For the real engineers here

On Wed, 25 Jun 2008 10:56:07 -0700 (PDT), wrote in
:

I'm thinking of a clean glider, one that might weigh 1500 pounds and
has a glide angle of say 1 in 25. At 50 miles an hour, that would mean
in an hour's time it might descend two miles (of course scale it
reasonable numbers, I chose those for ease of calculation). That means
it's losing about 1500 * 5280 * 2, or about 16 million foot pounds of
energy an hour.

Now if I add an engine swinging an 8 foot diameter prop, maybe as a
pusher, the question is, how big an engine for cruise only? A
horsepower is 550 foot lbs a second, or about 2 million foot pounds
an hour. If all of that is correct, it suggests with a 50% efficient
prop a little 16 horsepower engine could pretty much keep this thing
at constant altitude.

It passes the reasonableness test as far as I can see. Any serious
disagreements?

It looks reasonable to me, but I'm not qualified to judge.

For those of you who do things in metric units? I went to school a
long long time ago, and here in the US I can buy a little Briggs and
Stanton (spelling?) engine with a horsepower rating, not a kilowatt
one.

Here's a solution for SI conversions:
http://online.unitconverterpro.com/

[rec.aviation.soaring added]