Were not interested in Dereks conversion, and I have travelled extensively in EU and soared both in germany and in england so careful there with your generalities. Clearly you only read and comprehended the parts you wanted from my last post so for the hard of hearing I will say it again and expound the point a different way, EU has a CULTURE of sailplane flying, North America DOES NOT. We have a CULTURE of power flying. Modern aviation was born in America, and while we played with gliders and used them as stepping stones to develop powered flight, gliding flight is not and has never been our first love, power flying is. We created companies that mass produced power planes for the masses, while EU created companies to produce gliders. And while you continue to dismiss the schweizers and their contribution to soaring, let me remind you that their development of very inexpensive and EASY TO MAINTAIN ships is what really kicked off and sustained American soaring until the fiberglass age. In addition those “pos” schweizers you so flippantly dismiss are flying in the HUNDREDS and will continue to be flying long after your wooden termite attractors are piles of dust. As for modern high performance soaring, one needs to look outside the USA for the best birds, not so much due to the lack of american innovation, but due to the fact that there has never been a big enough market to warrant companies here to invest into tjhis side of aviation in a big way. So we buy our ships from you guys.