On Jan 24, 6:51*am, wrote:
On Jan 24, 6:59*am, "Maciek" wrote:

It was also
tried everywhere and called World Class!

And, unfortunately, it didn't work. Didn't work because of us - the pilots.
It's because if only we get a few hundreds of hrs. so we could appear in the
competition world, most of us want to fly gliders of more and more L/D. "Why
should I, THE PILOT with say 500 hrs. fly a bicycle like PW-5 with 30:1 or
something? I'm to good for that, I need 50:1 at least"

Maciek K.

If the glider selected hadn't looked like a "Smart Car", maybe I'd
have bought one.

-T8

True, there are lots of cheap gliders, they're just used ones. The
contest for them is the Club or Sports Class. The glass is more than
half full.

If you want new, high performance racing gliders that are still
affordable, there's a way - but it's tricky.

Far more than any other factor, the cost of new gliders is determined
by the production run. Potentially, there are huge economies of scale
if the production run is large enough. Here's the tricky part; the
manufacturer has to know how long the run will be when he designs the
glider.

So, how would he know that? There has to be a "one-design" class that
guarantees a long run.

Where the World Class went wrong is the implicit assumption that cost
is most directly related to performance - intuitive, but wrong. If
the World Cass design had been 50:1, the class would have been heavily
subscribed and the production run would have been huge and the cost no
more than the PW-5.