Stealth Pilot wrote in
:

On Sun, 20 Jan 2008 17:48:45 +0000 (UTC), Bertie the Bunyip
wrote:



No, Hitler didn't think of it first. Training gliders like this were
in
use form the early twenties. The SG 38 was a particulalry good one,
and
was licence built in several countries, including Schweizer in the US.
The procedure for training a student in the airplane was to have him
balance it on the skid in some wind for a time. When he got the hang
of
that, he did "slides" where either by bungee or by car, the glider was
towed to a speed just short of flying speed and the student would get
some experience in that area before being launced on low glides down
hillsides. Higher glides were done with bungee or auto tows and some
slope soaring was possible in these machines, though you would have to
be good, and lucky to do that.
The student would graduate to a secondary glider, which was basically
an
SG-38 with a fairing, and then onto something like a Grunau Baby,
which
was, and is, a good soaring machine with a very low sink rate but a
very
low cruise speed.
Almost everyone was trained this way. Two seaters were a rarity in the
thirties, though they did exist ( more in the US than anywhere else)
The success rate wa good. there were a lot of asccidnets, but the
airplanes crashed real slow and were easily repaired.


Bertie

fascinating. from the first hand perspective.

how old are you bertie?


Not old enough for that!

Nah, I did a lot of gliding when I started and was very interestedin
pre-war stuff. In fact the glider i learned in was a WW2 glider, a
Laister Kaufamn LK10, but it wasn't quite so vintage then. It was just
old.


Bertie