smjmitchell wrote:

What I think we need is a new way of building gliders.

I suspect we may be going at this backwards, and what we need is a
better way to increase the number of glider pilots. This will increase
the demand for gliders, allowing more manufacturers to produce gliders
in greater volume, and lower costs.

snip


There is ample evidence in the hang glider world and indeed in other leisure
sport products that the volume would increase dramatically if the price
could be reduced. Imagine if you could sell a certified APIS for 150% of a
current list price of a competition standard hang glider what that would do
to the volume of glider sales.

There are already gliders available to the hang glider pilots with much
superior performance to a competition hang glider for _same_ price as
competition hang glider. Take a look at the used gliders available: the
Ka-6 and even the 1-26 can meet your target.

There is much more to the issue than cost and performance. The barriers
to entering the sport are not the cost of a new glider, or the hang
glider pilots would be snapping up all these aircraft. Even a PW5 seems
like an exotic starship to a hang glider pilot that gets 15:1, and it is
cheaper to own and fly than a competition hang glider (former hang
glider pilots, now sailplane pilots, tell me this true).

Waiting in a queue for a club glider would be
a thing of the past - you would simply buy your own - the increase in volume
would come from within the existing gliding fraterity, not to mention the
more people the sport would attract and retain through greater
affordability. I don't know exactly how many hang gliders are sold annually
but recent articles I have read indicate that it is thousands a year. Anyone
got any hard data ????? How many gliders do Schempp Hirth, DG, et al sell a
year ... anyone got some data ?????

Without a growing sport, any sales increase we make within the present
community will be short-lived, because after a few years, everyone that
wants a glider will have one, and the volume will drop off. These things
aren't like cars - they last for a long, long time, and have to crashed
badly to remove them from the fleet.

Having lower cost gliders will help the sport, of course, but I think it
the effect is being overestimated. When someone decides to start flying
lessons, it is not because they see a new LS4 can be bought for $30,000
instead of $40,000.

To sustain the large volume of production that we speculate may be
needed to lower costs means we have to have many more people becoming
serious sailplane pilots (serious enough to buy a glider) every year,
year after year, to build the market for all those gliders.

Frankly, we already have cheap gliders via the used market and the
medium performance gliders. What we don't have is cheap, new, high
performance gliders so lusted for by the RAS pilots, but these are not
the gliders that will bring in new pilots.


Finally you don't need to point out that the above is somewhat idealistic. I
am very aware of this but unless we look to the future, challenge ourselves
to do better and make significant progress in the direction of costs and
affordability we will not have a viable sport. Someone has to start to do
the dreaming if we are going to have any hope of solving the problem. Anyone
share that vision ?

If I am right, that the viability of the sport does not depend on cheap,
new, high performance gliders, perhaps this is a good thing: it might be
more difficult to solve that high-volume production problem than the one
of getting more people into the sport and retaining them by improving
access to the sport by other means.

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Eric Greenwell
Washington State
USA