On Tuesday, March 15, 2016 at 1:25:54 PM UTC-7, runner4065 wrote:
I'm struggling how to read the polar curve for an SGS 2-32

Others have taken care of the important points, so I will address the semantics: The L/D curves you are looking at are not polars. They are plots that show the same data as a glide polar, but in a different way.

However, I think that the sink rate curves shown lower on the graph are indeed polars in the traditional sense. They are shown upside-down, and the origin is beyond the scope of the data shown, but if you extrapolated the horizontal speed out to 0 and converted the vertical speed to something less crazy (feet per second? Really?) you can use it just like any other polar.

I could be wrong, but I think that at the time that the 2-32 manual was published, what we now think of as a standard glide polar was not standard here in the US. Or it might be that the FAA folks who reviewed the manual were not familiar with the polar format. So maybe Schweizer formatted the data in a way that they thought their US-centric regulators and customer base would be more comfortable with.

Thanks, Bob K.