On Jan 28, 6:05*pm, John Cochrane
wrote:
I support the creation of the new 13.5 meter class. *In the past 11
summers I have flown a glider with less than a 13.5 meter span more
than 1200 hours and 30, 000 miles cross country. *Having been involved
in soaring off and on for over fifty years, I have also flown gliders
with spans of 15 to 19 meters about the same amount of time and miles.

There some pretty neat things about short wing gliders. *They tend to
be lighter and easier to rig than larger gliders. *This is nice for
older flyers and their older helpers. Just picking up the tail of many
of our 30 year gliders to put on a tail dolly can result in a hernia
for a 63 year old flyer. Moving the lighter gliders around on the
ground is easier. *For example getting a PW-5 or Sparrow Hawk off of a
busy GA airport runway is a snap. *Experienced Sparrow Hawk pilots one
man rig without a *800 dollar one man rigger.

Short wings increase the number of safe land out places. *I have
landed the short wings in about ten places that would have totaled a
15 or 18 meter glider. *The lower landing energy and speed of a
lighter glider is also a plus.

To me all gliders are pretty slow moving. *The sensations in small or
large gliders are about the same, the main difference is the speed on
the score sheet. *We all seem to try to return to our starting place
at the end of the day anyway.

I left soaring in 1978. *I had a Standard Libelle which I loved but
was not (in my mind) competitive. *I decided to do something different
and started racing sail boats. *I noticed that the less expensive and
smaller the boat the more fun and comradship in the fleet. *I do not
know why that is the case, but that is my opinion. *In soaring the
last ten years, it seems to me that the people really having the most
fun are the 1-26 ers.

I do not see that continuing to have a place for short wing gliders to
race and set records really takes anything away from any other class.
I think it is especialy neat that the class is being opened up gliders
other than the PW-5. *There are seveal really neat gliders that will
be able to fly in the 13.5 meter class. *Think of all the time,
effort, and money that has been spent designing and building these
gliders.

If you have not tried it, don't ____ *_____ __.

Bill Snead
6W

Bill:

Your points are well taken, and my comments were not one of the usual
anti-PW5 rants on r.a.s.

The main point is that your PW5 -- or any other light weight, easy to
fly, easy to rig and inexepensive glider -- will not last long in 13.5
meter class. You will not have a place to race the glider you like so
much, or any other like it.

The PW5 is already not the highest performing 13.5 meter glider. And
the minute anyone produces a modern 13.5 meter glider whose design is
optimized for performance, you're really toast. That's true whether or
not they allow ballast. An optimized no-ballast glider with a modern
wing, aerodynamic fuselage, and high wingloading will easily
outperform the PW5.

The outcome of this class is inevitable.There will be one worlds with
a mix of gliders. In the next one, only the highest performing
existing glider will show up. (russia? sparrowhawk? silent? I haven't
kept up.) and all the others will again have no place to race.

The minute a new glider is designed for world level competition in
this class, retire all of the above from racing. The new glider will
look like a scaled down ASW27. (Or maybe a scaled up version of those
monster RC models we've seen on r.a.s. lately). It will cost nearly as
much too. It will be relatively useless as an easy to fly, assemble,
etc. club glider.

We've been through all this before. The IGC split standard class in
two, so that existing flapped (Pik 20) and unflapped (Standard cirrus)
gliders would each have a home. In 3 years new gliders came out
(Discus, ventus, 19,20) optimized to each classes' rules, and those
existing gliders were all obsolete. Until club came along.

So where are you going to race a PW5 in a few years? You'll be toast
in 13.5 meter class. The club class is growing and they won't let you
in. Sports class is either going to die out, or become a ridiculous
class combining only PW5 and Nimbus 4. And that's only in the US.
There is no sports in the rest of the world.

The only answer to keep YOU racing in YOUR PW5 is a handicapped class
for lower performance gliders. I would think you'd be leading the
charge.

John Cochrane

I have to agree with John, the 13.5m class only makes sense as a
handicapped class.

Going through the history of the decision in the IGC, if my memory
serves me right, a number of things took place:

The initial push was for a new ultralight class. This plea was then
conveniently mixed with the problem of what to do with the failed
World Class. When the vote was brought forth for the creation of the
13.5m class, the question of allowing handicaps or not was tagged onto
the decision with the recommending group suggesting that handicaps
should apply. However, there was discussion on whether this would
stifle innovation and in the end the argument for innovation and no-
handicaps won the day. It is very possible to speculate that the IGC
was not ready for the particulars of this and that proper reflection
on the issues did not take place.

To start with, the 13.5m class has its origins in the need to further
the development of the sport. Here were all these people flying
ultralight gliders in various nations and what the IGC rightly felt
was the need to give these people a competitive home and encourage
them to develop their numbers rather than see them drift towards other
air sports.

The benefits of an ultralight glider are that it costs less and in
most cases can be fairly light and easy to operate. Of course when it
is light and easy to operate it is not high performance.

While the argument for innovation is good, in this situation it means
that the person who wants to win this class will develop a
specialized, exotic material, high-wing-loading glider, which will
neither be cheaper than current high-performance gliders, nor will it
be simple to operate. Visions of finding the perfect recipe and then
making thousands of these, therefore bringing down the price can be
discounted -- we already have the World Class experience.

So what will happen is that we will end up with this highly
specialized expensive machine that will turn up at the comps and we
can forget the people in these cheap convenient machines we made the
class for in the first place.

And in the end, do we really want innovation in the 13.5m class? For
the past years we have seen absolutely no innovation in standard
class. The Diana is so good that some people prefer to ban it rather
than develop a new glider to beat it. Where we see innovation is the
very active18 meter and of course open class. If we want innovation in
the shorter wingspan classes, why not develop a special class for 15
or 18 meter boundary layer suction wings and see short wingspans fly
with the performance of open class or better?

So the main question I feel we must address is this: can we look at
the decision to take out the handicaps in new light and see if we can
revisit it? The IGC has to seriously consider this before it goes down
the path of creating another failed class.

Alexander Georgas