Ben Flewett wrote:
You must be having a laugh! The quality of Centrair
gliders is far below the quality of the German manufacturers
from whom they stole (yes, stole) the IP and moulds.



You are both a snob and uninformed. First "Intellectual Property"
doesn't exist, and so cannot be stolen. What exists is copyrights,
which is clearly not of any concern here and patents, which could apply
to the situation, but don't in fact since nobody has claimed that there
has been patent violation in this case.
Second Centrair has certainly not stolen moulds, or Schleicher would have
prosecuted them. What they have done is building ASW20 under license
from Schleicher, and i don't see anything wrong there except the quality
of the products, which seems according to some of the posts here, to
have been inferior to the quality of the corresponding German products.

Things became unfriendly when Centrair offered the Pegase at a price
largely inferior to similar German gliders. Saying that the Pegase was a
copy of the ASW20 is bull****, the wing had been redesigned completely
by the French aerospace organisation called ONERA, and it was such a
success that the Pegase was in par with other similar gliders up to the
introduction of the Discus which was markedly better. I have seen and
flied a lot of Pegases, they are wonderful gliders of perfectly adequate
quality, and certainly better than the similar ASW19 from Schleicher.
Snobs of your sort that would only consider flying a German glider, and
preferably a 100 000$ glider are also very common in France. They
are the main responsible from the decline of soaring worldwide.

This being said i don't pretend that Centrair was a wonderful factory,
no more than Schleicher and so on. These are small factories with
limited resources, on the other hand building gliders in not rocket
science.


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Michel TALON