krasw wrote on 1/5/2021 3:26 AM:
And most importantly, buy a glider thinking about daily use. Flying qualities, easy rigging, good trailer, good instruments. It's so easy to bury your head into polars, nice pictures and percents of better LD, which for normal pilot means absolutely nothing. With better performing glider, you get into trouble farther from the home airfield. That's about it.

There is more to it than that, which is true if you fly at the same level of risk (safety,
landing out, and weather) with high and low performance gliders. Some pilots, however, enjoy a
XC flight of 200-300 km, and it is much more comfortable to do that in a 50:1 to glider than a
30:1, because it is easier to stay within gliding distance of an airport. For them, working
hard to cover 300 km in a 30:1 glider is not as satisfying as more comfortably enjoying the day
in a 50:1 glider, while doing the same 300km.

The value of L/D also varies with where you fly. Where I live in Washington State, there are
many airports and fallow fields in which to land, and a Ka6 or Blanik can have a decent XC
flight almost any day. That is not true in Nevada, for example, where the 30:1 glider will be
very constrained on where it can fly on most days, compared to a 50:1 glider.

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA (change ".netto" to ".us" to email me)
- "A Guide to Self-Launching Sailplane Operation"
https://sites.google.com/site/motorg...ad-the-guide-1