On 5/14/2011 6:34 AM, Papa3 wrote:
On May 12, 8:32 pm, John
wrote:

They did, give them credit. The IGC created the world class, in
response to this sentiment. It was exactly your "sunfish" class. And
pilots around the world resoundly rejected it. They voted with their
wallets, and 18 meter gliders, mostly with motors, are the only things
selling right now. Not even standard or 15m are selling.

It is a great theory. It was tried. And it failed.

John Cochrane


John,

All that this failed experiment proved is that there isn't necessarily
a market for a purpose-built one-design that turns out to be more
expensive than much higher perforance ships readily available on the
market. Again working the analogy, many of the successful sailing
classes (Sunfish comes to mind) were built and became popular first -
then someone decided to race them. Same with cars.

If we set out with a mission statement where one of the primary
objectives was to "contain costs", the class specifications would
follow.

I was there as a Director of the SSA when the specifications were being
discussed, and "containing costs" was a major specification. Turned out,
pilots would rather have an old glider with more performance than a new
glider for the same money. It's very hard to compete against the used
market on price, and this was not appreciated at the time.

If soaring was growing instead of shrinking, used gliders would cost
more, and the PW5 would have sold a more, maybe a lot more, gliders.

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA (change ".netto" to ".us" to
email me)