I think the whole thing suffers from the "I'd do it for free!" syndrome.
Same thing in flight instructing. Flying is something even the
professionals think is fun. There are so many competitors
who are willing to work for such a low price (because it is fun)
that there is little financial incentive for production.

Look at the APIS, Sparrowhawk, PW-5, Russia, Silent. Have the makers,
I mean the actual workers on these gliders, made anything close to the
amount of money they would if they were employed in a regular
job? $80k/year for 4 years for Greg Cole's skills pretty much wipes out
any possible profit on a Sparrowhawk with a production run of 20 at $30k.

So there's a bunch of folks innovating and making gliders for charity.
If you approached them with the same profit prospects and told them
they'd be manufacturing innovative urinals, they'd run, not walk, away from
the project.

So what do we see? A lot of innovations and great ideas. The downside
is so many competitors chipping away at the fairly small market that
there is little chance for a Henry Ford type operation to succeed.

Are we going to see one patentable "killer" glider? Maybe. A
turbine self-launch Sparrowhawk would be very hard to compete with
based on weight and the non-recurring engineering costs.

But will we see a "killer" design for a larger market? I suspect not.
I think gliding will continue to see a lot of low production run
charitable innovators, each chipping away at buyers. Well, at least this
is the case in the USA, where "experimental" gliders are allowed...




In article ,
smjmitchell wrote:

Which means, more than anything else, that one has to concentrate on one
model and only one, because there is no room for high volume production
of several models. As a consequence, any discussion wether 13m gliders
are better than 15m gliders, wether DG gliders are better than the LS4,
or any such futility may have only one consequence, distract people from
the aim.


Obsolutely ... in essence what you are saying is the same as Henry Ford 100
years ago when he said 'you can have any colour so long as it is black'.

If the price was a lot lower and there was only one choice I don't think
people would have anything to debate. They would just buy the thing.








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Mark J. Boyd