At 15:06 26 January 2006, Bert Willing wrote:
In rural France, maybe... but then, who wants a house
there :-)

For an estimation of the 'real price' of a glider,
real estate is not of
much help. If you compare it to the mean of yearly
gross income, you will
find that gliders haven't become that much more expensive.


This will look different depending on where you are
in the overall income distribution, where you live
and the time period, but...

In the US over the past 25 years (my LS-4 was purchased
new in 1980), glider prices have increased roughly
four-fold and household incomes have increased between
2.7x and 3.3x, depending on the part of the income
distribution you're talking about. This means in 1980
a new, current generation racing sailplane cost roughly
1 year, 4 months of household income for the median
household. Today an equivalent new racing sailplane
costs 1 year, 9 months of median household income.
For the households at the threshold of the top 5% of
income earners it has gone from 6.9 months to 7.5 months
of household income.

This is for a new, current generation standard class
glider with a trailer and a full instrumentation suite,
delivered to the US. Of course, the glider you get
in 2005 offers a bit better performance than the one
you got in 1980 and the instruments are far better
(GPS, computer, radios that work). Lack of quality
adjustment is a flaw in a lot of cost of living statistics,
so I'll leave it to each of us to make their own judgements
on that.

And of course, most of us move up in the income distribution
over our careers, so over time (at least until retirement)
a new glider should get more affordable. That at least
has been my happy experience.

9B