If you can afford it, to my mind, the biggest factors that would
sway me in favour of an ASW27 over an ASW20 are, firstly, the
great improvement in cockpit crashworthiness and, secondly,
having an automatically connecting elevator on rigging.

The front cockpits of all the early GRP gliders are basically
streamlining fairings that simply disintegrate on impact.

There have been numerous reports of gliders with hotelier
connected elevators being launched with the elevator
disconnected. I knew one pilot who was killed that way when
flying in Europe. The problem isn't so much with hoteliers
themselves as it is with a pilot simply forgetting to connect them
and then compounding that by forgetting to do proper positive
control checks.

John Galloway