On Jun 12, 10:26*pm, Andreas Maurer wrote:
On Fri, 11 Jun 2010 17:59:28 -0700 (PDT), Bruce Hoult

wrote:
I'd really love to know where all these mythical LS4s are.

http://www.segelflug.de/classifieds/

For example:
ASW-19, without instruments, otherwise good condition, 16.600 Eur
LS-4 23.500 Eur
DG-300 22.000 Eur
ASW-15 12.000 Eur

Note that that is now, not in 1995 when we bought our PW5s.

How deep is that market? What if 100 people join gliding tomorrow and
want to buy gliders? How about 1000?


Our two PW5s cost us NZ$25k each brand new, which would have been
around $15k or 13k EUR at the time.

Well... at this time we still had the D-Mark, the PW-5 being
significantly more expensive than a used LS-4 at this time, definitely
beyond the 35.000 DM border.

My recollection is that over long periods of time the DM was very
close to being the same value as the NZ$. In recent history, it's
always been very close to 1 EUR being the same as NZ$2. And, if I
recall correctly, you swapped DM for EUR at a rate of 1.95 in 1999.
So the NZ$/DM/EUR rates have been quite stable over this time period.
(far more stable than any of those currencies have been against the US
$ or Yen, for example)

The aircraft advertisements you quote above put the LS-4 at about
45000 DM *now*. I doubt that they were less than 35000 DM in 1995.
Probably they were at or above the current price.

We paid about 25000 DM for our PW5s. That is a lot less than the 35000
DM you give, not to mention the 45000 for a used LS-4 today.


But that's not the point.
Worldclass was a clear failure due to the chosen glider. The success
uf Club class demonstrates what people really want.

Surely the PW5 is not sufficiently worse than the Russia, or any other
entrant in that design contest, to make the chosen glider the reason
for failure? At the very least, you would have needed a completely
different set of goals for the design contest.

But in fact I think the main reason the World Class is a failure as a
competition class is due to the general world-wide decline of gliding.

Had the sport grown, as I'm sure we would all like, there would not be
enough used LS-4's, Discuses or even ASK6's to go around, at any
price. The advantage of a new glider, such as the PW5, is that as many
could be manufactured as required to meet demand, with prices probably
decreasing as a result.

People don't seem to appreciate how very inexpensive the PW5 was when
it was introduced (and would I think have remained given more demand).