On Dec 25, 9:11*pm, Brad wrote:
I was browsing thru one of the Yahoo glider N.G.'s today and read
where the World Class design may get ressurected. That got me to
thinking:

What would the ideal recreational next generation sailplane sailplane
look like?

I reckon it would be a Discus bT. Easy to fly, easy to rig, great
performance, doesn't need a crew.

As, well, everyone has says it's all down to production costs. Modern
gliders cost a lot because the skills to build one are expensive - the
cost is the labour, not the material. You can lower the labour costs
by sourcing production from where it's cheaper, just as DG and Schempp-
Hirth have done with contracts at factories in Eastern Europe with
labour costs are less than in Germany. However composite production
skills can't just be pulled out of thin air; I've seen first hand how
good Chinese and Taiwanese metal workers are (exquisite mountain bike
frames), but I'm not sure you could just rock up there and find a
factory that could build Discuses. Even the Eastern Europeans screwed
it up at least once with the DG300, which goes to show the challenges
involved.

I don't think automated production is a possibility for two reasons.
The first is the market - with the way the market for new gliders is,
and the way gliding itself is, you couldn't guarantee the production
run needed for the set-up costs.

The second is it's really not that simple to set up automatic
production of composites - I've been following the 787 production
story closely since well before things started going wrong. Boeing
went all around the world for partners ans their major contractors -
KHI, MHI, and Alenia - were the only people in the world who could
mass-produce large composite components, and even then those companies
have built factories with systems and processes (giant autoclaves,
laser cutters, automatic lay-up machines, robot trolleys etc.) which
simply didn't exist beforehand. (Which is why Airbus are so far behind
Boeing on composite technology - when Boeing was contracting the
Japanese for production, Airbus was contracting universities for basic
R&D on composite mass-production techniques they could use in-house,
knowing that Boeing had basically used up the world's supply of
possible composite contractors.) Some of the smaller contractors have
indeed messed up, partly leading to the now well-known production
problems Boeing is having.

Which is in no way bad news for the German manufacturers. Skilled hand-
built products command incredible profit margins; as long as the
company is well-managed (I've always wondered how RS managed to go
bust after the biggest glass production run in gliding history) and
has at least a sniff of a potential customer base it's possible to do
very well in such a market.

At the end of the day I have no problem with the market for new
gliders being almost entirely very expensive hand-built products. I'm
happy buying 30-year-old aircraft which still fly pretty well and are
perfectly affordable. Not sure the US ever saw the influx of glass
gliders the UK and Europe did though and if your used market looks
like ours.


Dan