Best Overall Motorglider available today?

On Thursday, 15 October 2020 at 00:27:59 UTC+3, Ramy wrote:
I couldn’t agree less with the notion that you need a top racer to go anywhere. It may be the case in contest racing where every small performance advantage is significant, but the performance difference is insignificant for the rest of cross country flights. You May fly few miles less or few mph slower. I agree it wouldn’t matter for those who fly locally, but a significant number of pilots such as myself don’t fly contests or records but fly aggressive cross country as you can see on OLC. The AS34 should be marketed for this significant segment of soaring pilots, not for clubs and local fliers.

Ramy

I own and fly LS8-st. I fly "agressively" OLC, national records, nationals and occasionally worlds. Did my FAI 1000k badge in it. There is nothing wrong with 18m/std. class racers designed in mid to late 90's, they are wonderful ships. You can do a lot things with them. My point was, that if performance is important, you should consider more modern flapped designs than differences between these designs. No matter what the handicaps are, if you fly LS8 side by side with V3 you start to cry in 3 minutes.

And then the marketing. Factories start building them and pilots buy them. Yes they have websites, they try to put latest designs in to a hands of good pilots (who have ordered the first serial numbers 10 years earlier anyway) and some even offer test flights. I have not witnessed anything that I would even remotely call "marketing to a segment".

I know of one that can climb directly to 18,000' (33,000', according to
the POH) and then cruise at 140 KTAS for 600 miles or so, and has two
seats.Â* Oh, and it has a 50:1 glide ratio with the engine stowed.Â* Not
much of a contest ship, though.

On 10/11/2020 6:47 PM, Ramy wrote:
I don’t think anyone mentioned the AS34ME. While not available yet, it sounds like it has good potential. The web site claims total of 9000+ feet of potential climb, or 2000 self launch and 75 miles range using it as a sustainer, which is pretty much double the FES capability.
I am not clear on the charging process. Since the batteries are in the wing, it sounds like you can’t recharge between flights without taking the wings apart?
Will be interesting to hear thoughts if this is a good candidate for best overall motorglider?

Ramy

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Dan, 5J