Suggestion: wind energy will make gliders cheaper

During the 2003 Sailplane Homebuilder's Association Western Workshop at
Tehachapi, I got to tour the Tehachapi facility of GE Windpower
(formerly Enron Windpower). In the tour group with me was Gerhard
Waibel, arguably one of the best sailplane designers and developers in
the world.

I think both of us were impressed with the size and effectiveness of
the blades we saw, but I don't think either of us saw any direct
application of windpower blades to sailplane manufacturing. The blades
we got the closest look at (which, by the way, we were specifically
instructed not to photograph) weighed a couple tons each, and had very
deep sections in terms of T/C. And they were designed for turning
flight of the spins-and-plummeting-only sort.

Energy economics being what they are, all of the heavy development
effort in wind turbines is currently concentrated on very large units,
with rotor diameters coming up to 100m or so. They tend to give the
best bang for the buck, and tend to kill the fewest birds doing it.

But, yeah, if we were playing some sort of Junkyard Wars game, and
there happened to be 15-meter diameter wind turbine rotors in the yard
in both clockwise and counterclockwise rotations, we might be able to
cob something together that might sort of fly and might sort of sustain
2g or so of loading. But beyond that the very specialized requirements
of effective soaring flight make it unlikely that there is any
technology cross-over except in terms of basic materials and
manufacturing techniques.

Bob K.
http://www.hpaircraft.com/hp-24