Cats wrote:
Shawn Knickerbocker wrote:
FYI...yesterday, Aug 30th, in South America.... Perlan
obtained 50,700 feet...

here is the site:

http://www.dg-flugzeugbau.de/perlan-e.html

Was amazed to see it was a pretty standard DG505 (or DG500 - depends
which site you read!) like we have available at our club. Bigger
wings, and I have no idea how they crammed in the space suits, but
still a good old DG505!

It doesnt really take that special of a glider to go high does it? Its
all about the upward velocity of the air minus the sink rate of the
ship? Sure it is nice to have a high Vne speed for wave flying and a
wide range between stall and flutter for high altitude. my question is
why didnt they fly downwind to the atlantic after reachign 50,000!?