got in the outhouse.


Jack