The glider in question was imported from the Czech Republic and intended to be used by the nominal US distributor for TeST Gliders as a demonstrator. He seemed to lose interest in the project and sold the glider to George Saunders several years ago. It is one of two TST-14M "Bonus" two-seat gliders in the US, the other being Bob Carlton's jet-powered glider. The TeST company has not produced a glider in a half dozen years and is now owned by Vladimir Pekar as a subsidiary of his company CompLet which produces laminate parts for other aircraft manufacturers. His interest has turned from the gliders to production of a fast, four-place airplane called the Shark, and so TeST has languished, although they are still providing some support for the small fleet of existing gliders. Two years ago a couple of British aircraft designer/entrepreneurs looked into buying TeST and resuming production of both the TST-10M single-seater and the TST-14 in England, but after months of research they discovered that both gliders required more than 1000 man hours of labor to produce and subsequently could not be built in England and sold at a reasonable price, and opted not to purchase the company.

The TST-14 uses a Rotax 503, more than 30,000 of which were produced, so it's a known quantity. It has a carbon fiber spar, and GRP skin, and actually has some aircraft plywood bulkheads. (TeST originally built wood gliders exclusively, so a bit of wood remains.) It uses two Brauniger multi-function displays instead of steam gauges. Rather than conventional layers of fiberglass cloth, it's constructed from a single layer of "Parabeam," a fabric that has two layers of fiberglass spaced a few milimeters apart by multiple perpendicular strands creating a kind of shear web between the two sides. The glider is extremely light. It has a modern microprocessor controlled engine management system and the engine is extremely easy to raise and lower in flight. It has delightfully light controls.

If TeST had had an energetic distributor in the US, doing for them what Leo has done for Alisport's Silent gliders, there would be many more than two TST-14's in the US, and there should have been. It's a well-made, well-engineered ship with a reliable powerplant that had a very reasonable price tag and an excellent fun-to-price ratio. Exactly the kind of self-launcher that would suit a large number of recreational pilots. Someone really should buy the company from Vlado, or partner with him, and restart production somewhere where labor costs are low enough that the ship could be competitively priced, as it was originally.