Buying a 1-35 pros and cons?

On Saturday, March 23, 2013 4:13:28 PM UTC-4, Tim Weston wrote:
Does anyone have any inside info on the pros / cons of buying a 1-35. I am interested in learning cross country.

Since I'm at the same stage of glider piloting as you are, I thought that you might appreciate my perspective. It's a bit different than the more experienced pilots.

To rephrase your question, "What are the pros and cons of a low-hour pilot buying a glider that has flaps only (no spoilers)?"

Back in August 2012, I asked RAS "how does a pilot learn to fly a flaps only glider?" Not easily. There are very few tandem trainers that only have flaps.

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fro...ng/DqKTBzfdZxM

What settled it for me was this. A former owner of a flaps-only glider privately communicated off-RAS that he had wasted an entire year teaching himself how to properly land a flaps only glider. He also pointed out that some of the 1-35 landings on Youtube and such are extremely long and inept. In other words, some pilots do a crappy job of flying 1-35s and live to upload videos of their efforts. The pilot who pointed this out to me is now accomplished in XC. For that and other reasons I consider him a reliable source. Not all advice is good advice on RAS.

So maybe you're a natural pilot who can quickly master flaps-only landings. Maybe you've have thousands of hours flying airplanes with flaps. I'm not a natural pilot, and so I figured that there was a good chance that I would end up wasting a year just learning how to properly land a 1-35, and that I might get completely discouraged with the sport, scare myself badly, or worse.

A lot of the attributes that attracted me to the 1-35 were also present in the SGS 1-34. I flew a 1-34, landed it no problem on the first try, but I found the cockpit to be very uncomfortable.

I settled on buying a PW-5 or a SZD 51-1 Junior. Both of these types would be an easy transition for me after soloing in an ASK-21. They are docile, have decent performance, and they stay up in weak lift. I'm better positioned to transition to a high performance glider down the road (compared to flying a 1-34 in the meantime).