I fly a 29, never flown a 27 but I can tell you what you get in a 29 that you do not get in a 27. A 29 has wings that are 50 pounds heavier per side! So add in the extra 100 pounds in wing weight, throw in $50,000 mix it together and you get a 4-5% increase in performance. I do love the 29, but if I had a modern 15 meter, I would not look to "upgrade", unless of course I was going open class! As far as racing there is top flight competition in 15 meters from regional level through WGC level.



On Saturday, December 2, 2017 at 8:40:30 PM UTC-8, Andy Blackburn wrote:
On Saturday, December 2, 2017 at 2:38:59 PM UTC-8, John Godfrey (QT) wrote:
Andy,
I think we have to go beyond Nationals to address this properly. Harder to do as you need to map glider to native class for all the regionals.

Yeah, that's more work that I was willing to do. Nationals participation is an okay leading indicator.

The other thing to think about is you can always fly Sports and there are occasionally mixed FAI contests. Generally, organizers don't want to turn pilots away so I wouldn't be too concerned that anyone is going to pull the plug on 15M anytime soon.

Last year, the average PRL score for competitors at FAI Nationals was 94 for 18M, 92 for Open, 91 for standard and 90 for 15M, so high-quality pilots continue to fly all classes at the Nationals level at least.

Lots of very good 15M gliders out there - Standard too.

9B