At 08:22 05 April 2015, wrote:
The LAK-17 FES seems like a great glider and the FES really works
nicely
according to a friend of mine who owns one. Too bad Transport
Canada, for
some BS reason, has decided they aren't allowed to fly here.

To my mind the FES system makes a lot of sense as a self-launcher
on a light weight medium performance glider like the Silent Electro.
On a state of the art high performance new glider, however, I have to
think of the huge cost of advancing performance by e.g. 1 or 2% and
the the additional cost of taking that away by adding FES with its
folded prop.