On Tuesday, October 18, 2016 at 12:38:47 PM UTC-6, Bruce Hoult wrote:
On Tuesday, October 18, 2016 at 8:04:47 PM UTC+3, wrote:
We are completely aware that turbine power has been added to gliders as far back as 1947. Indeed, Bob Carlton has researched and assembled a fine presentation on the history of jet gliders that he has presented at several SSA Conventions, as well as at Scaled Composites and a number of aviation seminars.

Bob has been flying jet powered gliders on the airshow circuit since 2004 (www.vertigoairshows.com) and began commercial development of variations as early as 2009 (www.desertaerospace.com).

The jet Arcus project is simply the latest in a line of developments going back to the Wright brothers' efforts to add a powerplant to a glider.

As far as we know, Dennis Tito's 4,000+ km in the first three flights of this modern glider with a sophisticated turbine from PBS represents a higher level of performance than previous attempts. We fully recognize and applaud earlier applications of turbines to gliders.

Didn't he previously do probably at least a 4000 km unpowered flight in just a few minutes, ending with a BRS landing in Kazakstan?

The L/D ratio was pretty ****ty, but the release altitude was unbeatable.

I am very sorry, but since this alleged flight that ended in Kazakhstan was not posted on the OLC, it did not happen.......and the moon landing in 1969, well that is another story...I have heard from unnamed sources that the Apollo 11 folks simply forgot their FAI approved logger....oh well...."The truth is out there......." ;-)